"Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" Comes Out On The Kindle Today

I'm excited about getting to Damasio later today, on the Kindle of course.

William Gibson and the Future of the Future from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Douglas Gorney

Compared to the AI entities and digitally-enhanced hackers of his debut novel, Neuromancer, William Gibson's current cast of characters is remarkably dialed-down. But their quest is the same—to gain an edge by identifying critical, emerging patterns of data among the noise. In his new novel, Zero History, global marketing genius Hubertus Bigend and his team find themselves in less virtual though equally dangerous realms of military contracting and fashion, chasing the holy grail of post-modern marketing—the secret brand.

Leave to The Atlantic to fill in, just as we thought that we'd cleared our plate. "Oh yeah, Zero History came out the other week!" And it's out on the Kindle, which is a relief; 'cause we're getting awfully bored of stumping the old Kindle catalog, e.g. when are we going to see Neuromancer on the Kindle?

Charlie Rose's Wednesday, July 28, 2010 conversation with Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com

CHARLIE ROSE: Jeff Bezos is here. He is the founder and CEO of
Amazon.com, the country’s largest online retailer. The company’s
electronic reading device, the Kindle, has sold in the millions since its
debut in 2007. Amazon recently announced it is now selling more digital
books than hardcover books for the first time in its history.

Although sales of the Kindle continue to grow, the device faces
increased competition from tablet computers such as the Apple iPad. Last
week Amazon announced second quarter profit rose 45 percent from the same
quarter last year and its revenue grew 41 percent. Amazon’s stock has
since fallen because analysts expected even greater earnings performance.

I am pleased to have Jeff Bezos back at this table.

View the full conversation here, and read the full transcript here.

Reading from John's Blog by John

In the main, this isn’t a post about the iPad, although there’s a bunch of relevance there, and the conclusion mostly is about the iPad. I’ve been experimenting with different reading form factors for digital books over the last few weeks — I’ve of course had my various Kindles (Kindlii?) for a couple of years now, and have basically come to love them. I’ve read maybe a hundred books, at least a couple of over a thousand pages, and would not trade it. It is decidedly not a perfect device, and is…what’s the word?…oh, right: ugly. But it gets a lot right for the way that I use it.

Really good posts about the Kindle Catalog at this blog.

Kindle: my analysis of title availability and pricing from John's Blog by John

But here’s the kicker: of the 23,034 pages of books I purchased last year, 14,871 (64%) could have come to me as electrons instead of dead trees. Now, I’m not being naive — I don’t have the tools to do some sort of eco-analysis on the total energy footprint of the Kindle and servers compared to the relatively-more-efficient-and-developed printing industry. But I do know that there are several 500+ page books that I’m just not reading because they’re too big to drag around. Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, for example, or Winik’s The Great Upheaval, or Follett’s World Without End. And I think with a Kindle, I would start reading them all. [disclaimer: there’s some pricing and page count funkiness because of the timing of the analysis, availability of paperbacks now versus hardbacks then, etc. also, i should note that the real-paper catalog on amazon doesn’t seem to be the same as the kindle catalog — they’ve got lots of sync work to do there. titles were different, searching was different, etc.]

Read the full blog post here.