Monthly Archives: February 2011

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for Free

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for FreeThe reactions to my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons have been very positive. There have already been fifteen reviews of the book on Amazon and several university professors are looking at possibly using the book as part of their courses at different schools.

Thank you to all of you whom have already purchased and read and reviewed the book. It is very gratifying and motivating to see people investing their money in taking the book home with them and investing their time to read it.

I worked very hard to make the book both accessible and valuable, a book that can be useful to both current innovation practitioners and those just looking to either learn more about innovation or to jump-start their own innovation initiatives inside their organizations. And while I didn’t intentionally design the book to serve as a course text, reading back through it I find that it is actually quite well-suited to this purpose given its systematic approach.

I wanted to craft a quick message of thanks to those who have already purchased the book while also continuing my mission to make innovation insights accessible by alerting anyone who might be holding back from purchasing the book to two possible ways of getting a copy of the book to read for free.

Option #1 – Educators

If you are an instructor at an institution of higher education and would like to get a free evaluation copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, you can do so by registering with my publisher John Wiley & Sons or logging in with your existing Wiley account details, and requesting an evaluation copy to be sent to you.

Option #2 – Citizens

Most libraries allow the citizens they serve to request that they order a particular book, and usually if they do order it you will be the first one to be able to check it out after they acquire it. This allows not only the person making the request to read the book for free, but also lots of other members of your community. I don’t know about your library, but the selection of innovation books at my city and county libraries is quite limited, but they both now have copies of the new Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. For those of you that live in New York City, The New York Public Library just ordered and received five copies of the book.

Why not ask your local library to order it?

– A request form usually looks like this
– You can get the ISBN (0470621672) and any other information they might request here on Amazon

Thank You For Your Support

So, from the bottom of my heart let me just say thank you to all of you out there that take the time to read my articles here and on the American Express OPEN Forum and my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. For those of you who are regular readers of Blogging Innovation, stay tuned for a third way to get a copy of my book for free as very soon we will be running a giveaway with three signed copies up for grabs as prizes linked to you telling us what your favorite five Blogging Innovation articles of all time have been so far. Stay tuned!

And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a book on Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, I encourage you to check out the new book A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, edited by Paul Sloane, with a foreword by Henry Chesbrough, and with contributions from 30+ authors including yours truly, and many other great names including Stefan Lindegaard, Stephen Shapiro, Jeffrey Phillips and more. It’s available now from Amazon UK, Amazon France, and Amazon Germany and should be available on Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, and Amazon Japan around the end of March (but it is available for pre-order on those sites already).

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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Seth Godin and Amazon – The Domino Project

Will the Innovation Dominoes Fall and Disrupt the Book Publishing Industry?

Seth Godin and Amazon - The Domino Project“The enemy is not piracy, the enemy is obscurity.”Tim O’Reilly

I came across a TechCrunch TV interview with Seth Godin today about his future publishing plans.

I’ve been wondering what Seth meant when he told me last year at the World Innovation Forum that he would never publish another traditional book. Here is the video:

Now, he has made it clear what he meant, and just what his future plans are in the below video from Tech Crunch. His plans have a name, The Domino Project, and it is a publishing house venture he is undertaking with Amazon and it starts with a simple question:

How do you make a book spreadable?

Right now books work very hard against being spreadable, and in Amazon’s continuing quest to evolve the book business beyond just selling ebooks and blogs on Kindle, they apparently approached Seth Godin, gave him a blank sheet of paper to envision a new way of approaching book publishing. He described this collaboration with Amazon – The Domino Project – through a series of questions:

What happens if we allowed you to buy a 5-pack for only slightly more than one book? Wouldn’t you then give four of them away to people who would be interested in reading them?

What happens if we allowed people to share a Kindle book for free for a certain period of time and then try to figure out how to make money from it?

Can you dream big enough?

Can you do something that is worth doing, or will you hold back and play it safe?

Amazon will be working directly with authors – including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Godin’s new book will of course be included (and will be on initiative). He also mentioned that the trend of these new books will be towards the spectrum of manifestos. Traditional book publishers can’t do 96 page books, but The Domino Project can. Godin says that the success of the effort will be measured on whether or not the first 10,000 people who get the book, actually share it.

So, what was the most depressing part of the interview?

“The average American buys one book a year.”

Will The Domino Project successfully disintermediate the traditional publishing houses and transform how authors go about publishing book? Is there anything here that is actually new? What do you think?

Here’s the video interview if you would like to watch it for yourself:

Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box will be The Domino Project’s first title and it will come as a limited edition, a hardcover, a Kindle ebook, an audiobook, a 5-pack, and a 52-pack.

Oh, and if you don’t have my a copy of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire already, it’s available on Amazon as a hardcover or a Kindle eBook, or from other great physical and online booksellers:

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

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