Written on February 13, 2008 – 7:00 am
Martin Kloos, Business consultant
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month Jump Point from Tom Hayes, Landing page optimization from Tim Ash and a semi-classic: Smart start-ups from David Silver.
Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business
According to Jump Point, published in January 2008 and written by Tom Hayes, our next economy will arrive at an inflection point just 1000 days from now. Welcome to pandemic economics! Jump Point illustrates how this happens and how you could benefit from it. In his book, Hayes identifies five major discontinuities associated with the widespread adoption of the Internet by the entire world’s workforce. Those discontinuities include a fierce battle for consumer attention, competitive ji-hads, the rise of a global “mash” culture and the pre-eminence of trust as a business currency. This book is a must read if you want to stay on top of the game in the coming years. It’s the tipping point for geeks, says Guy Kawasaki.
Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
This title might sound a little geeky, but according to the authors of this book, optimizing your landing pages can make you millions. Landing Page Optimization, published in January 2008 and written by Tim Ash, describes how you can make a lot more money from your online marketing investments without spending too much more on driving traffic to your landing pages. This book includes case studies of page landing optimization, practical strategies that show you how to identify mission critical parts of your website, and a thorough analysis of Google Web Analyzer to get you started. You can find some additional and relevant resources on the website associated with this book.
Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities
Always wanted to know how to tap in the potentially unlimited value of online communities? Smart Start-ups, published in May 2007 and written by David Silver, promises to be thé guide for Entrepreneurs and Corporations to profit by starting online communities. Why to read? The book puts it’s finger on one of the biggest business developments for the coming years and shows YOU how to tap into this powerful trend using visionary business plans to build social networks that will make millions! Okay, okay got that last part from the inside flap of the book… Small trivia: on its website, a scoring system is hosted with which you can determine the probability for success of your new venture community initiative.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on January 25, 2008 – 12:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a writer and looking for more readers? Follow the example of the author of the ultimate birthday-gift book The Alchemist: Paul Coelho. He’s using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech (see below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more. The author said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He thinks that this tactic will pay-off in other countries as well. I guess he’s right. Just imagine that you download his book and start reading it. After two chapters you’re captured by the book and obsessed to know how it ends. Trust me, Coelho is the kind of writer who can make you do that. Do you really want to print the whole book? No, you surf to Amazon.
Not sure if it works the same for business books since they’re generally not so captivating as thrillers.
Coelho however is preaching his new sales evangelism on the Pirate Coelho blog, where he also offers links to illegal copies of his books: “Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…”. See the rest of his interesting speech:
Written on January 16, 2008 – 7:09 am
Martin Kloos, Business consultant
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month The Cult of the Amateur from Andrew Keen, Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger and The Search from John Battelle.
The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy
Although I, and perhaps most visitors of this weblog, don’t agree with the arguments Andrew Keen jotted down in his Cult of the Amateur, I do consider this book as a must read because it’s always refreshing to read a deviant vision on the impact of Web 2.0. Keen argues that all web 2.0 services produce nothing but bull and he shows hard facts on how it negatively impacts today’s business and economy by raising serious privacy concerns and invading copyright. This book also shows that many web 2.0 success stories, like Wikipedia, can be interpreted from multiple angles.
Cultivating Communities of Practice
Social Networks and online communities are hot. Hyves just recently reached 5 million users in the Netherlands only and Facebook’s value is marketed around $ 15 billion. Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger is a managerial version of a more academic work written by the same author and describes how communities of practice, which are groups of people who share a certain passion on a specific topic, operate and how they can be cultivated. A must read for people who want to know more about the inner workings and success factors of social communities of practices.
The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business
Many books have been written about Google, but few of them describe the relevance of what Google and its Rivals accomplish so thoroughly as The Search by John Battelle. It not only describes how Google rewrote the rules of business by becoming the sole reason of existence for thousands of online companies, it also describes the potential value of the billions and billions of records of user data. It gives an interesting insight in how this data describes who we are and who we become as a society, something Battelle dubs as “The Database of Intentions”.
Update: after some comments we realized that the visitors of The Next Web Blog expect us to be visionary on new book titles as well. And you know what? You’re absolutely right! But because “older” (yeah time flies, also for books these days) titles are still relevant today, we want to include some “classic” reading as well. So next months we’ll discuss one classic and two more recent books. For now, see the responses for some more recent readings or leave your own tips in the comments!
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
