Archive for the 'Books' Category
Infographic: How Coffee Changed America
View a larger version here. If you like coffee and enjoyed this infograhic, you’ll probably like the book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in Abyssinia to its role in intrigue in the American colonies to [...]
Today in Entrepreneurial History: February 1
1884 – The first volume (A to Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary is published. 1893 – Thomas A. Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Although it wasn’t the first dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental undertaking. The dictionary took more than [...]
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
In the book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains [...]
Badpreneuer: How One Guy Failed 10 Times
If you think you’ve had your fair share of failures and bad luck in life then think again as you meet Simon Jameson – an entrepreneur that has not only failed once in business, but 10 times. “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” – Thomas A.Edison Launched this [...]
Giving The Gift Of Information
Not sure what to give your young aspiring entrepreneur this year? Why not send a few entrepreneur memoirs their way? Entrepreneurial memoirs, whether they are displayed as printed books or on electronic tablets, are a treasure chest of information and entertainment. They fit the bill perfectly for all work-for-yourself wannabes on your holiday list, for [...]
Jill Salzman has always been a bit of a Founding Mom, but she can now add author to that list. She recently wrote a new book called Found It: A Field Guide For Entrepreneurial Moms. Though the subject may be tackled in your book, personally speaking, what do you believe is the most important aspect [...]
Toy Drive: The Story Of Christmas Toys
Ever wonder what really happens to the Christmas toys that do not sell? Bargain hunters may use that time as an excuse to discount shop after the holidays, but one author, Kay Conageski, wrote a book instead. Kay’s story tells a fun tale about Christmas toys. It also teaches kids about giving to those in [...]
Smart Business Book For Smart Women
SmartGirls are tackling the topic of women in business with their new book, The SmartGirls Way. The book looks at the impact women have made on the world of business, and offers advice to help them succeed. Set against the backdrop of the economic and social impact that women-led businesses will have on the next [...]
A Little Inspiration For Inventors Of All Ages
Susan’s journey began long before she began writing, but it was her turn as author that helped inspire women and children to find the inventor within. It was through her books that she found another calling as a public speaker. I recently asked Susan Casey a few questions about who she is, and what inspired [...]
Although it’s nice to know where your ancestors originate, it’s not always fun trying to teach that piece of family history to your child. Instead of sitting down with a complicated list of things you want them to know, next time just buy the My Heritage Book. Deanna Bufo Novak always held a special place [...]
Slate: One of my favorite parables is about a man who arrives in a village with what he claims is a magic stone. Put the stone into a pot of water over a fire, he says, add a just few ingredients—some vegetables, some old ham bones, a few spices—and soon you will have a delicious, [...]
Publishers Cash in On Self Publishing
The Guardian: Penguin USA will provide the service through its genre-fiction online community, Book Country, which launched in May offering wannabe authors the opportunity to post their work online and receive feedback. With 500 works of romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and thriller now online from 4,000 members, and “a small number” of those members [...]
Profit in the Underground Economy
Co.Exsist: It’s the second largest economy in the world. Within the decade, it may sustain two-thirds of the planet’s workers, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and even rival the United States. But it’s not China: It’s the bazaars, vendors, and informal markets of the world. Robert Neuwirth’s new book, Stealth [...]
Books Turning To Movie Trailers to Sell More
LA Times: In a sewer beneath Las Vegas, a lethal vixen named Abigail is locked in a mortal struggle an outlaw cowboy with ties to Greek gods. The scene, recently filmed over three days on a sound stage in Glendale, wasn’t for a new sci-fi TV series or movie. It was for a 30-second commercial [...]
From Corporate Life To Motivational Speaking
It takes a lot to leave a good job that pays well to venture out on your own. However, that is exactly what Monica Marie Jones did, and she has seen plenty of success because of her choice. Monica was no longer happy in the day-to-day grind, so she felt it was time to create [...]
Steve Jobs Was a Tweaker, Not an Inventor
In Malcom Gladwell’s review of Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs, Gladwell argues that Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventor. Instead, he was a tweaker. A tweaker, according to economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr, was a a resourceful and creative man who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them – refined and [...]
Workbook Nurtures Young Inventive Minds
Our children are our future. If we want to generate a new generation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we need to feed their creativity and teach them important lessons. Inventive Minds has created a new workbook that does exactly that. The purpose of the workbook is two-fold: to stimulate imagination and to serve as a teaching [...]
Billy Bob Teeth Inventor Turns Author
Life is nothing like the teeth that Jonah White created so many years ago. It is made to be enjoyed and shared. That is exactly what he has done with his new book. White, a multimillionaire who still lives on the property where his parents, the late John and Ella White, raised him on a [...]
Dream Dinners Founders Become Best Sellers
Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna started by helping families create delicious meals with easy preparation. Now they’re helping them reconnect over the dinner table, too. “The Hour That Matters Most” is an easy-to-read collection of advice and anecdotes designed to help today’s family reconnect over the dinner table. The authors wanted to avoid the guilt [...]
Selling Time, Before Wristwatches
Telegraph: This gem of a book tells the story of one life but illuminates in the process a swathe of history, writes Nicolette Jones Written by the curator of timekeeping at the Greenwich Observatory, it relates the life of a woman who sold time to the clockmakers of London. Between 1836 and 1940, Ruth Belville, [...]
Its a Myth: NASA’s Million Dollar Pen
There’s a popular myth that NASA spent “millions” of dollars developing a pen for astronauts to use in the weightless environment of a space ship – while their sensible Russian counterparts were happy to use the low-tech pencil. Alas, for all its appeal and plausibility, this is not true. Initially, astronauts and cosmonauts were both [...]
How Vodka Became a Billion Dollar Business
According to the Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits, “The largest liquor companies in the world haven’t launched more than five hundred flavored vodkas because no one wanted to drink them.” More from the Weekly Standard: To wit, on your next trip [...]
In the book Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen we meet characters like Lou Stellato, a futurist among funeral directors, who declares, “Funeral service as we know it is over.” Cullen’s book explains the issues of the shifting funeral industry and, incidentally, the process that [...]
In 1990, former English teacher, Max Hardberger, started his own marine consultancy business in Louisiana. He was periodically retained by shipowners to extract their vessels from lawless ports without a clearance from local authorities. In 1998, following his admission to the California Bar, Hardberger began to practice maritime law alongside his marine consultancy and vessel [...]
Book Review of Get Rich Click!
Making money on the internet is hard. Not hard in the same way that moving a ton of clay bricks by hand is hard, but definitely more difficult than spending money online. Luckily though the skills necessary to generate revenue from page views and clicks are something that can be taught. Marc Ostrofosky’s book does [...]
Is there a dark side to Amazon’s foray into self publishing? The Globe and Mail describes how spammers are clogging the environment: Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon’s self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense. Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label [...]
How to Make $100,000 with an Amazon Kindle Book
Business Insider: …with a $9.99 Kindle download price, the author sees $6.98 in revenue (Kindle Direct Publishing has a 70/30 revenue split in most major territories, including the United States. Amazon takes 30%, you get 70%. They wire the money into your bank account about 60 days after the month in which a sale occurs. [...]
This sounds easy. I created an account on Createspace.com. They are owned by Amazon. Great customer service. You have any question at all you hit a button that says “Call Me” and within 30 seconds they have a customer representative calling your phone. I downloaded a Microsoft Word template they provided. This template took into [...]
TechRadar: Amazon has announced that it now sells more Kindle ebooks than all print books – that’s hardcover and paperback combined – through the Amazon.com site. Introduced less than four years ago, the Kindle has quickly become Amazon’s top selling product, and now digitised books for the reader have become more popular with its customers [...]
A Bookstore That Only Sells One Book
At a small bookstore in New York City, if you’ve seen one book, you’ve seen them all, because the shop only sells one book, Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission. The author rented the small retail space to promote his book for a few weeks. The [...]
Mompreneur Guides Fellow Moms Through Business And Life
Kathryn Bechthold never felt quite like she had the balance thing worked out. On the first day she was set to do her first media appearance as the publisher of Mompreneur magazine, her baby daughter got sick. She had to find a last minute babysitter willing to care for her. That moment left her with [...]
Video: How They Made Books in 1947
Not sure which books should be included in your business information library? The Christian Science Monitor has put together a short list of books that they feel every entrepreneur should have. What would you add to the list? The E-Myth and The E-Myth Revisited In a relatively short book, Gerber gives a realistic job preview [...]
Can You Become An Expert in 10,000 Hours?
In the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell there’s a theory that posits that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you’ll be an expert. A former commercial photographer named Dan McLaughlin has decided to put the theory to the test. Although he’d never golfed before, could he become a professional golfer in 10,000 hours? That [...]
Ad Supported Kindle: What’s Next? Free?
Amazon has just released a new advertising supported Kindle for $114. The new Kindle contains advertising in it’s screensaver. The old, ad free, Kindle is still available for $139. How soon until Amazon is giving this things away? November 2011, if the predictions are correct.
Book: Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry
Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry by Stephen Denny profiles more than 30 companies from around world that have taken on the giant in their industry and won. From Silicon Valley to the townships of South Africa, Denny explains, “It can be a blessing in disguise to be the little [...]
Should you or shouldn’t you? That is the question that crosses every inventors mind when they are ready to do something with their special idea. John D. Smith went through that process, just to have his patent rejected. That hasn’t stopped him, though. Besides bringing his product to market anyway, he went on to write [...]
Book: Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo
If you enjoyed my previous post, Washington Makes You Dirtier, you’ll love a book from Jeffrey Tucker called Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo. The book is about how the government makes everything it touches worse. Its pervasive interventions in every sector affect the functioning of society in so many ways that we [...]
Last week I reviewed the book One Simple Idea by Stephen Key. I loved the book and think that many of Business Opportunities Weblog readers will love it too. If you missed the post last week, or just want more information, here’s Stephen Key in a video describing who he is, what he does and [...]
BMOC $0.99: The Book With My Favorite Bizop
One of my favorite books of 2007, BMOC by Warren Meyer, is now on sale in a Kindle version at Amazon for $0.99. While the book is fictional, it does contain a number of interesting business ideas, including my favorite outlandish business opporunity of all time: fountain coin harvesting. Warren Meyer runs an exceptional blog [...]
One Simple Idea: Invent, License, Collect the Royalty Check
Stephen Key lives the life that many of my readers dream of: he develops ideas for new products, licenses them out, collects royalty checks, and doesn’t look back. In his new book One Simple Idea, he explains how you can do it too. In this book, Key reveals the secrets that helped him and thousands [...]
Poke the Book: Do Something Now!
Seth Godin’s new book, Poke the Box, is a short 84 page manifesto that will push you to get up and try something. If it fails, so what? Try something else. Godin offers some great, humorous, advice for overcoming the roadblocks and obstacles that you’ll face as you attempt to make something happen. From the [...]
Are Bookbinders a Thing of the Past?
With so many people buying Kindles, iPads and Nooks, do traditional bookbinders have a future? The San Francisco Bay Area’s small bookbinderies are struggling amid the weak economy and spread of digital publishing. One local bookbindery is making iPad cases to boost its revenue, but others haven’t been so lucky. WSJ’s Cari Tuna reports. The [...]
Weekend Thread: What’s Your Favorite Business Book?
Is there a business book that has really helped you? Is there a book that has inspired you to be who you are? Leave a comment below and share your favorites.
The growing trend of moms becoming mompreneurs has been astounding. Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell are two women that fall within this category. Like many women, they love their lives — no matter how crazy it can get. According to TheStar.com, Amy and Danielle have recently collaborated on a book that demonstrates the real ups [...]
Amanda Hocking sold 450,000 e-books in January directly to her readers, for under $3 each. The 26-year old writer has never been traditionally published and according to one anonymous publisher it is unlikely that any traditional publisher could offer her a better deal than the Kindle store. Hocking only began self publishing in March 2010 [...]
Marc Ostrofsky is a domain name investor who’s made millions of dollars buying and selling domain names. The most famous one he flipped was Business.com. He bought it in the mid 1990s for $150,000 and sold it in 1999 for $7.5 million. In May, his new book Get Rich Click! will be available. It offers [...]
Who is John Galt? Atlas Shrugged Movie Trailer
The Official Atlas Shrugged Movie trailer is out. Atlas Shrugged Part 1 opens in theaters April 15th, 2011. Atlas Shrugged, if you don’t know, is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957. In the book, leading innovators, ranging from industrialists to artists, led by John Galt, refuse to be exploited by society and [...]
Japanese Book Scanning Service
Springwise: A vast, densely packed bookcase may still be a status symbol for some, but in small Tokyo apartments it’s simply not practical. Whilst the arrival of the iPad looked set to solve the problem, Yusuke Ohki soon discovered that an iPad without e-books wasn’t much of a solution. Taking matters into his own hands, [...]
Personalized Books For Unique Kids
Any parent that has ever purchased a personalized book for the their child knows exactly how the process goes. The extent of the personalization is usually limited to the child’s name, a friend’s name, and maybe their favorite food. However, Shara Lawrence-Weiss, the owner of Personal Child Stories, has created a business that goes above [...]
