Forbes: Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore. People browse, find a book they like, pull out their smart phone, and order online. Making an intuitive leap, Jeff […]
What Kind of Bookstore to Start in the Age of Amazon Read More »
In the book Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West we learn that the name Fred Harvey was once ubiquitous in America. His company built the nation’s first chain of restaurants, lunchrooms, hotels, bookstores—in fact, the first national chain of anything—and was heralded for
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The Library Hotel, on Madison Avenue at 41st Street, in New York City is a one of a kind hotel: it’s like a library with beds. Each floor of this luxury establishment is devoted to a different subject, and the rooms on that floor are equipped with books and works of art dealing with that
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
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Though not the typical kind of book I link to from here, The Frozen Water Trade is an insightful look at an early American entrepreneur who created an entire industry. Amazon: “[The book] introduces turn-of-the-19th-century Bostonian Frederic Tudor as an indefatigable American dreamer who sought to give people something they didn’t know they wanted-and make
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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
BMOC $0.99: The Book With My Favorite Bizop Read More »
In this excerpt from the book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, Dave Jamieson explains how baseball cards first became seen as promising investments, setting the stage for a decade of speculation and overproduction: Around the mid-1970s, a small cabal of serious baseball card collectors grew wise to the fact that their
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As the pace of change accelerates and the volume of information explodes, we’re under great pressure to connect just in time with the people and ideas we need to thrive. But we can no longer plan our way to success—there will always be factors beyond our control. This uncertainty, however, cultivates one of today’s key
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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
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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
One Simple Idea: Invent, License, Collect the Royalty Check Read More »
