It’s all the rage, apparently: authors are making movie-style trailers for their self-published books:

(If you’re intrigued, buy Tied to the Tracks at Amazon.)

(Technorati tags: Tied to the Tracks, book trailers)

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When I first heard about Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, last week, I was pretty excited. Yes, it’s pricey, at $400, but the idea of being able to read not just books but newspapers and blogs wirelessly and comfortably really appeals to me, as does the idea of being able to carry around a lot of reading material in a small package. (As a subway rider who hauls around a lot of stuff with me every day, this can be a matter of some concern. If I’ve got only a few chapters left in a book, do I take it with me on my trip plus something else to read when I finish that — which means carrying around an extra book all day — or do I put the almost-done book aside to finish later and just start on a new book? Truly, this is a dilemma of literary proportions.)

But now the reviews are coming in, and it seems as if the ideal e-book is not yet here. Tech columnist Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal has panned it. David Rothman of Publishers Weekly worries about the Kindle’s “Big Brotherish terms of use” and the privacy issues involved: Amazon keeps track not only of what you read on your Kindle but where you place bookmark and what electronic notes you make on your reading. Yikes.

Publishing industry consultant and observer Laura Dawson has a nicely concise take on the Kindle:

By now, the Kindle device from Amazon has been out for a full week and the reviews are in. In the “plus” column: The E-Ink technology is great. The battery technology is amazing. The fact that it doesn’t have to be connected to a computer to download content is really cool. The wireless subscription getting picked up by Amazon (so you can have delivery of newspapers, blogs, magazines to your Kindle) is also great. Some say it’s not quite as ugly as the prototype. In the “minus” column: While the wireless subscription is free, the content (which is normally free on the web) is not. The selection of Kindle-ready books offered for sale on Amazon could be much better. The device does not read PDFs. You cannot text portions of what you’re reading to anyone. And it looks like something from Toys ’R’ Us.

(That’s from her email newsletter “The Big Picture,” which you can read online with a free subscription.)

I don’t think it looks like a toy — I think it looks like something out of Star Trek (a good thing, as far as I’m concerned). And while it’s true, as Dawson says, that you can read blogs and newspapers online for free, books still demand to be paid for. Still, she eventually concludes that the Kindle is “yet another artifact of interesting-but-not-very-useful technology.”

Which seems to be the general consensus in both the book and geek-toy worlds. Oh well: I guess I’m sticking with paper books for now.

(Technorati tags: Amazon Kindle)

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Loren Coleman — author of the Cosimo-Paraview titles Bigfoot!: The True Story of Apes in America, Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, and others — will speak on matters cryptozoological at New York’s American Museum of Natural History on December 1. From the AMNH’s site:

Loren Coleman: Adventures in Cryptozoology
December 1, 2007
Kaufmann Theater, first floor
Free with Museum admission
1:00 p.m.

Discover the world of “hidden” creatures with Loren Coleman, one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists and author of numerous articles and books on unexplained animals, including The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Mysterious America. He has traveled extensively interviewing witnesses of lake monsters, Bigfoot, Mothman, and other such unsubstantiated beings, and has served as consultant to NBC-TV’s Unsolved Mysteries and A&E’s Ancient Mysteries.

For regular news and discussion about strange monsters and weird happenings, check out Coleman’s popular cryptozoology site, Cryptomundo.

Bigfoot!, Mothman, and other books by Loren Coleman are available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Loren Coleman, cryptozoology)

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Today, November 13, is World Kindness Day. If you’re looking for new perspectives on the spiritual rejuvenation to be found in helping others, check out the Cosimo book The Power of Purpose Awards, a project of the John Templeton Foundation. In this collection of award-winning essays, you will share an umbrella with a monk, root for a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, cheer on the efforts of an elderly woman struggling to learn to read and write, scrub down a bathroom for “colored” in the 1950s segregated South, and play a memory/listening game with the elderly. And much more. The essays explore the many ways we can find purpose when helping other people on a personal level, nurturing the environment, or when working with others toward a larger goal. While their subjects are diverse, their message is simple: finding one’s purpose is finding one’s meaning, one’s “divine spark.” In helping others, we help ourselves.

Proceeds from The Power of Purpose Awards benefit The Hunger Project, a global, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. The Hunger Project has mobilized clusters of rural villages around the planet to create and run their own programs that achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.

Looking for more ways to be kind? Search for charities — and everything else — at Good Search, a search engine that donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities, and schools designated by its users.

The Power of Purpose Awards is available at Amazon and other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Power of Purpose Awards, Hunger Project, Good Search, World Kindness Day)

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Saturday, December 1, is World AIDS Day, and on Friday night, November 30, the New York City Event for World AIDS Day will take place at St. Bartholomew’s Church at Park Avenue at 50th Street, from 6:30 to 8:30pm. The event — cosponsored by The Hunger Project, a New York based nonprofit that Cosimo partnered with to publish the book The Power of Purpose Awards — will feature United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon; U.S. ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke; the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria; and dancers, musicians, and AIDS activists. The evening will be emceed by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien.

For more information, please visit aidsdaynyc.org.

The Power of Purpose Awards is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: World AIDS Day, Hunger Project, Power of Purpose Awards)

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Cosimo author Hazel Henderson — coauthor of The Power of Yin — will be speaking at the international Beyond GDP conference in Brussels on Novmeber 19 and 20. The goal of the conference, according to Henderson, is to “change the economic growth paradigm in 27 countries.” Henderson will chair the first session on November 20, at 9am Central European Time, on “Practices in Business and Finances,” discussing socially responsible and triple bottom line practices.

Watch a live webcast of the conference starting November 19 at 3pm CET at beyond-gdp.eu.

In other news, Henderson has been elected to the British Royal Society for the Arts, founded in 1754 and chaired now by H.R.M. Queen Elizabeth. Members past and present include Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, and Tim Berners Lee.

The Power of Yin is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Power of Yin, Hazel Henderson)

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Cosimo author Peter Robbins — coauthor of Left at East Gate, about England’s 1980 Rendlesham Forest UFO incident — and Cosimo-Paraview author Nick Redfern — author of Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, among other titles — will appear at the 5th annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference to be held Friday, November 9, to Sunday, November 11, in Las Vegas.

Robbins will speak on “UFO and Alien-Related Imagery in Advertising”:

Paralleling the past few decades of unidentified flying object reports, incidents and alien abduction accounts, UFOs and aliens have had a hand in selling us and our children everything from breakfast cereal to computers. Is this simply a matter of the advertising industries taking advantage of imagery already ingrained in popular culture to sell us more goods and services, or is something deeper and more methodical at work here? Both, as it turns out.

Redfern’s topic is “Project Moon Dust: How The Government Recovers Crashed Flying Saucers”:

Nick Redfern reveals the startling story of the US Government’s UFO quick-reaction team that has traveled the US, and indeed the world, to recover crashed alien spacecraft, extraterrestrial bodies, and exotic technology. From Bolivia to Turkey, from the UK to South Africa, and from Cuba to Afghanistan come stories of amazing Roswell-like events, and the Top Secret world of the Government’s UFO recovery team: Project Moon Dust.

For more information, please see the conference’s Web site, UFOconference.com.

Left at East Gate and Body Snatchers in the Desert are available at Amazon and other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Peter Robbins, Nick Redfern)

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Cosimo-Paraview author Rao Kolluru — whose new self-published book, Spiritual Entrepreneuring, as well as his Cosimo-Paraview title, River of a Thousand Tales, are available at Amazon — is organizing a conference on global climate change at Columbia University.

“Global Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases: Market Incentives, Risks, and Lessons” will be held on Thursday, November 15, 2007, from 1pm to 5pm at:

Columbia University
School of Public Health Building, Hess Commons
722 West 168 Street, New York City

The conference is sponsored by Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Metro Chapter, Rao Kolluru, President, and Columbia Students for Environmental Action (SEA), and cosponsored by The Louis Berger Group Inc.

For more information, contact Rao Kolluru at RaoKollur@aol.com.

(Technorati tags: Rao Kolluru)

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Cosimo-Paraview author Cecil Helman has won the 2007 Book Award from the Medical Journalists’ Association for his work Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontier (published by Hammersmith Press). It had previously been BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

Helman’s Cosimo-Paraview title The Body of Frankenstein’s Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine is a collection of essays that Publishers Weekly called “a strong antidote to modern medicine’s tendency to treat the body as a machine.” Helman — a physician, anthropologist, and folklorist — explores medicine’s connections to myth, magic, and metaphor through discussions of the placebo effect, the concept of transplant surgery, the diagnostic technology of the X-ray, and other medical matters.

Suburban Shaman and The Body of Frankenstein’s Monster are available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

(Technorati tags: Cecil Helman)

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