The Kindle 2 has arrived, offering “20 percent faster page turns,” and access to 1,500 books at a time in a 10-ounce, 1/3-of-an-inch package.

I’ve not held one in my hands yet, but I am eager to see how many nanoseconds it takes to riffle through War and Peace. Did they build in the fanning effect you get with a real book?

Seriously, we are going to have to redefine “book.” And not just into something that’s a sleek little electronic toy. The term will also need to encompass features like communal bookmarking, and possibly Twittering.

That’s one of the features being promised by Shortcovers, a Kindle competitor that will work on devices including the iPhone and Blackberry, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Now, Twittering is about producing and consuming 140-character messages. It accommodates the extremely short attention span. I’ve done some Twittering, and I’ve read a lot of books.
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I just finished reading my friend Lee Polevoi’s first novel, “The Moon in Deep Winter.”

It’s a darkly comic tale of domestic treachery, set in snowy and frigid New England. Having done a good amount of reading and writing and some ice fishing myself, I can tell you that Lee has an eye for detail and the requisite “intoxication with language,” as Jim Harrison put it,  to make this a book worth reading.

And given that it’s wintry outside and the moon will be full tonight,  it’s the perfect time to check in with Lee on the habits of the craft of fiction writing, his thoughts on the state of publishing, and who he’d like to play the lead should this title ever make the big screen…

Q: Lee, how do you conduct your research? You’ve included some snippets of interesting knowledge on a number of far-flung topics and places (the mechanics of flight, an island in the South Pacific, Mexico City, etc.). Do you look these places up, or prefer to go there and experience them in person?

For the unwary writer, research can be a seductive trap.  While researching various topics for inclusion in my novel, I had to be careful not to spend too much time looking things up and less time actually writing.  Back in the day, I spent long hours in the library finding what I needed.  In present time, I’ve become adept at hunting down what I need online, while doing my best to steer free of “quirky” sites and time-wasting chat rooms.
The key in research is to find the right one or two key details, which lend verisimilitude to the fiction, without overwhelming the reader with random facts and/or appearing to be little more than regurgitated research.  As to “experiencing places in person”—yes, whenever possible, I like to go there (I attended college in New England, the setting for The Moon in Deep Winter) but when that’s not possible, again I seek out those details that add mood and atmosphere to the story’s setting.

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Stanford prof Robert Sutton has written a book called The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. From Publisher’s Weekly:

This meticulously researched book, which grew from a much buzzed-about article in the Harvard Business Review, puts into plain language an undeniable fact: the modern workplace is beset with assholes. Sutton (Weird Ideas that Work), a professor of management science at Stanford University, argues that assholes—those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their aggression on the less powerful—poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of their individual effectiveness. He also makes the solution plain: they have to go. Direct and punchy, Sutton uses accessible language and a bevy of examples to make his case, providing tests to determine if you are an asshole (and if so, advice for how to self-correct), a how-to guide to surviving environments where assholes freely roam and a carefully calibrated measure, the “Total Cost of Assholes,” by which corporations can assess the damage. Although occasionally campy and glib, Sutton’s work is sure to generate discussions at watercoolers around the country and deserves influence in corporate hiring and firing strategies.

I love the idea of a self test, an analytic measurement that could possibly clue in the emotionally unintelligent asshole as to his nature and effect on the rest of the world. Not that it would make much difference to the asshole himself. But just think what might happen if you could begin to quantify (assuming non-asshole management) the actual cost of having assholes in key positions.

This book could change the world!

I consider the English language more or less a sacred thing, so it has always bothered me when people take it into their own hands, bending the rules of syntax and grammer to suit their whim. Business guru Tom Peters (who now goes by tompeters, at least on his Web site) is one of these. I found it easy to dismiss his work in the ’90s, when he published books that were typographical nightmares. Different fonts, different colors, text going this way and that, random capitalization. All I saw was a disorienting jumble. It felt like work, trying to figure out what he was trying to say. Like trying to figure out what’s next from the freeway driver who makes six lane changes in 90 seconds and never uses the blinker.

So when I saw his latest book, Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, 2003, on the clearance shelf at Target last week, I was gratified that it was marked down from $30, to $21, to $5.26. The problem was, at that price, I couldn’t resist buying it.

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As previously noted, the Yellow Pages are now as antiquainted and useful as dial-up rotary phones. Yahoo and Google have redefined how people find businesses by offering simple but powerful search functions. And now a San Diego start-up is poised to unveil a next-generation business directory that will incorporate Web 2.0 features to give consumers a voice — and maybe a lot more influence in the marketplace.

MojoPages is in alpha and rolling toward beta, and doing so in very transparent fashion. You can follow the impending Mojo launch through a series of videos on Veoh, a new one shows up every Tuesday, and on the MojoPages blog here. The video series introduces the team, tells the story well and captures some of the early-stage energy behind what looks like a great idea.
And the timing for an interactive business directory that enables consumer ratings and feedback couldn’t be better. Just last week Citizen Marketers, a new book by Church of the Customer bloggers Ben and Jackie was published. As the big media behemoths continue to lose ground to new media outlets like MySpace and YouTube, businesses are necessarily searching for new ways to effectively reach their customers. The trend is toward engaging customers in conversations, and businesses that ignore the trend do so at their peril. Your customers are your best evangelists, and they are about to become your marketing team too.

So why not an online outlet for raving fans? While MySpace and to some extent YouTube are great for the narcissistic, it’s-all-about-me set, there’s room for a practical, useful Web 2.0 play — one that helps you find a decent plumber when one you need one, or a muffler shop or whatever. Word of mouth, after all, is the mother of all marketing, the ancient method of assuring that the cream rises to the top. If MojoPages can become an agent of truthiness (props to Stephen Colbert) we all win.

Practicing what he preaches, George Siemens has made his new book “Knowing Knowledge” available for download as a pdf, and posted it as a wiki. It’s also for sale on Lulu.com. Scanning it, part one is theory, part two appears to be more focused on practical implementation, but it effectively raises some interesting questions right off the bat:

Is the book still a viable vehicle for knowledge transfer? Think about it, a book is essentially a snapshot in time from one tiny pin-prick of a perspective. Business books typically assert an authoritative viewpoint — this is how to solve this problem. But how can someone sitting at a keyboard in a small room for a certain period of time anticipate the particulars of your specific problem? If that person is knowledgable, they can produce an artifact that has value, sure. But can they compete with say, a network of semi-experts?

Will kids being born today actually consult “books” when they reach adulthood? Or will all human knowledge be readily available, and accessible on the fly, in other formats?

“A great deal of wreckage is caused by boys behaving badly. The healthy ones — well-balanced human beings in full command of their alpha strengths — are natural leaders who are trusted by colleagues, respected by competitors, revered by employees and loved by Wall Street. But other alpha males are risks to their organizations — and sometimes to themselves.”

– Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson, “Alpha Male Syndrome: Curb the Belligerence, Channel the Brilliance”

New today from the Harvard Business Press, a book on a topic that grows more relevant every day. Chest-thumping aggression and posturing had it’s day, and still does on the savannah. But in the concrete jungle there are cell phones, blogs, IMs and other ways to spread the word on those inevitable occasions when the emperor is unclothed.

Together we are smarter, even, oftentimes, than the CEO, president or whomever we have ceded power to. Is there really any doubt about that today?

Seems there’s a glut of big-name books coming out this fall, which has publishers scrambilng to differentiate their hoped-for blockbusters from the others before they land in the remainder bin. So reports the Los Angeles Times yesterday (my emphasis):

At Simon & Schuster, for example, publicists have been reaching out to bloggers…. “This isn’t something I was doing a year ago, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us now,” said marketing director Leah Wasielewski. “I got a fantastic response from some bloggers, and it makes sense because this approach allows us to target consumers directly and gauge their interests. You go right to the source.”

Also quoted in the Times story is Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group:

“For me the Web is like a teenager’s room,” Menaker said. “It can be very messy, and you don’t know quite how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.”

If publishers are beginning to connect directly with niche markets, will they begin to publish to them as well? Instead of pouring resources into marketing blockbuster home runs, will they begin to hit singles and doubles, micropublishing books that may have not made the cut in the past? Or maybe a new class of info-preneur will fill the void…