Letters Remain

Category: entrepreneurship

  • Cory Doctorow’s Experiment: Does Free Work?

    For his next collection of short stories to be published, titled With a Little Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doctorow will be running an experiment so that he can see whether his strategy of offering his work for free is working. With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for various packages, Doctorow is to track his…

  • Innovation of Innovation

    The costs of innovation have exceeded the benefits, says Umair Haque, and it’s time to move away from this “relic of the industrial era” towards something specifically “built for the 21st century”. Haque has dubbed this the almost too hip Awesomeness Manifesto. The three problems with innovation as it stands, according to Haque: Innovation relies on…

  • Online Dating and OkCupid

    OkCupid, one of the biggest online dating websites around, has had a bit of an up and down history. Originally called SparkMatch, itself a by-product of the once popular TheSpark, the site was one of the first completely free dating websites that now abound online. Inc. Magazine looks at the history of OkCupid—it’s struggles and…

  • Publishing and the Digital Landscape

    We’ve talked much about what’s happening in publishing, paper, and digital culture, but let’s talk about what should happen. “Book Oven is cloud-publishing: we are an online toolset that enables individuals and groups to make, improve, publish, and sell print books and ebooks. Book Oven is designed for independent writers and small presses.” Regardless of what…

  • New Authors and the Web

    If you do happened to get signed by a publishing house, odds are you won’t get the attention you think you deserve. Once you finish your book and actually get it out there your job is just beginning: “Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web,…

  • Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing

    In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of…

  • Social Publishing

    You’ll hear more about social publishing from me in the future, but this is too fresh to hesitate showing you. Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull press, has been trying to rally interest for a social publishing start-up called Cursor. In this interview, he defines “social publishing”: 1) Define “social publishing” in terms…

  • In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring

    Audio sampling in contemporary music is a form of budding innovation that proves not only the evolution of the industry, but a method to build on creative works that inspire us.  The practice of sampling is common in most creative industries, but often less obvious than it is in music.  Music sampling happens to receive…

  • Entrepreneurial Reads and Annual Reads

    I’m a real sucker for book lists. Entrepreneurial Reads is a wiki list of suggested reading for entrepreneurs. The list contains books written specifically for entrepreneurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revisited) in addition to much fiction containing entrepreneurial lessons (e.g. The Fountainhead). That link came via What Books Are Worth Reading Once Per Year?–a post by…

  • The Five Whys

    Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows: My car…