Thursday 22 November 2007

Strategic Human Capital Management is now available on Kindle

My book is now available on Kindle, Amazon's new e-book, for the amazingly good value of $28.75.

Amazon hopes that the Kindle will become the ipod of reading, and it does seem to offer significant advances over previous similar technologies.

In particular, the Kindle provides access to the web, through mobile broadband which can be picked up from anywhere, not just wi-fi hotspots. So readers can, for instance, check my blog posts on the points I am making on the page of my book they are reading. Or they can easily check what other blogger, or authors such as Peter Cheese, Gary Hamel, Lynda Gratton, Gurnek Bains or John Boudreau are saying about these areas.

88,000 other books are also available, many for just £9.99. And although the Kindle sells at £399, costs will no doubt falls, as its functionality further improves, over the next few years.

It may be difficult to imagine using this advice now, but how many of us could have imagined the ipod and podcasting taking a fairly central role in our lives even just ten years ago?

Then there's the environmental benefits as well.

As well as signalling major changes in reading patterns, the Kindle suggests a very different approach to writing books. This week's Newsweek features an article on the Kindle which includes this quote from Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book:

"The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product."



The article goes on..

"This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson ["The Long Tail"], John Battelle ("The Search") and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs."



So what do you want our next book to be about?

1 comment:

  1. Good luck with this Jon - I had not seen Kindle in action until I read your post! See you soon, Scott

    ReplyDelete

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