blog.booktagger has moved to blogger. Sorry WordPress, you just weren’t flexible enough.
Update your feed to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BooktaggerBlog.
If you want to migrate from WordPress to Blogger here’s a good utility: blogsync-0.3
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Booktagger Blog Has Moved To Blogger
May 27, 2008RFID Technology and Bookstores
May 26, 2008Last week I attended the CeBIT trade fair in Sydney. I brought along my phone/camera and was itching to stream something relevant to Booktagger to the Internet. In the end I took a video of a conversation I had at a booth for RFID (Radio-frequency identification).
Imagine being able to find the book you want in a shop with a location device that beeps as you get closer to the book. Or for bookshops, imagine one person able to run a stock-take in a fraction of the time it normally takes. This is the power of RFID. See the video below for a conversation on the technology.
Comic career advice
April 22, 2008Having finished reading 4HWW I was looking for something similar and found The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. Not only the last career guide you’ll need, but the first business book published in manga format (Japanese comic book style).
Author Dan Pink has written two other books, including a New York Times bestseller, and often contributes to prominent business and technology publications. He studied the manga industry in Tokyo during 2007 before releasing his current title. Still not intrigued? Try viewing the book’s trailer below:
20 Free Books Claimed 20 More to Go!
April 10, 2008Act quickly, there are 20 more free books to give out. The book clubs with 5 free books should have 6 members (5 members + 1 moderator). The book clubs with 10 can have 11 members. Join and tell your friends.
7 x The Painted Man
1 x Texas
2 x The Stranding
Don’t forget to fill in your address details so we can ship it to you. Australia and NZ addresses only.
40 Free Books from Publishers – Register Now!
April 10, 2008We have 40 free books to give out from publishers Allen & Unwin and Harper Collins. The books are exclusive, not even available in stores yet! We have a limited number, if you want a copy act quickly.
Here’s what to do:
- Choose a single book you want to review (only one per person)
- Add it to your bookshelf and join the associated book club (the first members to do this will get a copy of the book)
- Ensure your address details are filled out in your profile so we can send you the book
- Tell your friends!
Conditions:
- Write a review at least a paragraph in length, if reviews are daunting create a set of questions for yourself to answer
- To avoid rights encroachment you must have an address in Australia or New Zealand (If you live in another country tell us and we’ll see if we can organise with publishers in your neighborhood)
6 bonus books:
For those who participate the most in the forums we’ll hand out an additional book, to be announced.
Here are the books (the full details of all books are below):
Courtesy of Allen & Unwin
- Texas by Sarah Hay – 5 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
- The Stranding by Karen Viggers – 5 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
- Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood – 5 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
- The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block – 5 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
Courtesy of Harper Collins
- The Painted Man by Peter Brett – 10 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
- The Daughters of Moab by Kim Westwood – 10 Free Copies – Click here and join the Book Club
Now it’s time to make your selection.
Texas
By Sarah Hay – Allen & Unwin
The compelling new novel of life, land and love in the Top End by Sarah Hay, winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first novel, Skins in 2001.
On a rundown station in Australia’s remote top end, life for Susannah is isolated, difficult and nothing is as she expected. A dark history seeps through the land and the air shimmers with heat and an intangible menace. Then a young English girl, Laura, arrives to work as a jillaroo and falls in love with Texas, the Aboriginal head stockman, naively believing that her love will pull him out of long-held destructive habits. Texas is a powerful story of the land and the past and desire, of the ruthless nature of this country and the fragility of the people trying to force their will upon it.
The Stranding
By Karen Viggers – Allen & Unwin
A novel of love, loss and the healing power of nature.
A man arrives in a small coastal town, obsessed with that he has lost, broken by grief. He is drawn to Callista, a young artist who has her own compelling reasons for wanting to be alone. A friendship develops, then a passionate affair, but everything is challenged when their past demons are accidentally revealed. Everything comes to a head with a whale stranding on a remote beach, and the whole town becomes involved in a tense and uncertain rescue; a rescue that challenges the beliefs and philosophies of the local community as well as the outsiders who assist in the rescue. The stranding brings the characters together in an emotionally charged situation that produces unusual rifts and liaisons and an unexpected outcome. Beautifully written, The Stranding is a lyrical and heartfelt story about loss, memory and the power of love.
Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood
By Robyn Scott – Allen & Unwin
An uplifting, engaging and deeply affectionate portrayal of a wonderfully eccentric family and their life in Botswana.
This is the extraordinary story of the Scott family’s fifteen years in Botswana, during which Robyn’s mother single-handedly home-schooled her three children, whilst her husband ran a flying doctor practice, attempting, with often unexpected results, to adapt his experience to the unique demands of a rural practice and the growing problem of AIDS. Set against the backdrop of one of Africa’s rare democratic success stories battling with one of the continent’s worst AIDS crises, this book remains an uplifting, engaging and deeply affectionate portrayal of an extraordinary place and family.
The Story of Forgetting
By Stefan Merrill Block – Allen & Unwin
A heart-breaking, multi-stranded novel about love, loss, family and so much more.
At seventy, Abel is a hermit, resigned to memories of the family he has lost. Hundreds of miles away, in suburban Austin, fifteen year old Seth is devastated when his mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Though neither one knows of the other’s existence, Seth and Abel share a unique tradition: as children, both were told stories of Isadora, a fantastical land free from the sorrows of memory. Spanning continents and generations, The Story of Forgetting is the tale of how loss, however devastating, can ultimately forge profound meaning.
The Painted Man
By Peter Brett – Harper Collins
The stunning debut fantasy novel from author Peter Brett.
The Painted Man, book one of the Demon trilogy, is a captivating and thrilling fantasy adventure, pulling the reader into a world of demons, darkness and heroes.
Mankind has ceded the night to the corelings: demons that rise up out of the ground each day at dusk, killing and destroying at will until dawn, when the sun banishes them back to the Core. As darkness falls, the world’s few surviving humans hide behind magical wards, praying that the magic will see them through another night.
As years passed, the distance between each tiny village stretched farther and farther. It seems that nothing can stop or harm the corelings, and nothing can unite the dwindling populations.
Born into these isolated hamlets are three children: A Messenger teaches 10-year-old Arlen that it is fear, rather than the demons, which has crippled humanity. When she is only 13 summers old, Leesha’s perfect life is destroyed by a simple lie, and she is reduced to gathering herbs for an old woman more fearsome than the demons at night. And young Rojer’s life is changed irrevocably when a travelling minstrel comes to his town and plays his fiddle.
But these three children all have something in common. They are all stubborn, and know that there is more to the world than what they’ve been told, if only they can risk leaving their safe wards to find it.
The Daughters of Moab
By Kim Westwood – Harper Collins
Down in the generator rooms at Kingdom Fort True Believer Centre, transfect ‘E’ is confessing, and the Nathans are taking it very badly …
Assumpta Viali likes her solitude. A chronic loner, she dispenses rough justice ‘as required’ for Eustace Crane II, the Nathans’ crotchety Head of Council.
For Eustace, however, nothing has gone right since Tribulation. He’s been left the leader of a bunch of pithless wonders hiding in their crumbling citadels, something blasphemous tucked in their basements. And while his scary minder heads off on secret business of her own, out in the Sorry Plains the Children of the Maglev prepare for the Afterlife.
But one among them has a far less sacrificial future in mind.
We’re Growing!
April 8, 2008Booktagger is growing in popularity. Today we upgraded the infrastructure of our server to ensure our site continues to run strongly. See anything odd with the site? Please let us know. We’ll be ironing any bugs out over the next few days.
Booktagger now has around 1,300 members with over 10,000 books added to member shelves.
Booktagger and Australian Myspace Applications
April 3, 2008We’re meeting up with Myspace next week and hope to find out about other Australian based applications developed on their platform. I’m going to ask if we were the first, who knows? First doesn’t mean best, we’re trying 
It’s Monday 1 pm, time to go home for the week.
March 31, 2008
On my currently reading bookshelf at the moment is “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferris. The thought of leaving work for the week at 1 pm on a Monday is a big incentive to speed through this book, and the speed-reading tips Tim offers makes it even easier.
In the early pages, Tim introduces the 80/20 principle, based on the work of economist Vilfredo Pareto, and suggests that 80% of our results at work come from only 20% of our efforts.
This reminds me of writing my thesis, where 20% of my time seemed to produce at least 80% of each chapter and too much time would be spend tidying up figures. Why not eliminate tasks that consume too much time and yield too little results? Tim also gives tips on how to beat Parkinson’s law, where tasks always swell to take up the time given to fulfill them.
Tim keeps a blog with many tips for efficiency, aimed at giving you more time to travel and enjoy life. Ironically, he suggests going on an information fast for five days (no web surfing, no news, no tv), but I can’t do that until I’ve read his intriguing posts on how to learn a language in one hour and get super fit in 4 weeks (with a total of only 4 hours gym time!).
Breaking records on the daily commute
March 27, 2008
Booktagger users are probably regular readers of book on their daily commute, but how many have used the time to write one?
Italian Roberto Bernocco tapped out a science fiction novel on his Nokia and published it on Lulu.com, making him the first author to write a book using a mobile phone. Roberto composed short paragraphs in perfect italian, which he later uploaded to his computer for editing.
In Japan, a new genre of book has become established, with five of last year’s best-selling novels originally cell-phone novels. These are composed in the unique emoticon-punctuated style that friends text message each other with. Rin (pictured) has sold 400,000 copies of her novel “If You.” This surprised her mother, who was unaware her daughter had texted a novel and, I am sure, surprised Rin herself by making it to fifth position on the nation’s bestseller list.
