There’s a description of what and why on TorrentFreak and a video of Coelho talking about how the web has challenged traditional publishig.

The figures are hard to argue with:

“…how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more…”

Interesting stuff. He looks good with a pirate eye patch, too

That was a week ago. They’re still there, getting soggy. Unloved, unused, taking up space, wasting tree. I’m not alone. Walking down the hill to work today I saw four phone books either binned or just left, and I wasn’t looking particularly hard either.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you used either of these? For me it’s been a while. And why? Well, it’s not about the content – both guides are pretty comprehensive as a rule. Instead it’s about the fundamental process behind what it is you need to do with these bits of content.

I downloaded a copy of Microsoft Live Search mobile for my new smartphone last week – it’s a very slick application which released for the UK fairly recently. I was all ready to have yet another app sitting there for a couple of weeks before I got bored and un-installed it, but I’m bowled over by how useful it is. You really can find information on location-specific stuff – accurate, comprehensive information – via a GPRS or WIFI connection, in real time.

This kind of functionality kills the Yellow Pages dead. And that’s a beta application on a 2×3 inch screen, so it’s hardly perfect. Once you throw in Google Maps (or Google..) or any of the other search/local search providers, the concept of a physical directory is not only dead, it’s dead and buried, dug up again, cremated and scattered to the wind.

With 67% of people in Britain (6.5Mb PDF) accessing the internet and 4/5 of these with broadband, it’s hardly suprising that the web is the first place any of us go to find out basic (contact) information. Why spend any time at all fooling around in a 1000+ page directory when you can get this stuff straight away online? Who knows.

The debate continues, as it has (and will) for some time – about the future of books. We dabbled in eBooks when I worked at Waterstone’s Online, way back. In the latest copy of Stuff Magazine, two of the staff battle out the pros and cons of the book vs the ebook. Devices such as the Sony Reader, the iLiad and the Amazon Kindle – all claiming to be “the new book” keep the conversation bubbling along. Andrew Marr tested ebooks for a month and said: “Overall, I am reluctantly impressed with my ebook…” but also made the good point that they’d be better if they smelt a little musty

Books (obviously) aren’t dead: in fact it’s pretty well accepted that books do what they do infinitely better than anything else, which is why they’re still around, er, **** years later. As a user interface, the book is near-perfect: compact, easy to use, cheap, requires no battery power. Where it fails is where it comes up against what the internet is so blindingly good at: searchability, browsability, comparison, linking. The battleground (it it is such a thing) isn’t an even place: “reading” vs “looking up” isn’t a fair fight. But nowadays there’s something wrong with the notion that we should still be mass-distributing directories to everyone with a phone…

Anyway, talking of books…(bit of an Eddie Izzard spurious link there..): here’s an alternative top 5. Books I haven’t necessarily admired because of their stunning plot, but because they really made a difference to the way I think about tech:

Design for community: actually, a really good read and not just from the nerd perspective – Derek Powazek writes really well and engagingly about how to encourage community, and what not to do. It’s not often that a tech book still has currency in 2007 when it was written in 2002 (many’s the time I find an old one on my shelf which brings tears to the eyes..), but this one still seems pretty relevant today.

The Zen of CSS design. If you haven’t seen CSS zen garden then go there quick, click about a bit and then pretend you’ve known about it for years. If you don’t you’ll immediately lose any credibility you once had. Most of you will be seasoned visitors and you’ll be aware of the extraordinary focus which this site brings to people dabbling with the possibilities of CSS design. The book is more of the same, but picks a bunch of examples from the site and talks about how and why they work.

Next up is any of the Hacks books. I’ve picked on Google Hacks but most of them are pretty good. These get you right under the hood with many big player sites, delving into everything from URL hacking to API calls. If you’re looking for a better understanding about how Google maps works, or using the Yahoo search developer tools, these are for you…

Web standards solutions is an elegant “real world” look at the various hacks in CSS and markup application, and gives good advice on how these hacks apply to W3C standards. It’s reminiscent of A List Apart in many ways – each end-user problem has several approaches which are then deconstructed with pros and cons.

Last up (for now..) is Designing Interactions, a supremely interesting look at the history and approaches behind some of the foremost thinkers in interaction design, from the genius who first came up with the mouse to menus, Macs, and some other stuff which doesn’t begin with the letter ‘m’. For such a physically weighty (and deeply impressive tome – especially good to leave lying around if you’ve got some geeks round for dinner), this is a really great read.

These are all on a listmania list over here.

I don’t know if this is Amazon running some kind of competition to see how much social material they can fit on one page, or a sandbox area which they hope no-one would ever happen across. Either way, it’s an extraordinarily chaotic and totally bewildering experience which would run to eleven pages if you tried to print it out.

From top to bottom (and my fingers started bleeding about halfway down so this may be incomplete..):

• tags
• voting
• see also..
• editorial reviews
• a completely bizarre and apparently unconnected collection of images and, possibly, blog posts
• first sentence, first page
• “SIP’s” – statistically improbably phrases
• “CAP’s” – capitalised phrases
• related topics, concordance, text stats… (?)
• citations
• percentage figures for what book people ultimately go on to buy
• search suggestions
• more tags
• various reviews
• product forum
• listmania
• “so you’d like to”
• items by category
• items by subject
• a feedback box

…crazy.

…now, where’s the damn price….?