I was planning on thoroughly testing the various apps on my Touch on vacation in a few weeks.  I have books on my Touch in the Kindle app (bought Outliers: The Story of Success), Stanza (bought Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers), BeamItDown (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and eReader Pro (The Last of the Mohicans).  I’m also using Calibri to manage the books and convert to appropriate formats.  However, I haven’t really given any a full test drive.  That’s what a vacation to the beach is for.

For now, check out MacWorld’s iPhone Central e-book reader’s guide.  Here’s the skinny but read the entire article to all the details.

• Stanza (free, Lexcycle) (App store link)
• Instapaper (free [pro version $10]; Marco Ament) (App store free and pro versions)
• Classics ($3, Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu) (App store link)
• eReader (free, Fictionwise) (App store link)
• iFlow-based books (various prices, BeamItDown) (App store link)
• Kindle for iPhone (Free, Amazon.com) (App store link)
• BookShelf ($6, Zachary Bedell (App Store link)

Note the book links in the first paragraph are to hardcopy books on Amazon.  Not sure yet how to link to e-books.  If you are interested in the Sharepoint Book for Stanza, search for it through Stanza and you’ll get 40% off and receive a full PDF version to boot.

Here’s my review just posted on GoodReads.com:
Just finished the audio book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. Well worth the free download from Zappos.com but also available at Amazon.com. The book is not quite 5.5 hours and if you can’t get the free version, worth the purchase price. I plan to buy the hard copy as reference. Played on high speed on my iPod, I was able to finish it in one week’s daily commute.

The book leads the reader through five stages of tribal leadership with solid examples of each level for both individuals and organizations. Of special interest to me was the description of word choice as individuals move from lower to higher stages. Some of this is obvious (me/I to we). But a significant difference for stage five organizations is how they define the competition. Instead of identifying other organizations they tend to discuss the competition in terms of their noble cause. For example, “cancer” as competition instead of XYZ company.

View all my reviews at GoodReads.

From Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity:

You don’t manage information overload — otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you’d blow up.

- David Allen

Did you catch the “Next Great American Band” auditions a few weeks ago? After a tune performed by a traditional sounding bluegrass band, one of the judges asked if the band could play anything more “mainstream” than traditional bluegrass that would appeal to a wider audience. They launched into a bluegrass version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” Granted it was tongue in cheek but it was pretty creative.

Today my iPod randomly dished out Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” But wait, that sounds like “newgrass” not hard rock. Sure enough, it wasn’t Aerosmith but rather The String Cheese Incident and they were pickin’ and grinnin’ “Walk this Way.” How fun is that?!?

Last week I cashed in on a free trial at eMusic. A free two week trial yielded 25 DRM-free MP3 music tracks and one MP3 audiobook. I picked up a couple of CDs worth including The String Cheese Incident and Bare Naked Ladies plus the audio book Super Crunchers. I don’t recall when I first heard of The String Cheese Incident but being from Wisconsin, I was certainly attracted to the name. I’m pretty sure it was on some music-related podcast. Any who, sometime in the last year or so I added them to my Amazon wishlist which is how I typically “bookmark” books and CDs for future consideration.

I’ve posted a link below so you can try out e-Music, too. The free two-week trial comes with no string (cheese) attached. (Which is good since that could be messy.)

Prefer Amazon.com?
Aerosmith - Walk This Way
A String Cheese Incident
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, recently addressed the connection between global warming, public relations spam and magazines in his blog. I got a kick out of his comments since he included as spam the “blow-in” magazine subscription cards that drop out of magazines on to your floor. He says…

Our circulation department wants to put in as many as possible, because five cards have a slightly higher chance of one being sent back than four, and six is slightly higher yet. As long as those cards earn more in subscriptions than the cost of paper and print, they’re consider a good thing from the circulation department perspective.

He goes on to say that editors hate them because of the grief they create for readers. AMEN!

It just so happens that a few weeks ago I ordered a subscription to Wired which he edits. The cost of the one year subscription is only $10 bucks. But what’s the cost to my back for bending over and trying to pick those slippery cards up off the ground?

I’ll count the number of cards in my first issue and report back!

(Cross posted at Thinking Analytically.)

The BusinessWeek blog, Management IQ, recently mentioned then new book by the authors of the bestselling Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.   My company offers Crucial Conversations training and I’m scheduled to participate in December.  From what I understand the tools are appropriate for both home and the workplace.  I’m looking forward to the class.   I receive the Crucial Conversations newsletter so I’ve had my eye on the release of the new book: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.

The book purports to provide “eight powerful principles for changing behaviors” of others and of ourselves.  Perhaps it is worth a read (or listen)!

A few months ago I listened to Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling. In this book, author Stephen Denning uses a fable complete with talking animals to stress the importance of storytelling in our organizations especially in times of significant organizational change. To quote the author, “The ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill for coping with, and getting business results in, the turbulent world of the 21st century.” On Monday, October 15, 2007 Stephens newest book will be released - The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative. The book has already received great reviews for several prominent people including Reed Hastings (CEO of NetFlix) and best selling leadership author, Jim Kouzes. To promote the book, Stephen is offering dozens of free tools, papers, videos and other bonus items. They will be distributed on a limited basis at his web-site beginning October. Get them while they last.

If you’ve ever tried to rip an audiobook in iTunes, you know it is a hit or miss event. Even when CDs are part of a set, iTunes tends to inconsistently name tracks. In order to combine tracks, you must manually join CD tracks before each rip. Plus there’s no easy way to combine tracks from multiple CDs. Markable from iPodSoft.com is a simple $15 solution to this problem.

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