The Thin Red Line

My regular readers who have been with me for awhile already know that I really Hate memes.    Many times, I simply ignore them or give the sender a brief mention and link at the end of an unrelated post.   Once, when Mitch tagged me with a meme I just didn’t want to do (this is a book review site, not a free form blog and I hate to post off-topic) I played a mean meme trick by tagging him right back with the Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist meme.   Mitch never did attempt to tackle that very challenging meme on his blog, but he seemed to get the point that sometimes getting tagged is a real pain in the ass.   (And my friend Jamie whom I also tagged with that meme, royally rose to the challenge and did a great post.)     So when my new Entrecard buddy Saphrym tagged me with an Entrecard meme,  I decided to once again turn the tables.

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Today I am featuring Bill Keaggy’s  Milk Eggs Vodka not because it’s an interesting and amusing book,  though it is,  but as an example of someone who has turned a popular web site into a commercially successful book.

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Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, "That’s not writing.  That’s typing."    This is just one of the hundreds of  quotations of famous  "Needles, Skewers, Pricks and Outright Nastiness"  featured in Oh, What An Awful Thing To Say–A Book Of Notable Insults

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Books are powerful.   This morning Ron woke up feeling punk and cranky.   But after getting his coffee he picked up a library book he brought home yesterday and began reading.    And was soon laughing merrily and within minutes was feeling better and cheerfully looking forward to our busy day.    Chance are,  Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities may well affect you the same way.

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I have long been a huge fan of Unshelved, the daily comic strip about the life of Dewey, the lazy librarian at the Mallville Public Library. The strip by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum is wildly popular with library staffs everywhere. And it’s very funny, even if you don’t happen to work in a library. So I was thrilled when shelving in book length comics collections at 741.5973 to come across a copy of Read Responsibly, the latest Unshelved collection. As always the strips are clever and thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. "Creative Problem Avoidance" is a hoot. Highly Recommended.

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Last week’s books on spectacular log homes seemed to spark a real interest in the subject for Ron and today’s books are two he ordered from the library catalog which we both oohed and ahhed over. As eye candy, The Rustic Cabin: Design & Architecture, a lavishly illustrated over-size coffee table book is spot on. Ralph Kylloe is an expert on rustic furniture and design and this book spotlights magnificent homes built with every modern convenience in an elaborately rustic style.

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When I was a high school senior I had a sociology class, taught by a really nice man who was not a very stern disciplinarian. One day during a unit on group communications we did an experiment: The teacher whispered a sentence to the first person on row 1 and each student in turn whispered to the next until the message had been passed through every person in the room and the last person spoke the sentence out loud. The original sentence: "There’s a house for sale on the corner." What made it to the other end of the room: "Some midgets on the corner want to buy rubbers."

Somewhere along the way, someone (coughs and shuffles feet) changed the "house" for sale to a "condominium" for sale. And then the message passed through a crucial exchange, between "Dixie", a very smart girl whose brilliance was often obscured by her heavy old New Orleans Yat accent (’hay dawlin’, where ‘ya at?’) and "Ray", a pleasant, easy going guy we all knew was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Dixie tells Ray there’s a "condominium for sale" and he looks blank and whispers back ‘what the hell’s a condominimum?’. Dixie gives him a real kind look and whispers back ‘aw, you know Ray, like a rubber for a midget’. It was interesting lesson, though not perhaps the one Coach "Libbadoux" had in mind.

Unfortunately, many consumers are little more sophisticated than my former classmate in understanding the details of condominiums, co-operatives and town-homes, three increasingly common forms of home ownership that depending on where you live and how much you make may be the only realistic chance you will ever have of owning your own home. Having written about my dream of building a log mansion in the woods, it got me to thinking seriously about buying a home and as always I brought home a huge stack of books to learn more.

You only need to hear one thing about condo’s, co-ops, & townhomes by Mark B. Weiss. Don’t Bother. When he stops being a mindless cheerleader for the real estate development industry, it is only to talk down to the reader. To quote Ron quoting Dorothy Parker, "It isn’t the sort of book that should be set aside lightly. It is the sort of book that should be hurled away with great force" (to the rubbish bin.)

how to Buy a Condominium or Townhome (no image, Worldcat) by real estate attorney Irwin E. Leiter is a significantly more useful book. In clear and concise language Leiter explains in detail all of the legal complexities of owning a home in an association with other homeowners. This guide would be an excellent resource both for someone at my former classmate’s level of understanding who wanted to know what this type of home ownership is all about and for someone seriously considering purchasing a unit in this type of community who needs to understand the legal complexities of their potential purchase. Recommended.

More books on home ownership next week.

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I was very honored on Friday to be quoted by my friend Rich Becker on his Copy Write Ink blog. As I commented on a discussion over at BlogCatalog about Technorati authority, Google Page Rank and other measurments of a blog’s success

“… most bloggers who have not yet established a large readership and built a solid base of well-tagged content for search engines get very distracted by all of these measurements and allow themselves to become [too] focused on these metrics …”

So when Rich invited me to expand on this as his guest on Blog Straight Talk, I jumped at the chance. Since starting The Thin Red Line in June I’ve spent a great deal of time online meeting and talking to other bloggers, particularly at BlogCatalog, which is a great community site for bloggers. I’ve also looked at and read A Lot of blogs. And all too often what I see are bloggers who have not invested the time and work into creating useful content, who invest a great deal of their time and energy into worrying about their metrics and monetization.

Talk about cart before the horse. If you create a product and don’t sell it you won’t make any money. But you can’t get serious about selling a product until you’ve actually created it. And so many of the metrics and monetization obsessed bloggers I’ve met seem not to get this at all.

My more metrics-focused friends and indeed anyone reading my traffic reports and adsense statements might be shocked to learn that I am operating this blog according to a carefully considered business plan and I actually expect it to produce meaningful cash flow within two–three years.

When I first started I was writing this blog as a personal message to a couple of
friends whose lives I kept up with via their blogs. I included book reviews in my posts because I am passionate about books and reading and wanted to share the books I discovered in my work at the library. Then I noticed something in my SiteMeter reports. There were people reading my blog whom I’d never met and they appeared to be coming in just to read the book reviews.

And then I stumbled into BlogCatalog where I met all kinds of brilliant bloggers and took some good advice and moved my personal journaling elsewhere and focused this blog on presenting books. And it’s starting to take off.

When I’d reviewed only a handful of books, I only occasionally got search engine visitors. Now that I’ve posted a couple of dozen book reviews I regularly get search engine visitors. When I get to a point where I have written and posted several hundred book reviews, I expect to see significant traffic from search engine results. I also work very hard at forming relationships and getting meaningful links from high quality blogs to build up my regular readership, those who come back again and again to see what I am writing now. And my posts to this blog are at different times primarily intended for search engine visitors who want to know about a particular book OR for my regular readers who may sometimes indulge me with their attention when I post off topic, as today.

I also try to be sure no one leaves disappointed so I have taken to making my off topic-posts more and more resemble book reviews, so those readers will still feel they got their daily visit from ‘that guy at the library who knows about all those books’. Which leads me to

One of the things I do as I am shelving books all day is to neaten the stacks and make sure each book is placed evenly in its row so that the title and call number can easily be read by anyone who needs to find a book. But there is just no way to get Tilt to stand up straight. This cleverly designed history of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy has been cut on an angle so that the spine of the book leans inward towards the back of the shelf rather than standing up straight. Just like the famous tower that is its subject Tilt has a permanent slant. You may or may not actually want to read the history of this famous structure and learn about the many unsuccessful efforts over the years to right the Leaning Tower. But even if this is too dry for you, it is worth checking out the book just to admire and appreciate the very clever design. At my library Tilt can be found at 945.55.

I think that "flash fiction" or Very short stories is something you either love or hate. Trouble is I can’t decide which side of that I am on. Flash Fiction Forward is a collection of 80 very short stories. Some of them were quite clever and truly impressed me while others left me thinking the very short form is useless. Love it or hate it, Flash Fiction Forward can be found in the adult fiction stacks, in the F’s for Flash.

If you’ve written 100 well-tagged posts and found a niche and theme you can really run with, by all means check your Technorati authority and Google Page Rank and do what you need to do to improve your metrics. But don’t ever forget that you’ve got to actually Create high quality content before you can monetize it.

My thanks again to Rich for having me as his guest on Blog Straight Talk.

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I have a confession to make. Sometimes I just hate getting tagged with a meme. Especially when I’m tagged by a blogger I really like. With a meme that just isn’t suited to my format of daily book reviews with only rare ‘reading days’ and very occasional off-topic posts. There. Now that is one thing you know about me. I would have to now list six more if I were to really follow my friend’s meme which I can’t really do if this post is to have the appearance of one of my usual book presentations. So I hope my BlogCatalog buddy doesn’t mind that rather than follow the meme he tagged me with, I am tagging him right back with a meme of my own.

A woman I talk to frequently online recently changed her avatar from a cartoon-like drawing to her actual picture and for several days I thought that some new comer with a vaguely familiar handle had joined the board and it wasn’t until today when I spotted something familiar in the wording of a discussion post. I typed "You look so So SO DIFFERENT! I only just now since your icon changed realized that you are still Jamie!" Displaying her actual face rather than a familiar cartoon had actually made my friend Less real to me. This got me to thinking about how often online things are not what they appear to be and it is the appearance rather than the substance that all the effort has gone into.

And then I looked at these two books I brought home from work. They are clearly so unusual and interesting that I feel certain you will have wanted to catch a glimpse of them, and it may be that one of you actually would like to read a detailed travel guide with very specific information about where unique and unusual attractions are that has an index arranged by state and could thus be very useful in planning a kitschy vacation and a very academic argument issued by a scientist in response to the Intelligence Design movement that purports to prove that God does not exist. The fact is that after paging through both books, I honestly have no desire to actually read them and tell you anything more than that.

Which is how it is that I come to tag bloggers xight and suburbian queen with the Einstein’s Brain God Does Not Exist Meme, which I hope will be a suitably amusing experience for readers of their blogs. It is not a difficult meme. You just have to do a post that includes the covers of the two memed books and appears to be about those books but actually isn’t. Making it look as this post does like one of my usual book posts is optional. Mitch is probably in Mexico and may not respond for awhile but hope he will consider this a suitable ‘Welcome Back’ and I am totally confident that whatever Jamie does with this it will make me laugh.

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On Blog Catalog we are this November discussing the question

The Biggest Obstacle To Electing The Right Presidential Candidate

and the discussion has taken some interesting turns and brought us down some different paths. And one of those paths leads directly to the library, lobbing the meme hand grenade firmly into the court of this blog, where I have tried all along to promote the use of public libraries and talked from time to time about my experiences working at the library. So when Tiffany’s post argued that an ignorant vote is worse than no vote at all, I have to agree.

But when I hear about a voter who has no idea who these people on his ballot are or what these issue questions on the ballot Really mean, I have an incredibly ingrained urge to take them by the hand and lead them straight to the nearest Reference Librarian. This is something I actually Do when people ask me about complicated issues dozens of times each week. I lead the patron over to the reference desk and say something like ‘This is Vicky, she’s a reference librarian and she can show you how to find out about that.’ I’d leave him to Vicky then and go back to shelving books.

Unless she was on the phone or helping some one else and the patron would have to wait a moment, in which case I would be sure to add that ’she would be able to provide him with sources of objective information about all of the candidates and issues on the ballot and would be able to point him towards very useful resources of information he may not be aware of at all. ‘ just so the patron would know it was worthwhile to wait a moment for her attention.

I can’t imagine ever needing to add in person, what the patron would soon discover for himself– that she is very helpful and will patiently answer or discuss all of his questions and show him how to find answers and learn more. And that her services are already paid for by his tax dollars and it never costs anything to call or come by and utilize her valuable services.

And the really neat thing about helping this voter find out what he needs to know is that I could do this in any library as easily as I do it in the one I know like the back of my hand.

I absolutely agree that ignorant and ill-informed voting is a Major obstacle to electing a good President. If you care about electing a good President, the next time you encounter such a voter will you take a moment to personally introduce him to a reference librarian? Knowledge is a great cure for ignorance. And a pretty cool ‘industry’ to work in.

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Panning books is definitely not the fun part of making this blog and much of the time I follow the old adage ‘if you can’t say something nice…’ But having taken the time to read through today’s titles and not having anything else I am yet ready to write about I decided to go ahead and post a very rare Double Don’t Bother.

Who among us has not played Monopoly? I remember many, many Monopoly games from childhood, which sometimes became so heated and emotional that someone would take the board and run home. So naturally I was struck by Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way when I was shelving in games at 794. I read a bit about Elizabeth Magie Phillips who invented in 1904 a Landlords game, about the age of the great trusts and the Carnegies and Rockerfellers, about Teddy Roosevelt, trust-buster and the founding of Atlantic City. And finally about the development and marketing of the world’s most famous game, skimmed through much trivia and read a gripping account of life at a very high stakes Monopoly tournament. If you are a Hard Core Monopoly Freak, you will Love this one. For everyone else, it may be a bit much.

As a budding power blogger with two growing blogs, any blogging books that surface at the library catch my attention. This one isn’t worth bothering with unless you are someone who has never heard of or seen a blog before, run a business that could really benefit from having a business blog, and want an explanation of how technically to make such a blog that was neither detailed and specific enough to actually walk you through the job nor focused and tweaked towards guiding you to the resources to do the heavy lifting. I have absolute certainty that no one reading this post will fall into that narrow audience category and have thus lazily refrained from linking this title.

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Some days I need to put the computer down and catch up on my reading in order to write about books here every day, and today is one of those days. Sorry, no book reviews today.

If not reading me gives you a couple of extra minutes today, click on the logo and visit the Free Rice web site where a charitable organization will donate free rice through the United Nations food program each time you select the correct definition of the word at the top of your screen. It is a fun and challenging little word game and it’s a nice feeling to watch the little rice bowl fill up as you answer correctly. The software seems to do a good job of switching to easier or harder words so you don’t win too easily or lose too often.

Some folks of course will point out that volunteering at a food bank or donating cash to a reputable relief charity would do more to end hunger than playing this little game on the Internet and of course they will be correct. But it you would likely spend five or ten minutes playing a word or puzzle game online anyway, knowing that you’ve donated a bowl of rice for having done so ‘aint half bad.

Update: Netcritics.info has just posted a side-splitting review of The Thin Red Line. You Have to go read it. It’s a hoot.,

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One of my duties at the library is to go around just before we close and gather up any stray books that have been left here, there or wherever. Just before closing time Sunday afternoon I came upon a small stack of books in the Children’s area. I was about to check them in and put them on a cart to be re-shelved when I happened to take a look at them. And found that all three were really neat books that I was not already familiar with. So I decided to bring them home instead to read them and share them with you.

It is very unusual to encounter a book that does not have the title or any other writing on the front cover. Which is just one of the very striking things about Walter Was Worried, a pre-school book by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. This book illustrates the emotions different children experience in response to the weather. While the drawings are in a somewhat primitive style, Seeger deftly manges to communicate the stated emotion in each child’s facial expression as the book moves from worried (when the sky grew dark) to ecstatic (when the sun came out). If you have pre-schoolers in the house, this one is Recommended.

I was very intrigued by the title The Deaf Musicians. As someone who is severely hearing impaired but nonetheless loves music (the net result of that is that I am mostly into music that was popular when I was a teenager before I lost most of my hearing) this seemed like it would be my sort of thing. Sorry to say it wasn’t. Pete Seeger’s attempt to jump on the ‘popular musicians put out children’s books’ bandwagon falls flat. The illustrations are, well, kind of ugly and the story line of a musician who goes deaf and then begins performing “music” in sign language with other deaf people on the subway made little sense. Not Recommended.

I’ve long been a Maurice Sendak fan, particularly of his iconic Where The Wild Things Are but had some how managed to miss this delightful little gem. From Alligators All Around to Zippity Zound, Sendak presents the alphabet. With charming alligator illustrations and inventive alliterations (juggling jellybeans, making macaroni, quite quarrelsome) this is a fun way to review the ABC’s. For the pre-school set, this one too is Recommended.

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One of the biggest benefits of blogging for me has been in meeting people with different backgrounds and perspectives. More than once lately I’ve been forced by another blogger to recognize some of my own prejudices, preconceptions and unexamined value judgments. And that’s a good thing.

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Some days, I love my job. One of the really nice things about working at the library is that you work for librarians. Over the years, in other jobs I’ve inevitably asked about some aspect of the work that interested me, although beyond the scope of my own limited duties only to be told to ‘get back to the work we pay you for; that’s none of your concern.’

Putting books back on the shelves all day every day you get to know the Dewey Decimal System quite well. I can tell you off the top of my head that cookbooks can be found at 641 (a huge number at our library with an extraordinary number of decimal subsections that goes on for about 18 feet), Gardening at 635, Pets and Domesicated Animals at 636, Computers, Software and the Internet at 004, 005 and 006 and travel guides in the 910’s. Also that Bibles are at 220. I had noticed some time ago that Bibles were at 220 but it was only today that I realized that the number 220 denotes only the Judeo-Christian Bible. So I asked the head reference librarian where the sacred texts of other faiths can be found.

Keith reacted as though I’d handed him a present. He explained that 200’s–289 are all devoted to varying aspects of Judeo-Christianity and that everything about other religions can be found in the 290’s, which he led me to and showed me where the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita are shelved and agreed with my observation that this very uneven treatment of religious subjects seemed to reflect Dewey’s own prejudices. Ten minutes later Keith went back to the reference desk and I pushed my empty cart back to the work room, thinking ‘I love this job’.

All of which is in preface to introducing today’s books which stress the unusual part of the ‘interesting, unusual and noteworthy’ in my tagline. The 000’s are easily the weirdest and freakiest of the 10 Dewey ranges. Officially noted as "Generalities" this range includes everything from UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster and alien abduction survivors, to computers, software and Internet, the Guinness Book of World Records, professional resources for librarians and a grab bag of other oddities that Melvil Dewey couldn’t fit in anywhere else. The Alien Abduction Survivors Guide is, believe it or not, an earnest support manual for abductees. The author, who claims to have been abducted by aliens numerous time and to be a spokesperson for those aliens, offers specific advice for dealing with various emotions, including ridicule. Recommended for amusement value only.

Black Belt Librarians is a no-nonsense handbook for implementing rules on library use that insure all patrons will be able to use library services in a safe and comfortable environment. Which is a very PC way of stating it is a manual for library administrators in districts where large numbers of homeless patrons use the library as a place of shelter and refuge, a purpose for which libraries were never intended. It served primarily to make me thankful that we have relatively little of those types of problems at my library. Recommended only to library administrators who have a significant homeless patron issue to address.

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In yet another excellent discussion over at Blog Catalog, techfun asked the question What Is A Valid Reason For War? And after some excellent back and forth the discussion came around to What Do You Do When War Comes To You? Which led me to the following post quoted directly from the discussion. The linked discussion of Gary Geddes’ Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things was first published in my books blog, The Thin Red Line on June 8, 2007 and is posted today on my new political rants blog capitaL eLs and cross posted to TTRL.

libdrone

I can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like to be living in a country that is suffering a war on their own turf which they have no choice but to in whatever way resist or fight one day at a time as they Can. What frightens me about all of this is that most of us Americans seem to perceive very little about the realities of life in other parts of the world and thus are easily led to conclusions we would see are patently false if we actually knew something about the place and people we are told lies about.

at the risk of shameless self promotion go read my discussion of book called Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things

blog.libdrone.org/2007/06/kingdom-of-ten-thousand-things.html

and pay particular attention to the information about everyday life in Afghanastan just before 9/11 and the much repeated vow to "bomb them back into the stone age". We Americans fail to perceive the reality of life in other parts of the world at our grave peril.

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As I have mentioned in passing, I have been using Blog Catalog more and more, and primarily to meet and socialize with the kinds of thoughtful, logical people who can make an online argument fun, for those of us who like that sort of thing. I lead two discussion groups over there, Skilled Political Debate (moderated) and Ron Paul For President.

Don’t faint, Mom. I am not supporting or working for Ron Paul, and largely function as a devil’s advocate to respectfully question supporters claims and lead discussion threads so that they become conversations worth remembering. I am, however, working for blog catalog as an intern. I think the site owner and I agreed on the job title Ambassador, but he is a brilliant mile a minute kind of guy who occasionally pops in to lavish praise or ask a few questions or share news but mostly says, I trust you, do what you think best.

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With a big thanks to Nina Munteanu, whose blog post last week brought it to my attention, I want to talk about a new Blogger widget that allows visitors to your blog to purchase your entire archived posts as a bound book. Please note that for reasons I will make clear the button below is only an image and has no active link.

From the information in Nina’s post and other information gathered at the web site, I first learned that the retail price for the book is $19.95 soft cover/ $24.95 hardcover of which the blog owner receives a flat 20% royalty on all sales, regardless of volume. In mainstream book retailing, $20 would be High for a trade paperback, and at that price point readers would expect a pretty substantial volume to feel they have gotten their money’s worth. While it is not exactly buried in fine print, the much less publicized fact is that the theoretical book used in the example is only 20 pages in length, and each 2 additional pages add an additional $ 1 to the retail price. (Please note that I do not say the cover price; in my testing no price appeared anywhere on the book’s cover or pages.) There is a limit of 200 total pages per book. If my math is correct ($19.95 + ((180/2)*$1)= $109.95 retail for a 200 page trade paperback book. Speaking as someone with long experience in selling books, I state categorically that this is not a viable price point for any customer other than those traditionally served by vanity presses.

Self publishing an identical book with the publishing service Lulu.com would cost a base $34.53 per unit, plus whatever the author chooses to have added to that base price as their payment. For the sake of argument, add in the $21.99 that the blog owner would theoretically receive on sales (I can’t imagine there would be many) of the $109.95 book and you have a retail of $56.52. This is still more than any reader who does not personally know the author would ever pay for a book. With Lulu, you would have the option of getting that price down, however, first by selecting black and white printing rather than full color Base cost $8.53, then add a flat $5.46 author payment, which in traditional publishing would be a phenomenal net payment for an unknown author of a title with limited distribution potential, and you have a $13.95 cover priced paperback which you can realistically hope to sell to most anyone who can be made interested in what you write.

Additionally, I am very sorry to report that the SharedBook software is not ready for prime time. In my testing, which I repeated twice, my oldest blog posting was dated May 30th and my newest September 21st. I selected the option to publish All rather than specify a date range. This was the only user-available option prior to automatically generating my book. After a long but not unreasonable wait, the site prompted me to download the images of my book covers and pages in an 8MB .pdf file. First, and perhaps most seriously Blog2Print for unknown arbitrary reasons included only posts from July 21st to September 21st in my 40 page ($29.95 retail includes a $5.99 author payment) book. Despite repeating the generation and download steps and insuring that Publish All was selected, I was never able to get Blog2Print to include my May and June posts. An even greater concern is that Blog2Print, apparently choosing at random from images within my blog posts that were of an appropriate scale and shape, printed the front cover of Poppy Z. Brite’s D*U*C*K on the front cover of my book and the front cover of John F. Hunt’s Stuff Guys Need To know on my back cover.

This is extremely unacceptable, not only to my own tastes and sensibilities (I pan both of these books between those covers), but more importantly because it is a clear cut infringement of the copyright rights of Ms. Brite, Mr. Hunt and their respective publishers which could expose both me and Blog2Print to liability were I to actually have this thing printed and distributed as they have prepared it.

Having discussed Lulu as an alternative, I need to make clear some important differences between self-publishing with Lulu and auto-publishing through the Blog2Print widget. With Lulu, the author is responsible for manually preparing the .pdf files from which the book is professionally printed, and this is not a trivial undertaking. However, given that the data to be published is already in precisely formatted HTML, the task is not beyond the reasonably assumed technical reach of a blogger who has progressed to the point of having 200 pages of posts worth preserving in a book. Another important difference is that to publish through Lulu you will have to pay a $100 fee to Lulu that covers things such as getting your book assigned an ISBN and getting the book and it’s ISBN loaded into the standard industry distribution channels that will make it available from wholesalers and retailers such as Amazon.com. You will also be required to buy a copy (at the base price) after you have made all final changes and before the book is irrevocably "set" to insure that the finished product is as you expect while it is still possible to make further corrections and changes should they be needed. (Think of this as a "proof" copy as it is called in traditional publishing.)

It is entirely realistic to believe that you have or will accumulate a sufficient number of sufficiently high quality blog posts to publish a book, and there are realistic means of doing so. Unfortunately, at this time, Blog2Print is NOT one of them.

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I have never been a fan of the "dummies" books and honestly never understood how a publisher that unequivocally calls its audience Stoopid on the cover of every book could possibly become popular, yet the bright yellow tomes on a huge range of topics have become ubiquitous. And sometimes, though certainly not always, the books themselves are quite good.

Blogging For Dummies is a comprehensive reference that begins by defining the term blog and proceeds methodically to tell you most everything you need to know about them. Brad Hill takes a very humorous and self-deprecating tone which somewhat makes up for the very hand-holding, step-by-step ’software manual’ style these books inevitably adopt.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the various options for starting a blog: from the social networks on MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 and Google’s less sociable and slightly geekier Blogger (all free) to paid Type Pad accounts, to using Movable Type or Word Press pre-installed on a blogging specialist web host’s server to downloading and installing one of these programs on your own on a general web hosting server. I started this blog on a whim, without ever considering what options were available and am quite pleased to realize that had I reviewed all of these options before starting I very likely still would have chosen Blogger.

Other sections cover the mechanics of day to day blogging, the use of RSS and other syndication services, publicizing and promoting your blog, netiquette for bloggers and, finally monetizing your blog with ads. This volume would be most useful for someone who has already begun blogging and wants to get a better understanding of what it’s all about and helpful to prospective bloggers who prefer to learn before they leap. Recommended.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger is a highly visual, well-written and concise guide to doing exactly what the title says. Elizabeth Castro does not spare a word or a pixel for the history of blogging, the possibilities of using other hosts and software platforms or anything else except showing you precisely, step-by-step how to build and manage a Blogger blog. This book would be excellent for helping someone like my mother, who has never blogged before, to make their first effort. (My mom has started reading here lately and I hope she will see this suggestion– she has become a great photographer in recent years and I would love to be able to visit her blog and see her latest pictures every day!) Highly Recommended.

The Best of Blogs seems uncertain what it wants to be– a guide for new bloggers, a history of the medium or a directory listing of interesting and unusual blogs. And in its indecision, it fails in all three areas. The history and general explanations, occupying a small section at the beginning of the book are cursory and provide little useful information. The meat of the book, occupying the middle two thirds of the 320 pages consists of a listing of blogs in various categories, which do not seem particularly well chosen. The authors seem to be most interested in parenting and child oriented blogs as well as football and sports centered blogs. If these are not your particular interests this section will not be all that helpful. (I also believe that printed directories of online content are necessarily obsolete 60 seconds after they come off the press and a waste of paper under the best of circumstances, even when the listings are well-chosen, which these are not.) The final section of the book, about 50 pages addresses the particulars of creating your own blog. This section feels like an after-thought and would have very limited utility for a new blogger. NOT Recommended.

All three of these books and many other books about blogging can be found in your public library at Dewey Decimal Number 006.7.

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