Remember the Google Video Marketplace? Exactly. Launched months before Google bought YouTube, the video store required cumbersome copyright protections and was a nonstarter with consumers. Google closed the store last year, enraging the dozen or so people who'd actually bothered to buy videos.

And Google's Book Search operations are a disaster, overseen by Ramsey Allington, an unqualified IPO lottery winner who joined Google at the right time to get valuable stock options and social connections. He has made a mess of his department, driving out qualified female employees by being a sexist boor. Publishers would do well to steer clear of Google until he's gone.

Even if Google Book Search is placed under competent management, I doubt it will succeed. Google lacks a merchant's sensibility, trusting algorithms over salesmanship. But most people do not walk into a bookstore knowing what they are looking for. They seek serendipity — a quality that Googlers, with their overplanned vision of the world, hope to eliminate. There is beauty in an untidy stack of books. But a Stanford MBA's spreadsheets will never capture that.

(Photo via Paris Parfait)

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Recent news about digg and my almost completely unplanned but surprisingly snowball-like PR campaign (watch this space for announcements) has given me more motivation to write about my involvement in the origins of digg. The fact that I work at a company vastly larger than digg, even after the latest round of funding, offers me a pulpit of sorts, where I can speak more freely about my experiences from October 2004-January 2006. Anyone out there who would like to talk about a book contract, I think I have some compelling material, given the right deal.

And I'm fat because I sit at a computer 15 hours a day. This picture is a proof for an article ;-)

(Photo by Owen Byrne. Thanks to tipster Sean at 5tags)

I really love working there and definitely plan on honoring that. After that we’ll see! But I do absolutely know what my next book will be about and I’m subtly gathering string on it, thinking about it all the time. It’s definitely not a sequel, but it’s similarly something I’m uniquely qualified to write. Mostly because I’m insane! It’s a very ambitious project.

Lacy, still sometimes going on the road to promote her first book, "Once you're lucky, Twice you're good," has expressed disappointment that it didn't go popular in the mainstream.

Here's why that didn't happen: No one in the mainstream has ever heard of Digg, Twitter, Slide or Ning — some of the still shaky startups Lacy portrayed as successes that validate the Valley. The book should have covered one company — probably Facebook, which everyone's heard of — and told its story. Once you're lucky, Twice you're good," read like several long BusinessWeek features stitched together, not one story where the reader wants to know what happens next.

If Lacy pulls that very ambitious trick in her next book, she won't have schedule another interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which though painfully awkward also sent "Once you're lucky, Twice you're good," up Amazon's charts overnight.

The switch caused some confusion, and Berkun admits it was "a huge pain in the ass. But it did occur after Berkun and publisher O'Reilly were slapped with a $1,000,000 lawsuit claim for allegedly making the mistake of failing to do their trademark homework. Looks like having your publisher whine about people's shocking ignorance of the existence of trademarks can bring on bad karma.

• Boston — A literate city, where Technology Review editor Jason Pontin would make an excellent host.
• Chicago — Local entrepreneur Dick Costolo has a lot of time on his hands after Google acquired FeedBurner.
• Montreal — Oh, Canada? Why not! Austin Hill of Akoha is the go-to guy for startups north of the border.
• Raleigh, N.C. — Likewise a college town. ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo is plugged into the local tech scene.
• San Antonio — After South By Southwest, Lacy's had enough of Austin, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. But why not San Antonio, headquarters of AT&T, where they're just starting to hear about this "Web 2.0" thing? Brad Mays, AT&T's blogger-wooing PR guy, can organize it.
• Seattle — No sense in skipping this town if Lacy's going to Portland.
• Washington, D.C. — Or more properly, northern Virginia, the cluster of technology companies sprawling between the Beltway and Dulles Airport. Brian Loew, CEO of health startup Inspire, is a good local contact.

Photos by Randal Alan Smith

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy
• R is for Rose, who made Digg his toy
• T is for Twitter, which turned blogging small
• Z is for Zuckerberg, the richest of all

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.

The incredibly backward, if not entirely corrupt, business of publishing, distributing and selling books and said racket's desire to sell more television-chef cookbooks and copies of pulp attached to Hollywood movies in emerging markets like Asia — and passing along the lost margins to authors. Piracy concerns have been voiced in the U.K. since Charles Dickens's time, and guess what? Books are still published, even today! What should be far more of a concern than Bangladeshis reprinting their wares from PDF files or Google making their work easily found is Amazon.com moving to vertically integrate on-demand publishing with online sales. (Photo by AP/Pavel Raman)

1. Birth in an article
While some buzzwords grow in the wild, and some are introduced in books, most start in an ephemeral text medium like a magazine or blog: two media with a big news hole to fill and a tendency to fill it with bullshit. Among other gimmicks like numbered lists and quizzes, blogs and magazines attract readers with pop theories. The pop theory needs a buzzword.
Upon publication, the theory is actually being debated and honed. After writing up his "long tail" theory in Wired, magazine editor Chris Anderson hashed it out with bloggers in preparation for the next stage.

2. Book deal
A pop theory may be solid enough for an article, but once it's stretched to book length, the author is forced to invent supporting terms so the theory can "change the way you think about the world." In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell names "Salesmen," "mavens," and "connectors;" in The Long Tail Chris Anderson discusses "The New Producers," "New Markets," and "New Tastemakers." The theory takes on a pseudoscientific structure; Anderson invents "the three forces of the Long Tail" and prematurely declares death to "the hit." This is because people who read pop-theory books are even more gullible than people who read magazines.

The book's cover is white, with the title in big letters and one simple, metaphorical image.

3. Co-optetition
By this point every other magazine has published a me-too theory, and Amazon has three other books to recommend along with the one the gullible reader purchases. If you think the world is flat, you may also want to "think without thinking" and tap into "freakonomics."

4. Widespread misuse
The buzzword has reached the gullible, those who need to impress the gullible, and people who read BusinessWeek. It now loses all real meaning. I recently heard a Facebook app maker say, "Monetizing our apps is all about the long tail — transitioning from viewers to users." He may as well have stuttered about "South Korea and the Iraq," because the "long tail" has nothing to do with turning viewers into users. I like to call this "alchemical thinking."

5. Backlash
This phase actually began shortly after stage 1, with a new wave of backlash for every stage after. Now the backlash has finally saturated among everyone who ever heard the buzzword. Blogs have satirized it, Fake Steve Jobs has ironically name-dropped it, and it's a category on Valleywag. The opposite of the buzzword has earned its own buzz, meaning that even a "short head" business can co-opt the buzz of the "long tail."

6. Hallmark of cluelessness
The real use of the buzzword has long since fallen out of use as people rediscovered the other, older words that meant the same thing: "tipping point" has become "breakout moment" and "black swan" has become "surprise." Anyone who still uses the buzzword is clearly an ass.

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag and Too Much Nick. In two years he'll have a book called "Alchemical Thinking." Dude, it'll change your life.

Also, a separate source says Lacy definitely took six figures (probably $100-200k, says the source) for the book.

Finally, someone at BusinessWeek mentioned that the bubblicious article was Lacy's first cover story, theorizing that she got it thanks to co-writer Jessi Hempel, a more seasoned writer with some covers under her belt.

Granted, Jessi is the one who went around the blogosphere defending the story, then passing the buck for the story's most egregious exaggerations (especially the $200 million valuation of Digg) to Lacy and BusinessWeek's editors. If that's how a seasoned writer acts, maybe giving this green one a book deal is so crazy it might work.

Earlier: Scoop: BusinessWeek bubble blower gets book deal [Valleywag]

The BW story scandalized those afraid of the ludicrous business valuations that Silicon Valley mostly avoided after the dot-com bomb, and it sent Digg's management scrambling to explain that no, they didn't tell Lacy and co-writer Jessi Hempel that their company was worth $200 million, and no, they really aren't a bubble company.

Lacy shies away from the same accusation — Her book is "not a bubble book," she tells me, and she denies rumors that Penguin, her publisher, advanced her $500k (another ludicrous fake valuation, of course).

Lacy says she'll cover "the rise of Web 2.0 out of the bust, following key characters who are/were notable
stakeholders in both, with analysis on what is the same and what's different." Not a promising premise — sounds like every other story in Business 2.0, Forbes, and Fast Company — but just how bad (or, who knows, good) the book turns out depends on which "key characters" Lacy decides to follow. (It's a safe bet her friends at web startup Yelp — pictured left — will make the cut.)

Earlier, on Lacy's BW story: Why BusinessWeek said Kevin Rose is worth $60 million [Valleywag]

Carly Fiorina's book wasn't planned to come out just as the investigation and ensuing scandal was being examined by Congress (if only publishers could be that quick). It's a mixed blessing for Fiorina — after California indicted ex-chair Patricia Dunn and four other people involved in the investigation yesterday, her book should sell better than expected when it comes out Tuesday.

But it also means Carly's just given a book full of public testimony that will entangle her in this whole mess. Looks like someone could get roped into a few more hours on the witness stand.

Ex-Chief of H.P. Pursued Leaks, Too [NY Times]
Tough Choices: A Memoir [Fiorina's book on Amazon]

A respected top Valley reporter, a guy with the WSJ on his resume and Red Herring's star writer during the mag's Golden Era of Om Malik and Peter Rojas, is self-flacking his own book. (I've never even traded emails with the guy, so he must be spamming wide among tech journos.) Is this Web 2.0 or a sign that promo budgets are really tight? Still, this is better than the time Guy Kawasaki had his publicist invite me to join Guy's network on FilmLoop.

"If you can agree to an embargo on coverage/reviews until May 9, the Tuesday of E3..." Real flacks could learn from Dean. He offers the embargo as an option for more info and explains *why* he wants to wait for a specific date. Most flacks just send the info and mark it EMBARGO MAY 09 as if the freelance writers they're spamming work for them.

Poor guy's book isn't even on Amazon — does he need to hand copies out himself? The home-made press release is after the jump.

Hi,

I've just put the finishing touches on my new book:

"The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console."

If you can agree to an embargo on coverage/reviews until May 9, the Tuesday of E3, I can send you a PDF preview of the book.

The book is the result of more than a hundred interviews, many at the highest levels of Microsoft, as well as countless months of research. I was lucky enough to get unprecedented access within Microsoft, so this book is a true insider's look at the evolution of the Xbox 360 and Microsoft's ambitious multi-billion dollar gamble to become a leading force in the video game industry. The book reveals interviews and insights with not only the entire Microsoft Xbox team, but also key executives from Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and leading game developers.

I've discussed the book quite a bit on my blog at:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/gaming

The official book page from my publisher, SpiderWorks, is:

http://www.spiderworks.com/xbox360

I will follow up soon with a summary of the most interesting things in the book, as well as provide a formal press release on the book. We'll pull together plans for limited excerpts, pictures, cover art, and interviews about the book as needed.

The book will be released on May 9 and will be available in an eBook and printed edition at SpiderWorks.com and Amazon.com.

If you are interested, I'd be more than happy to send you a review galley of the book, as well as a print edition as soon as it is available.

Thanks much,

Dean Takahashi
Staff writer
San Jose Mercury News

She never made it into the tournament (I blame Google New York's slow PR team), but I'd like to officially recognize Lauren as an all-around Google Hottie — for her style, her Stones shirt, and her ability to monetize lesbianism (she got the book deal mere months after coming out! Such talent! Such connections in the publishing world!).

The Cockpit: Hot Lesbian Sexy Action [NYO Daily Transom]

Ben Brown: i just got an email from Jason Fried
saying that his book
is "a book of ideas"
Wow!
he's right.
simplicity is golden.
who should read it?
EVERYONE!
do you like ideas?
this book has them!

Ben Brown: "Visit the Getting Real site to get more info on who should read the book"
SERIOUSLY?
jesus.
oh wait
it's not a REAL book
its like, vanity publishing gone digital
I am going to write my "Book" today

Valleywag: so, ok, his 1 real success story is Ruby on Rails, right?

Ben Brown: it's not a success story, nick
it's a way of life.

Valleywag: "Over 400,000 people around the world use these applications to get things done."

Ben Brown: Almost ONE HALF OF ONE MILLION
that pretty much gives him license to REVOLUTIONIZE the web
37SIGNALUTIONIZE

"Getting Real" by 37signals [37signals]