I recently picked up The Narrow Road: A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money by Felix Dennis [Amazon affiliate link] on the recommendation of someone who understands that the road to success is indeed a narrow one.

And, because the Amazon reviews were awesome.

No, really, two of the five customer reviews, plus the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly, called the book out for being a rehash of Dennis’ previous book, How to Get Rich. Now, in my mind, this new version is 80 pages shorter, so it’s already winning, but the payoff really didn’t arrive until I read the forward, which apparently the negative reviewers didn’t.

As Dennis writes:

How to Get Rich was designed as an anti-self-help manual, written to dissuade the majority of readers from making the attempt to acquire real wealth. My book then, partially failed in its purpose. Too many critics and readers found it “inspirational.” … a palliative is in order. The Narrow Road is the result… these pages offer a brief guide for those determined to attempt the getting of money and willing to shoulder the consequences. Should you not be so resolved, I suggest you discard The Narrow Road and choose one of the hundreds of other books written (often by charlatans) especially for you.

In short, people who didn’t get the message the first time got even more confused on the second go, which I think is the best example of the concept of The Narrow Road that I can find.  It’s a lonely path, not commonly travelled, and people who are on it, regardless of their final destination, are bound to get many more “aha” moments than the readers who are just looking for business porn to distract them from their workday.

I enjoyed it, and not just because it was a quick read (frankly, if the author had tried to take up more of my time I’d suspect he didn’t really get what he was trying to put across as a guide for entrepreneurs.)  I suspect it’s the kind of book where certain sections will mean more to me after further experiences happen.

Closing with a quote that stuck with me on the first pass: “The happy-go-lucky may call it an obsession. So what? I doubt you will meet many happy-go-lucky souls on the narrow road.”

Here’s something weird: the Apple iPad has managed to make cheap things expensive and expensive things cheap.

The expensive part’s easy. True story: I bought my first iPad because I had a meeting and I figured that displaying the pictures on it to the people around the table instead of trying to hook up a projector would make my presentation look, basically, more luxurious.

I didn’t get that deal, but I hold by that premise. More and more, people are using iPads at trade shows to collect email addresses, and even though the things have been out for a year and a half now, it’s still working. In the past, people wanted to touch the new thing. Now that more people have one, it’s a mark of quality that people want to identify with. In public.

But at the same time, the iPad’s made things cheaper. I can buy Kindle books for generally less than the print equivalent, and comics are something I’m watching closely as the major players move to same day digital. Now you’ve got something that used to be available only in print, at (a dwindling number of) collector’s shops, and you can download it and read it right away. The pricing is still being figured out, but in general, it’s cheaper than the print version right out of the gate.

Sure, a print edition might be more collectible, but those of us who studied just a tiny bit of math (and, uh, survived the 90′s collector bubble) have pretty much figured out that editions with print runs over a million aren’t going to be especially rare.

In the meantime, a book that used to sell for $3.99 now sells for $2.99, or $.99, or ultimately the 99 cent sweet spot that used to be reserved for mediocre hamburgers.

On a device that makes my horrible graphic mockups worth 30% more on the average pitch meeting.

Exciting times.

I’m sure I’m far from the first to make this observation, but I suspect Obie Fernandez had this planned for a few years:

"Rails Threeway. Huh huh huh."

In related news, I’ve been working with Rails 3 (beta 4) for a while now and it’s saved me a ton of time, which is handy, since I have no time with the baby and all that.

In other related news, Beavis and Butthead might be returning to MTV.  It’s a perfect storm, people…

I can’t decide if this is a fail or not:

For those who don’t know, Managing Humans is an excellent book on management for computer people by the guy who runs Rands in Repose.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game character from the early ’90s.

I’ve had bosses in the past whose effectiveness would have been pretty much on par with someone playing Sega all day, so I guess they’re now vindicated, and my hair feels a little bit pointier.

Circa 1995, this kind of matching algorithm would be hailed as a great triumph.  After all, they’re both books!  Today, I’m left a little underwhelmed, and it’s not just from today’s example; some days I’m recommended a book I’ve previously read (which Amazon didn’t know, so it’s a good guess,) but other days it’s an obscure book on an academic conference’s proceedings.  I get one of these emails every day, and it’s like a car wreck wreck on the highway: I don’t want to look but part of me can’t help but peek out of the corner of one eye. I can’t bring myself to opt out…

Now, let’s take this a step or two further.  Amazon has an extensive API that gives access to most of the data you can find on its website.  It’s probably one of the biggest libraries out there, and there are many businesses that have pretty much built their product as an extension of this service.  None are big enough, yet, to effect the kind of change I’m thinking of, but as more arrive and as industry consolidation continues in the book and search industries (it’s never a monopoly because of That Guy in His Garage who could Change Everything in a Split Second of Disruption,) there may well come a day where an encoding error like this one (assuming this is an error; Rands and Sonic might go hand in hand) would ripple across the blogosphere (or at least the splogosphere) faster than a spinning hedgehog.

If that happens, I think it’ll be a 50-50 split between creating bestsellers and destroying an author’s credibility forever.  Good thing nobody on the internet reads books anymore!

I picked up Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (affiliate link) at the local library both because it was listed as a top ten business book of 2009 on some list somewhere and because the premise seemed so bizarre: Henry Ford once owned a chunk of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Delaware and attempted to build a rubber plantation there!

As it turned out, the plantation story was fascinating enough on its own, but I was blown away even further by what was basically the background material for the story, which talked about the sheer impact that Ford had on the way things worked in the beginning of the 20th century.

The industrial revolution on its own was pretty huge, but most of what I knew about it was from the brief talk Clay Shirky gave about the use of gin as a universal coping mechanism to handle the sudden influx of free time that city workers found themselves with.

Ford not only brought a new means of production to the world, but he seemed to recognize that workers were as much a part of the factory as the thousands of tools he’d built to fashion the cars, and he took extraordinary steps to make sure the workers were in, well, good working order as well.

This not only included higher than usual wages ($5 a day!) but he also had a whole department that visited employees and their families in their homes to make sure they were spending their money wisely and learning basic life skills like keeping flies off the food.

There’s an incredibly fine line between fascism and Ford’s style of capitalism, but some of his experiments and theories were unbelievably audacious. Forget factories; he’d build whole towns in the most extreme cases of vertically integrated manufacturing I’ve heard of to date. For example, cars had wooden floors, so Ford harvested and milled lumber. Cars were metal? Ford had foundries. Oh, and this was all done in the same factory at River Rouge.

I can’t express the degree of change that Ford tried to and in many cases managed to implement on society that go far beyond the assembly line – not due to length or time restrictions, but simply because I don’t understand them fully and the book’s been retured – but I’m left with this impression:

For all the hype and talk about the degree that the internet has changed modern society over the past 15 years, it’s a mild incremental process compared to the upheaval that must have happened between, say, 1879 and 1929, a span which would encompass Edison’s light bulb, Ford’s work, and, to a lesser extent, the airplane (I chose that 50 year span to go against the, oh, now 63 years that have passed since the transistor was invented in 1947.)

For example, there’s a clip at the 52:34 mark of the Code Rush documentary (available here) where someone (analyst David Readerman?) stands at a town’s main intersection and points to the banks and stores and claims they might be all gone in 2 years, replaced by the internet: “I don’t know why [The Gap]‘s even renovating this store. Why aren’t they investing the money in their website?” That didn’t happen, but if the change was “Ford big” it might’ve.

Maybe that change is still coming, awaiting only one more big (or even small) thing to bring the stars into alignment, but it’s left me wondering:

What Big Change could result in a remoulding of the world on the level that happened not even a hundred years ago? And if it’s coming from the tech community, are those Two Guys in a Garage that we kept hearing about working on the prototype as I write this?

It’s been a while, so I bring you this: the multi-step process to amusing yourself when you’re tired and burnt out and don’t really like computers but can’t think of anything else to do and your brain is buzzing too much to sleep.

1) Go to the Toronto Library website.  They’ve got a lot of books.

2) Do a keyword search for the internet.

3) Marvel at how the number one search result is not found in any library.

4) Try to figure out what that means.

I’m not sure if I’ll have the time tonight to write what I want to write about, so here’s a link to the review I posted about Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin. Oh wait, the title of the book’s the link.

That’s not Amazon affiliate bait either, just a regular link. BUT it’s to the .ca version of Amazon so 80% of you will have to look the book up yourself on the .com. And I don’t get paid. So we’re even. Nyah.

I need more practice writing book reviews.  Amazon’s like a practice blog where I can put stuff that I’m not sure I’ll like in a few months as my writing gets back up to speed. If I posted it here, I’d end up leaking mental energy over the mild urge to edit or delete it, but once it’s on Amazon (and no, I’m not going to check this,) I can’t delete it.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t mean what I said, I just figure I need work before I can turn “I really liked this book” into a full page feature in some literary review magazine.

If you like business stories, check it out, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, except about the having to look it up on Amazon.com thing.

Oh fine, here.

I haven’t been following Chris Anderson’s work too closely.  I read (and enjoyed) The Long Tail, and I caught his intro piece on Free in Wired a while back, but I don’t read his blog regularly and most of the news I get these days comes from Twitter, which skews differently on any given day.

What I’ve caught so far, and I’m sure there are more sides to the story, is that data’s starting to come out that challenges the Long Tail theory, and today I see what appears to be some backpedalling on the Free concept.

I’m not trying to critique either of his theories here.  To me, this all falls into the “here are some examples of how a concept works except where it doesn’t” style of business books, and there are a lot of them out there.  You know what?  That’s OK.

I didn’t learn a single thing about the Long Tail from the book.  I got some new words for my vocabulary so I could better communicate ideas around the concept, and I found out a bit about how retail works.  It was worth the however many hours and dollars the book took from me.  I’m sure Free will give me similar value.

I think, in this business ADD environment, there’s a market for a new kind of self made guru: all you need to do is queue up your books for the next cycle.  Start writing a book today about how businesses ran things 2 years ago.  In 2 years, do it again.  I figure after about six years you’ll have established a pipeline that you can start publishing, with minimal editing, every two years for the rest of your life.  It’s the whole what was old is new again thing.

Business books serve two purposes for me: one is to get that vocabulary up and running, as mentioned, so I can frame new ideas and discussions in a way that people will understand under the meme/zeitgeist of the moment, and the second is to put my brain in a trance-like state from which related ideas will come out.

From that, if someone wants to churn out 200 pages on how digital oranges are going to take over the new wave of RFID wikis, I’m going to save myself the effort of deciding at the checkout and just buy the damned thing without worrying too much about whether or not I’m getting scammed. I’ll find a way to make it worth my while.