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During last week’s conference call for The Creative Empire, Tara and I were asked which business books had the greatest influence on us.  Even though I recommend different business books all the time, its not often that I think about which books had the greatest impact.  So today I’m sharing four books that had a major role in shaping my business philosophy.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson – I first read this book back in 2007, and it was really the first time I thought about how larger business trends affected my little micro-business.  Even though he never mentions it, I found myself thinking about Etsy the entire time I was reading.  And even now, I can’t have a conversation about the culture of Etsy without bringing up The Long Tail.

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – I can’t tell you the first time I read (ok, listened to) this book, because I’ve now listened to it so many times that it’s permanently ingrained in my memory.  So much so, that once my husband told me a…

Crafting an MBA

Now that a judge has rejected the Google Books settlement, one of the unanswered questions is what will happen to universities dreams’ of conducting research on the huge archive that Google has created.

For humanists and others interested in such “Big Data” research, the answer got a little clearer this week. Several of Google’s university book-digitization partners announced plans to build a new center for computational research on millions of digitized texts, many of them scanned by Google.

The Google Books settlement, scuttled last month, would have permitted the use of millions of in-copyright works owned by universities for “nonconsumptive” computational research, meaning large-scale data analysis that is not focused on reading texts. For example, researchers can mine such databases to study how the English language has grown or how rapidly humanity is forgetting its history. Under the legal settlement, Google had pledged to invest $ 5-million on one or two centers created for…

Wired Campus

Philadelphia—Like a lot of other people, academic librarians are wondering what happens now that a federal judge has tossed out the proposed settlement in the lawsuit over Google’s book-scanning project. Some of them got together for an informal roundtable discussion of the ruling at the Association of College and Research Libraries’ conference, which runs here through Saturday.

The discussion was led by Corey Williams, the associate director of the American Library Association’s Washington office. (The ACRL is a division of the ALA.) Ms. Williams tracks legislative issues for the association. She made it clear that her remarks did not represent any official ALA position.

“The world has changed a lot since 2005, when this lawsuit began,” Ms. Williams told the group. “Now it’s 2011, and the marketplace, many have observed, is just moving forward. Where does this leave us in our day-to-day operating of our libraries?”

Librarians are especially keen to figure out what to do about…

Wired Campus

A federal judge today rejected a proposed deal to settle the legal battle over Google’s controversial project to digitize millions of books. In his long-awaited opinion, Judge Denny Chin wrote that the $ 125-million settlement with authors and publishers “would simply go too far.” The deal “would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.” Check back later tonight for more details on this story.

Wired Campus

It’s no secret that I read a lot. Especially business books.

Though I have been known to mix that up with other choice non-fiction.

For instance, I’ve spent the last two days reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body. Despite the fact that I hated Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Work Week, I couldn’t resist the temptation to check out 4HB after seeing people rave about their results on Twitter.

But I didn’t read 4HB straight through, as I do with most books. Instead, I read the parts that were most relevant or interesting to me, and then immediately started putting the principles into practice.

I read most business books cover to cover because I actually find them fascinating. (I know, I’m a nerd.)

But for most of you reading this, that isn’t an ideal strategy. You’re busy, you’ve got lots of other things to do when it comes to running your business, and your idea of a fun Saturday night probably isn’t reading Good to Great for the 12th time. You just want the information that…

Crafting an MBA