A few nice best selling books 2009 images I found:
Wetsern Snowy Plover Charadrius alexandrinus R1-western-snowy-plover-villa-creek_2
Image by mikebaird
Western Snowy Plover (bird) hiding from predators in a depression in the sand and well-camouflaged by rocks, south of Villa Creek, Estero Bluffs, just north of Cayucos, CA, Feb. 14, 2007. This is believed not to be a nest. (Note on Snowy plover nests: A natural or scraped depression on dry ground usually lined with pebbles, shell fragments, fish bones, mud chips, vegetation fragments, or invertebrate skeletons.)
Photo by Mike Baird, bairdphotos.com. Shot w/ a Canon 5D w/ 600 mm f/4.0 IS lens w. 2.0X TE and a 25mm extension tube, on a solid tripod. This is a re-conversion of flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/390622989/ for submission to ngs.com. This photo was used as the cover shot for the ccnha.org Nov.-Dec. 2007 "Nature Notes" membership magazine.
View On Black
photomorrobay pool members especially, please critique this image for technical and/or artistic improvement. mike [at} mikebaird dot com bairdphotos.com
Photographer Biography:
Michael "Mike" L. Baird (bairdphotos.com) is an avid amateur photographer, specializing in nature, wildlife, and surf photography along the California Central Coast. He works as a State Park Docent, leading nature and digital photo walks (photomorrobay.com) and helping the docent organization with his knowledge of the Internet, computers, and photography. Mike was the engineering vice-president at ask.com, and is the author of a 15-year best-selling entrepreneurship book entitled Engineering Your Start-up: A Guide for the High-Tech Entrepreneur (eysu.org).
22 April 2009 Creative Commons use note: Hello again from Birder’s World! Thanks for posting to our Flickr group! I’ve selected your photo of the Western Snowy Plover — www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/2069541099/ — for use on our home page.
It’ll appear in the same spot your Peregrine Falcon shot is at — under the "subscriber-only features" banner. (The images in this area rotate, so visitors see different ones each time they visit.) The photo links to an article on a birding site in Malibu where the plovers occur. The photo credit below the shot reads "Photo by Mike Baird" and your name is linked to bairdphotos.com/ – Thanks for posting it! What a great shot! Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor, Birder’s World,
www.birdersworld.com
New Moon Taylor Lautner READ Poster
Image by ALA staff
New Moon Taylor Lautner READ Poster at the ALA Online Store, at:
www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=2807
Original catalog description:
Team Jacob
New Moon
Based on the best-selling book series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon is the highly anticipated next installment to the movie Twilight. With over 53 million books in print, hundreds of fan sites, and numerous critical accolades and awards, Twilight has become a worldwide sensation and cultural phenomenon that has defined a generation. In New Moon, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is devastated by the abrupt departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) but her spirit is rekindled by her growing friendship with the irresistible Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Suddenly she finds herself drawn into the world of the werewolves, ancestral enemies of the vampires, and finds her loyalties tested.
Poster ©2009 American Library Association.
Free
Image by Bill McIntyre
So I thought overall this was fairly good, but a bit of a disappointment. This is a shame as I really enjoyed The Long Tail and thought it was well written and had loads of interesting points and examples. In Free, Anderson has some interesting points to make about how the digital world has had a massive impact on costs and driven down prices so much that free becomes an option. The impact this has on people growing up in the age of free is also interesting – but the exploration of that side of things is fairly limited.
The history side which kicks it off is good and has some interesting examples of how free came into being as a price – and how mostly marketing of complementary products drove the price in the physical world.
The economics to me seem a bit shonky in places – something I seem to increasingly spot in books like this. Also he nearly starts exploring how the internet has leveled the playing field in terms of micro economics (which is interesting as its theory turning into reality) but then steers away mainly because pricing structures of individual countries and companies mean this hasn’t actually happened – so although you can have perfect information with the information you can’t have the rest of the theory. There’s an interesting book in that somewhere – wonder how the Economics textbooks cover it now?
However, it’s a fairly short book and feels limited in thinking, and most importantly limited in decent examples, which undermines it. It’s all very well to say that bands make their money out of gigs and t-shirts now not selling albums and singles….but backing that up by saying the Rolling Stones make loads of money out of tours and Radiohead could even put an album out for free first digitally and still it was their best selling physical album….but these are huge established bands. What about the bands coming up now? How do they make their money to be able to er…eat before they get a huge fanbase. This problem is rarely acknowledged or explored well by writers on the subject. There is no doubt the model is changing, but there seems to be a lack of understanding of how it should work, and why people’s copyright should matter.
As usual with commentators on this sort of area – there is no fuss about people paying for copyright basically saying they should give it away for free to consumers, despite their hard work. This led me to a thought about how Chris Anderson would feel if someone took an article from Wired or from this book and put it in their magazine and passed it off as their own and charged for it. Would it be different because it was charged for? Or is it different because its a company making money rather than a consumer getting something for free? I’m not so sure – surely its the same difference really – its still someone not respecting someone else’s IP/copyright.
This is something I’ve read quite a lot on from an increasingly smug set of ‘web 2.0 writers’ who seem to be quite happy freelancing for anyone and everybody and cultivating their own brands. It’s an interesting contrast with the Economist not having any bylines for writers as they believe the writing in the magazine is a combination of different people’s ideas and thinking. I know which I prefer reading…and it’s not free.