The Small Business Boomers blog is running a contest, and all you have to do to enter is leave a comment. Here’s the deal. If you leave a comment recommending a business book you think would be valuable to baby boomers starting a business, you will automatically be entered to win two books: The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. Hagstrom.
The deadline is August 7th, and you can leave as many comments as you’d like to increase your chances of winning, so recommend early, recommend often, and do it here.

Beginning tomorrow and running through August 4th, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Macmillan Audio will be offering the audio edition of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for free. Listeners will receive the audiobook in three easy-to-download sections, and soon after that, as an added bonus, will also receive an exclusive prepublication audio excerpt of Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. The book itself will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 8th.
Jeff Seroy, Senior Vice President of marketing and publicity at FSG, said the purpose of this audio giveaway is to “celebrate Friedman’s enormous influence on our lives and times. And in preparation for the release of his new book, a green manifesto and a continuation in many ways of his thinking in The World Is Flat, we want to enable anyone who hasn’t already read The World Is Flat to catch up with Friedman’s argument and vision for the future.”
If you’d like to receive these free audio downloads, sign up at the following address: http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/giveaway

Beyond the Code author Rajesh Setty has posted an interview with Mike Kanazawa, author of Big Ideas to Big Results. The two met at our 2007 Author Pow-wow, and are both ChangeThis authors as well.
Here is an excerpt of that interview:

Rajesh Setty: I’ve heard you talk about doing “more on less.” Can you explain more about that and how it relates to driving change and success?
Mike Kanazawa: In many organizations there is little time for strategic thinking, prioritization of work or thinking through effective resource allocation. Every group is running fast against their own goals and often out of alignment with other divisions. Organizations end up in tactical overload. As resources get spread thin or cost cutting is done, leaders fall back on the old rallying cry, “we just need to do more with less!” In the end, these organizations get stuck in gridlock and progress comes to a grinding halt.
One of the big impediments to change is that people are so overloaded with firefighting on a daily basis that they can’t get out in front of things to do fire prevention work or to create strategic change. Shifting your mindset to doing “more on less” can help you and your team to get your work under control and deliver results more quickly on the few initiatives with the greatest business impact.

Here is a direct link to the entire interview: http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2008/07/22/big-ideas-to-big-results-interview-with-mike-kanazawa/

For even more, you can find Mike’s ChangeThis manifesto here. Rajesh has written two manifestos, which you can find here and here.

I love Nick Hornby. His column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” is (or, sadly, was) the first thing I turn to every month when The Believer arrives in the mail. They’re consistently the most unpretentious, enjoyable and downright funny reviews out there. If you’re interested, McSweeney’s has released two collections of those reviews–The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Joe Posnanski, author of a wonderful book himself, has called Hornby’s Fever Pitch “one of the five best sports books ever written.” Hornby is also author of High Fidelity and About a Boy–both made into terrific movies–and Fever Pitch was also made into, well, let’s say a Jimmy Fallon movie. He has authored many, many, many other books as well.
But, none of that is why I’m writing of him today. I mention him today because he has his own blog, a fact I’ve somehow overlooked until I came across his post about eBooks, a hot topic here at 800-CEO-READ. The Penguin Blog picked up the post, which is where I found it. (And, what’s the first thing I read on Nick Hornby’s blog? That he’s giving up his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column. Drats!)
Anyway… onto that ebook post. Hornby begins:

In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the ‘iLiad’, for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon’s version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the iLiad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an iLiad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

If you’re interested in the eBook debate, be sure to check out the discussion that followed its posting over at The Penguin Blog.
Paper Cuts has an interesting look at how the internet commerce has actually increased the price of certain books by discovering “a previously non-existent market for what you might call ‘rare but not collectible’ books.”
And, finally, The Guardian has been having authors submit their top ten lists of books in their genre. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life, chose the top 10 book undercover economics books in February. His choices were:
1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
2. Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
3. The Poetry of Robert Frost, Complete and Unabridged by Robert Frost
4. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
5. The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
6. The Winner’s Curse by Richard Thaler
7. The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
8. The Hare and the Tortoise by John Kay
9. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
10. Why Buildings Fall Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori
For Harford’s explanations of these picks, go here.
For other author picks, go here. If you love independent bookstores as much as we do, start with Jeremy Mercer’s top 10 bookshops of the world, and allow us to nominate here our beloved sister company, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.