➻ Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield in the same room? Yep, and Portfolio’s Courtney Young was there taking notes. My favorite line comes from Seth: “The only thing all successful people have in common is that they’re successful, so don’t waste your time copying ‘the successful strategies’ of others.”

➻ Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, chatted with Dutch journalist Dirk Koppes about the future of books, and posted the interview yesterday. His conclusion is that “There’s no need to panic, just focus on doing great work and getting it to people in great ways.” I couldn’t agree more.

But Nicholas Ciarelli at the Daily Beast might not. He thinks the book industry is making the same mistakes that record labels made, writing “the choice isn’t between buying an e-book or a physical book, but rather between buying an e-book or no book at all.” Read his argument in The Great E-book War.

➻ David Shields talked with Sonya Chung of The Millions about his new book, Reality Hunger, in a two part interview. (Hat tip to Vroman’s Bookstore.) He said something rather brilliant in part two of the interview: “Art is a conversation between and among artists; it’s not a patent office. Reality can’t be copyrighted.”

The interview also led me to an interesting interview with a book pirate done by C. Max Magee, Confessions of a Book Pirate.

➻ Awesomely Simple author John Spence believes that Leaders are Readers, so he reveals his crush on Joe Calloway and discusses some of his favorite business books.

➻ From the realm of the slightly absurd, Joe Posnanski, author of The Machine, thinks “the Yellow Brick Road is the most wasteful and pointless public works projects ever,” and Douglas Adams ponders Puddle Thinking at butdoesitfloat.com.

➻ Publishers Weekly posted a Valentine’s Day Roundup of book reviews today, and Powell’s has a special offer for the special holiday.

➻ And, because I love you, here’s James Blackshaw. His latest album, The Glass Bead Game, takes its name from my favorite Hermann Hesse novel.