Big news out of Seattle today. Amazon.ca has finally launched Search Inside the Book. SITB has been available on the .com site since Oct. 2003, but it took much longer to launch the program in Canada.

Search Inside the Book lets customers search for keywords inside a book. For example, if I want a book on Turkey, I can select the Search Inside results tab, then see 2-3 pages of the book.

Helpful for sorting out Turkey vs. poultry. Nice for fiction if you want to read a couple of pages to see the writing style. And, of course, an interesting opportunity for readers and publishers.

GooglePrint is also available but I’m not sure how many Canadian publishers are on board.

Bramwell Tovey is the music director for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. He joined the VSO in 2000 but before that he was artistic director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. He is a bit of a card, which I remember from my Winnipeg symphony-going days. The thing I like about Bramwell is that he hams it up with the audience, especially those of us attending a free concert in the park. He still gives you the colour commentary between pieces, but there is an acknowledgement that we’re all outside, that a dog might have pooped in the front row and that’s why there’s a large gap in the audience.

The “playlist” yesterday was also an acknowledgement of the audience. All the pieces had elements that we’ve heard in other places, like advertisements. It was a bit like the Bugs Bunny repetoire.

Rossini’s William Tell: Overature (apparently the ring tone is available)
Lehar’s Gold & Silver Waltz
Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance No. 8 in G minor (played in stores last Christmas season according to Tovey)
Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries
Borodin’s Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances
Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Op. 36: Nimrod (who doesn’t like something serious called Nimrod)
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Op. 49 (with no less than 16 cannon shots)

The top of the night though was Saint-Saens’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, fronted by violinist Christel Lee. Now Christel is no ordinary violinist. She is 14 years old, originally from Vancouver, and studying with world-acclaimed violinist Kyung Wha Chung.

I am in awe of anyone who can play an instrument, in particular these child prodigies. Young Christel came on stage in a flame red gown to accompany the white-tux orchestra. Ms. Lee blew my mind away, and we gave her a standing O so I’m not overstating how awesome she was.

Then I rode my bike home. A very civilized evening indeed.

Two weeks ago, James Sherrett tagged me in a game of literary tag. Although I hate to be left out, I’m also not a joiner. Like a fish on the line, I’ve resisted long enough. I am IT.

1. How many books do I own?
I suspect that I own more than 1,000 books. I have a large number of them stored in my mother’s apartment. She keeps the less loved books in boxes but the first editions and antiquarian books on display (as if they are hers).

2. Last Book I Bought:
June: Malcolm Gladwell’s BLINK in BookCity in Toronto in The Beaches.

3. Last Book I Read:
This weekend: The Great Stink by Clare Clarke.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
3. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alastair MacLeod
4. You Went Away by Timothy Findley
5. The Canadian Oxford English Dictionary

5. Tag Five More:
Patricia at BookLust
Laila Lalami at Moorish Girl
Kevin Smokler
Dynamo duo Susie and Travis at Hop Studios et al.
Stowe Boyd and Stowe Boyd of Corante. I proudly display my Get Real sticker.

I was asked today why I thought online publishing won’t takeover traditional publishing. My answer was that humans have been reading off paper for hundreds of years, and I don’t believe that books are fungible.

Music formats–from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3–are much more fungible. The delivery mechanism has a history of fairly rapid change. One format has acceptably replaced another. It is foreseeable that this is an infinite process. For literature–text on stone, animal skin and papyrus to parchment to codexes and bound pages to ebooks–the cycles of change have been much longer and the adoption of new technology has been slower.

Parchment, for example, was introduced as a replacement to papyrus sometime after the 3rd century. Documented use of papyrus, however, continued in classical literature until the 7th century, and even until the late 11th century. Not exactly a quick uptake of technology.

I think until we run out of trees and the ability to use 100% post-consumer recycled products, bound pages–or books–will still be used. Etexts, audio books, and whatever digital format we create for the future will of course be acceptable and used by many people, but the historical data on the adoption of ebooks does not suggest any wide scale change in the habits of book readers.

Now newspapers are a different story. The nature, however, of a newspaper–a collection of short articles–translates well online, as do certain types of books, such as reference manuals, recipe books and perhaps even poetry and short fiction. Like the shift from papyrus to paper, change is inevitable, but I’d argue that the phase out period will likely extend well beyond my lifetime.

Have a look at what the geeks are up to:

“Mighty Mouse” has been one of the top 10 searches for the last couple of days according to Technorati.

Apple.com/mightymouse

I want my mouse to roar!

America is calling.

If I was rich on time and in the pocketbook, here are the upcoming blog conferences I’d like to attend:

Blog Business Summit in San Francisco, August 17-19. $895. I attended this conference last year and thought it was great. I met Darren Barefoot, whose blog I’d been reading for months. Darren is also a speaker at this year’s conference.

I met Travis and Susie, who I share interesting publishing ideas with, and all the blog gods like Robert Scoble.

Janet Johnson from Marqui is also a speaker–Janet who I recently met at the SFU Future of Publishing session.

There is a very fine list of speakers again this year. But August … things are gearing up in the publishing world and I’ve just received my security/tracking ankle cuff, the latest chained-to-your-desk innovation. Sadly for me, I will not be able to attend.

Instead my hopes are set high for Number 2, Blogon 2005 in New York City Oct 17-18. $1095. I’m going to start lobbying the powers that be now … New York here I want to come. I recall at BookExpo America there were all sorts of bloggers who came out of the wood work. Cool people. I want to be there. The campaign starts today.

Any others I should know about?

The world of paper and the web converged for me yesterday. I attended the SFU summer workshop on “The Future of Publishing.” It was an interesting panel discussion moderated by Robert Ouimet, the prinipal in At Large Media, and the founder and president of At Large Media Ltd. Emma Payne.

Janet Johnson of Marqui spoke about how Marqui worked with Marc Canter to find 20 A-list bloggers to write about Marqui and the controversay about that. Eric Karjaluoto from smashLAB talked about ways to build dialogue. He also showed off some rainbow creative. The vomit was my favourite. Arieanna Foley talked about being a professional blogger and consultant. She gave a quick demo of Qumana and talked about writing for Corante and on her blog Blogaholics.ca. Kris Krug, co-author of BitTorrent for Dummies with Susie Gardner, talked about Bryght. My favourite line was “we build the internets.” Kris I’d met before at a couple of blogger meetups and I liked his pot stirring techniques in the session. The panel did fall into a bit of a love fest for a while and Kris diligently persisted in pulling them out of group hugs. And Ben Garfinkel from Industrial Brand Creative was there. My favourite line of Ben’s was, “we’re not wired right.” He has a cool flash intro of a hamster in a wheel, but I can’t seem to find it. Ben?

What did they talk about? Blogs mostly. Citizen journalism and the impact of blogs and cellphones on reports of the London bombings, Live8, etc. The Cluetrain Manifesto was invoked and we talked about talk is cheap, silence is fatal, if you’re not part of the conversation it will continue without you.

I learned that Canada.com is relaunching its portal and Brian from CanWest was in the audience asking for feedback on what bloggers would like to see. Other than that it was mostly a lot of talk, we geeked it up. There were questions from the audience.

On the way back to the office, I was walking with my colleague and explaining RSS. Boris from Bryght walked past. It was that kind of day.

I read somewhere that people make sense of their world through narrative. I find this to be true in my own world. Often during conversations or meditation, I’m struck by the relevance of the proverbs and miscellany that inform my understanding of the world; the running narrative in my head. Here, however, are some of the incongruous proverbs I stumbled over recently.

Many hands make light work … Too many cooks spoil the broth

No fool like an old fool … With age comes wisdom

Great minds think alike … Idiots seldom differ

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France. No surprise. The big news today is that James did his first triathlon.

Time: 1:19:32

He did a Sprint Distance Triathlon, which is 750 meters swim, 20 km bike and 5 km run. James came in 14th overall.

I’m terribly impressed and to celebrate I took a 20 min bath, put air in my bike tires, and did a quick sprint across the street. I’m going to have a nap now because all the outdoor air and sunshine made me hot.

Paris was one of the fifty sons of King Priam of Troy. Fifty!

According to the Greeks, he was responsible for causing the Trojan War. Perhaps you recall this bit from the horrible movie Troy? In brief, Paris was handsome, wooed Helen so that she left her husband Menelaus, King of Sparta, and then she fled to Troy. Bad mistake.

The thing with Paris is that his handsomeness was a gift from Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Or perhaps Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was his gift from Aphrodite? I can’t recall so let’s say he was gifted his looks in return for choosing Aphrodite as the fairest of goddesses.

Quite the gift regardless. But where there is love (lust, passion), there is war.

The story of the gift of handsomeness is the story of the golden apple. In the story a wonderful party was held and everyone was invited. Everyone except Eris, goddess of discord and strife, although you know she arrives at end of the night for the bar fights anyway.

As you can imagine Eris was annoyed and showed up. She brought with her a beautiful golden apple. And it was no party gift. Eris threw the apple into the room amongst Aphrodite (love), Hera (power) and Athena (wisdom). The apple was inscribed “to the fairest.”

Ho hum. All three beauties demanded the apple. It came to blows practically and Paris was hauled over to act as the judge.

Difficult choice wouldn’t you say? All three can wreck havoc on a mortal. Well Aphrodite won, and so did Eris.

I’m reminded of this story because Darren Barefoot has posted a funny note about Chris Pirillo being approached by the producer of “Beauty and the Geek.” The producer’s name is Eve, I thought of apples, you know how it goes … another example of thought gymnastics.

Read Darren Barefoot on Chris or go straight to Chris’s posting of the voice message.

S.M.A.R.T.

Who would you have chosen?