Booklist 2.0: October 2008

Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing planet Google written by Randall Stross, Born Digital written by John palfrey and Urs Gasser and Click here to order written by Joel Comm.

Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know

We live in difficult times. The financial crisis seems to kill every innovative concept, Techcrunch declares Web 2.0 dead and Sequoia says RIP to good times… Fortunately, there is Google who helps us to make sense of all the information that is floating around us and who is constantly evolving to offer us more services to organize our information needs. Now  New York Times columnist Randall Stross wrote down the entire Google story in Planet Google – One Company’s audacious plan to organize everything we know: from it’s initial launch, its struggles to come up with a viable business model and its recent attempts to take over the Office Suite market. Planet Google is a simple, pragmatic but well written insight in Googleplex. Unfortunately the book does not offer too much depth like the implications of a world of ‘perfect knowledge‘ in which Google introduced us. But I guess we will leave that to another book.

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Much is written about generation Y, generation Einstein (in Dutch) and the impact of  growing up in a digital world but few wrote it down so well as John Palfrey and Urs Gasser did in Born Digital – Understanding the first generation of digital natives. Born Digital is the result of a digital natives research project and describes the issues surrounding digital natives and their extensive use of digital resources, the Internet and social networks. It deals with issues around privacy, safety, learning, intellectual property and media creation. This is not a technology oriented book. Rather it approaches the topic from a sociologic perspective which makes it, in my perspective, rather interesting. It seems that the book mainly focuses on parents, adults and policy makers who are trying to understand the implications of what is going on but it’s also an interesting read for the more technology savvy people.

Click Here to Order: Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs

I love Joel Comm’s tagline on his website: Make Money online. In the end that’s what it all comes down to right? Now Comm published a book that should help you achieving just that by giving you a sneak peek in the world of the world’s most successful internet marketing entrepreneurs. The book is packed with inspiring and fast-paced stories on real success stories and gives you some usefull insights and tactics on how to achieve the same results with your own initiatives. Click here to order is entertaining, a nice read!