Several years ago, I said I would no longer publicly comment about my time in 1996–1997 as Amazon.com's catalog manager. Why? Because my knowledge and memory were so out of date, and I did not keep a journal during that period. It would be silly for me to provide commentary about a company that I had only been with during a period of explosive growth—now no more recently than 14 years ago.

However, an essay in today's Wall Street Journal called "Jeff Bezos of Amazon: Birth of a Salesman," compels me to comment on one aspect of the pervading myth of Amazon's creation and early years. You can read elsewhere about the truth behind other parts of the creation myth, especially in Robert Spector's fine and exhaustive look at Amazon's early years, Get Big Fast.

The part that got me was the door-as-desk myth, which has

Hey, I wrote a book! Hey, I suffered for months to make it reality! Hey, it's reality!! It's in print! Crazy. Buy a copy (compare at online booksellers)!Five-Star Apps ($20 retail, about $13.50 online) has nearly 200 reviews of the best and most useful and most fun iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch apps that I examined. Reviews are supplemented with screenshots, since it's often hard to know what a program looks like in real use since you can't get demo versions (only "lite" programs).

You can follow links at 5str.us to buy the book!

I've put up a beta of the new version of isbn.nu, my book price comparison site, with a new design and a whole reworking of how you search for books to get faster results. You can also create an account and then bookmark books (by title or edition) and authors for later recall, as well as set shipping and price display preferences.There's a new logo, too:

This linked photo is no longer available.

Please give it a whirl and tell me what you think. I've already gotten some valuable feedback.

As a public service, I occasionally publish the email I receive from scammers who are trying to place fraudulent orders from booksellers. I run isbn.nu, which provides book price comparisons, but I don't per se sell books. Thus, I'm a target, but a well-informed one. I post these messages partly because they get indexed by Google, so a bookseller who does a minute of research on a strange order will find this message. I replied to this individual that their scam was well known and they might as well give up. I just try to rattle the cage a bit.

These books, by the way, are sold into Russia, apparently, usually by way of Nigeria. The fact that this email is signed as if it's from a UK bookseller is fascinating. I did a couple minutes of checking, and there's no such bookseller, and only one bookstore in that

My good friends at Take Control Ebooks, which publish my several books on wireless networking, Mac OS X file sharing, and other subjects, are having a massive blowout sale this month. They're bundling several ebook titles together into affinity groups--the first being a lump o' Tiger help: upgrading, customizing, users and accounts, syncing, passwords, maintaining, and AirPort networking -- seven ebooks for $22 with the coupon code CPN70205MOAS1. Or follow this link.

I've written (and others, too) about how Nigerians aren't just trying to hook people with "I am the son of the former dictator" money-transfer scams, but they also defraud bookstores in the U.S. They typically place special orders, use stolen credit-card numbers or forged cashier's checks, receive shipment, and then resell to Russia and other places. Very strange scams. (Here's a good two-year old article. I wrote about it around the same time.)

I got my latest in email today; I get these because I run isbn.nu, a book-price comparison service. I wrote back to the scamster explaining their schemes are well known and, surprise!, got a response.

From: Tolu Adekunle <rashos07@yahoo.com>
Subject: Mail Order Needed ASAP........

>Hello Sales,
> This is Tolu Adekunle, I am highly interested in purchasing
>order from your store to my store in Nigeria and i will

I'm mostly known as a writer, but I edit as well. An editor's role should be to work with an author to shape their vision, help them turn it into coherent and discrete sense, and make pieces aren't missing. The author has to have a voice; the editor needs to let them sing. The first book I've edited in a long, long time came out this evening. It's an ebook called Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac written by Andy Williams Affleck. Andy is a podcaster and knowledgeable Mac guy. He's been creating narrowcasts since the concept gelled more than a year ago, and he acquired a lot of very specific, hard-to-collect knowledge. In the ebook--a $10 download in PDF form, no strange tools or passwords required to read--he covers what you need to know to plan, set up a studio, record a podcast, edit it together, and promote

A rule I set many moons again is apparently still in place at Amazon.com. When I was catalog manager briefly (a six-month stint at the company in late 96 to early 97), I had to deal with the burgeoning number of user-submitted reviews which were posted live instantly on the site when I got there. I fought a battle over several months, culminating before I left, in which reviews were reviewed by a staffer before going live. I won this battle partly because more and more reviews were both unpleasant, offtopic, and not noticed until we got complaints. There were turds in the punchbowl, in other words.

One of the rules I set for my staff in reading over reviews was that reviews that attacked the author and that otherwise didn't address the substance of the book were off-limits. This is the "attack ideas, not authors" notion which is

I love this latest idea from Amazon.com: pay $79 per year and you get two-day shipping on everything you buy with no shipping charges per item. If you join "Amazon Prime" (reminds me of the Bezos Prime joke from Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com) you can upgrade to overnight shipping for $3.99 per item.

They even offer to ship stuff out for next-day delivery if ordered by 6.30 pm Eastern. This reminds me of those glory days in the early 1990s when a few Macintosh firms had insane overnight delivery by co-locating warehouses with an Airborne Express hub in Ohio. Was it MacConnection? I'm blanking out on which ones offered this.

A few times, I would order right up against their late-night limit--I think it was 2 a.m. Eastern--and receive the item by 10 am the next morning (Pacific). Tremendous.

Now, I'll

I've been poking some more at isbn.nu, the book-price comparison service I run, and with a suggestion from a news aggregator developer, have added RSS syndication to search results for books. If you search on an author, subject, or title, you can now subscribe via RSS to the results of that search. As I update the database, typically weekly, any new books show up in that feed. For instance, search on Stephen King and the XML feed in RSS 2.0 format is this.

I've embedded the RSS link in the meta tags for the page, which is a nifty way to allow Firefox and many news aggregators to recognize the RSS feed's availability automatically. Kind of slick.

To start with, I've limited the results to the 25 newest books by reported publication date. That seems to make the most sense given why someone would subscribe to a search

I got a bee in my bonnet, or perhaps a bug in my ear, about a week ago and finished the programming this evening on a system that allows you to use an RSS news aggregator to "subscribe" to updates of the price of a book at a number of online bookstores. I run isbn.nu, a book price comparison site, but you need to visit the site to see the price of a given book at about 16 bookstores, mostly in the US.

I've long thought about adding a feature that would allow people to sign up for notifications about when a book price changed or became available at a given bookstore. Perhaps you were waiting for a used copy of the book, or wanted a book to drop below a certain price. I may still offer email notification, but it struck me that I could immediately provide an