If I was an author I would be so addicted to Booklert

screenshot from "my books" on Booklert

Booklert lets you keep track of the Amazon rank of your (or anyone else's) books. You get an email or a tweet of the latest ranks at regular intervals. And you choose how often - anything from every hour, to once a week.

Zoomii Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots to give you a sense of what Zoomii is like:

This is after I've zoomed in a bit using my mouse's scroll wheel


and this is Zoomed out a little


Zoomed out all the way, or "home"

I Love Mark Ryden

Sweet Wishes by Mark Ryden and Marion Peck

Zoomii

Zoomii is a cool way to browse books. if:book says:

It's the most bookshop-like experience I've encountered online. Within seconds I'd been reminded of several books I've been meaning to read. And arguably the proximity of a diverse selection of titles could help strikes a blow for browsing and against the homophily that characterizes much Web browsing.

Magazine Page Design Video

From magCulture.com

Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. It provides a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at, one that anyone who’s ever designed a magazine will recognise.

Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

Fun. Silly and ridiculous. Just what I expect from this series. The secondary characters are what make or break the books in this series for me. For example, I really can only take a tiny bit of Albert Kloughn. In Fearless Fourteen, however, I liked the secondary characters so all was well.

Personal vendettas, hidden treasure, and a monkey named Carl will send bounty hunter Stephanie Plum on her most explosive adventure yet.

The Crime:
Armed robbery to the tune of nine million dollars
Dom Rizzi robbed a bank, stashed the money and did the time. His family couldn't be more proud. He always was the smart one.

I finished The Learners by Chip Kidd

I didn't know anything about this when I picked it up. It sucked me right in, though. I thought it was interesting and original and very funny. Here is a review of it from the New York Times.

From the jacket:

Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be—well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty—chiefly, his own.

Here is a video showing off some of the design features of The Learners