DJ-Workshop 101

Archive for January, 2012

Perhaps there is nothing so relaxing like reading your favorite title with a bottle of beer to give you company. Your mind cries out for revenge as you read Shakespeare’s Othello or is mellowed out as you turn the pages of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of the Grass. But alas, the murderous rat race and the bursting everyday schedule have permanently prevented such simple luxuries. You just do not have the time to read any more. ‘Is there any other alternative to reading a book’, you ask yourself. Well, why not someone else reading it for you? All you have to do is listen. Great, isn’t it? Audio books online are in these days.

Although audio books online have come to stay for quite sometime now, few people have come to grips with it, fewer still indulge in such simple opulence. Thousands of websites beckon you for free audio book online, comprising fiction, non-fiction, classics and more. Even if you are bound to a very strict schedule, there is nothing to prevent you from listening to an audio book online and enjoying every bit of it sans the hassles of going through it page by page.

As the literary works are downloaded to your computer, you may listen to their content at the privacy of your home without any hindrance. No need to visit the local library or browse the archives to find your favorite title. No late fees levied for any delay in returning the book.

But what happens if you are always on the move. Those who are traveling sales persons or departmental heads, perpetually on the road, visiting clients and distributors. For them the answer is simple. As these online audio books can be easily downloaded to the computer, you may burn them onto a CD, take them along and listen while you are driving. No problem at all. Your car CD player will then literally read out choice fragments of Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita as you press the accelerator down to the floor of the vehicle.

Another great advantage that audio books online offer is that they are reusable. In fact, you could listen to them as many times as you prefer, alone or in company of others, in the privacy of your home or while traveling in your car, any place any time of the day or night. No wonder more and more people are opting for audio books online. Websites are vying with each other to get the lion’s share of the profit earned from the sale of audio books online.

In some cases, nominal yearly membership fees are also charged by some websites, depending on the type of audio books you need. You may be overwhelmed by the extent of the availability of audio books online and the variety that is available. All for the benefit of the reading (or should I say, ‘read-listening’) public. The day is not very when audio books online may enter the hall of fame for escalating the world literacy.

The Kindle, made by Amazon is rated as one of the best eBook readers on the market today. Sure, they have some pretty fierce competition with companies such as Barnes and Noble, Sony and more. If you’re finding yourself wanting to purchase one, or maybe you already have one, I wanted to show you what you should expect to pay for the books online.

How to download the books

When you want to get an eBook, you can download from various sources. You can, for starters download from the Amazon website, as well as other third party sites. There are also other sources that you can use, when you want to download newspapers, magazines and more. The Kindle can read various formats, making it great for any reading that you may have.

What the average price is

You’re going to find that like a book in the stores, you’re going to want to compare your books. You don’t want to shop just at one place. Instead, you will want to compare your prices to see which ones are the best. The average price is going to vary on the book that you want to buy, so it’s hard to say. You will find that you can spend anywhere from nothing to as much as $25+ for a newer, larger book.

How to save money

While you can save on Kindle books, you will find that since you can’t really “borrow”, the best way is to either compare prices with other stores, or if you wish, you’re going to find that you can save, if you wait for the price to go down. As long as you’re not in a hurry to get the book, you will find that you can get it when the price goes down. As long as you have patience, the price tag shall drop.

Every eBook reader generally reads the same books, but as the eBook market gets big, you never know if the prices will get higher, or if they will drop.

During the electronic revolution, Google sprang about as the most indispensable search engine almost overnight. If there is anybody on the face of this planet who hasn’t heard of Google, I think he must be a relic from the Stone Age.

The book, The Google Story, is about the birth and the coming of age of this marvel of a company. Its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, met in Stanford in 1995. Despite the earlier differences between them, they connected well because they shared a vision and a bright but goofy character. Sergey, the math whiz and a first-generation Russian- American, is the son of Michael Brin, a math teacher in the University of Maryland, and Eugenia Brin, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Larry’s father, Carl Victor Page, was a computer engineer and he introduced his children to the world of computers early on. Although Larry’s mother was Jewish, Larry knew more about computers than Judaism.

During 1996, Larry and Sergey teamed up to analyze Web links as research toward a PH. D. thesis. Since this work took longer than anticipated, Larry came up with the theory of counting the number of links to a website could be a way of ranking that website’s popularity. Later on, they applied the Page Rank to the Internet. By early 1997, a primitive search engine called BackRub was developed. During the autumn of 1997, BackRub earned a new name, Google, derived from the googol a mathematical term, which means a number equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros and is expressed as 10 to the 100th power.

After its initial beginnings, the development of Google as a company reminds me of any small cottage industry that can abruptly grow in leaps and bounds to take over its industry sector. If Thomas Edison is called the genius of Menlo Park, Sergey and Larry, too, may be called genius-wizards of Menlo Park, because like Edison, they rented a large house in Menlo Park from where to continue the expansion of their company. Menlo Park became the nest from which Google the research project became Google.com.

One bright idea that led Google to its present day success was the idealism of its founders. During the heyday of the dot com companies, Sergey and Larry preferred to keep the company private as long as they possibly could because they wanted to build the best search engine; the money they could gain by making the company public was not so important.

Still, the company needed cash to expand, especially after moving to the new company headquarters in Palo Alto, and on June 1999, Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that two venture capital companies, Kleiner Perkins and Sequioa Capital, had agreed to invest $25 million dollars in Google with their managers Doerr and Moritz joining Google’s board of directors. With this announcement, the Google revolution started taking roots.

Not all went without a glitch. For example, in 2004, there was the legal action against a UK company Booble.com, imitating Google but with a sexual content. Then, when Google finally went public, it attracted a trademark lawsuit from Geico.

As such, the authors go on to tell many stories about the company and even its chef who prepares the food for the staff.

At the end of the book, Brin suggests improving the brain by plugging a version of Google into it. That will certainly be the next wonderful surprise Google can grant its users.

The Google Story is in hardcover with 326 pages. In the front of the book, a contents page showing its 26 chapters is followed by an Introduction, and at the end of the book, are the appendices such as Google Search Tips, Google Labs Aptitude Test, and Google’s Financial Scorecard, plus A Note on Sources, Acknowledgments, Photo Credits and Index. A few black and white photos in the middle of the book add to its enjoyment as well as the variety of anecdotes inside it. This book is also available as an abridged audio CD, an abridged downloadable audiobook, and a trade paperback.

The writers of the book David A. Vise and Mark Malseed are reporters. David A.Vise, a Washington Post reporter, has won the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of three books, one a bestseller “The Bureau and the Mole.” Mark Malseed is a contributing reporter to the Boston Herald and the Washington Post and has done some valuable research for two of Bob Woodard’s books.

For me, this was an enjoyable read with one tale after another. Although the information in it has been in the news media before, seeing it in one piece was a treat.