Help David Game Goliath By Buying A Book Today
There's a great opportunity to participate in a hack of Amazon.com today that won't net you a big list of credit card numbers or any free books or anything, but it will let you feel like you put one over on a local giant while at the same time helped a local website save the planet. And who would pass that up? The WorldChanging book which we've been mentioning lately (here and here) is for sale at Amazon and doing well, but WorldChanging.com and their book's publishers don't really have the capacity to do the huge marketing push that is necessary today to get a book in front of a whole lot of people. In lieu of millions of dollars of PR they've designed a situation that should get WorldChanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century way up on the Amazon bestseller's list. That list is more or less real time as it takes into consideration only sales over the last twenty four hour period, so if a whole lot of people buy a book at the same time that book is likely to be an Amazon bestseller, if only for a day. A day is enough, though, to get a whole lot of notice. People pay attention to what happens on Amazon.
So buy the WorldChanging book from Amazon.com today, November 1, at 11:11am.
If you've got a meeting at 11am buy it at 10:59 (or, better yet, pretend like the copier was giving you crap and show up to your meeting at 11:15 with a bunch of uncollated handouts, having bought the book as scheduled). If it's 3pm and you're just reading this, buy it right now. If you're in a coma buy it tomorrow. You get the idea. For $25 you get a big tome full of big ideas that add up to the big meta-idea that the Earth isn't a loss; The Earth is savable. WorldChanging is the antidote to all the sentiment out there that the Rapture can't save us from this morally and physically polluted rock soon enough. If you're looking for us to sell the contents of the book more specifically, we're reading a chapter called "The Hidden Vitality of Slums" right now. We also like "Big Green Buildings and Skyscrapers," and "Art Meets Technology." We loved the Al Gore forward and the Bruce Sterling forward, and, no, these aren't affiliate links if all of this love is triggering your spidey sense of ulterior motives. We have this book, though, and it's that good. It's the kind of book that makes encouraging strangers to buy it at a specific time on a specific date seem reasonable.
We "have this book" in the sense that we have it printed in its entirety on 8.5x11 uncollated sheets of paper. If this post has accomplished anything, it's cemented in Seattlest's mind the fact that we need to go buy a real copy. +1 towards the bestseller list.
