Tuesday, February 26, 2008

High Noon, Commerce and This Site

Today, one book came in for me. It is a tome of a fantasy book by Patrick Rothfuss, Name of the Wind. I think it is by a new author. It is 653 pages long. It looks like the classic fantasy serial. Maybe it is like the Wheel of Time series or the Malazan Book of the Fallen, very long, convoluted, and complex.

I took a few minutes to look around in the periodicals room. I signed out some Mad magazines from desk to look at. One of my favorite cartoonists is Sergio Aragones, who does cartoons without words in mad magazine. I really enjoyed his work on Groo the Wanderer, a fantasy comic book about a barbarian hero who is a complete and total idiot. I find his work to be quite funny.

We are getting Wizard also for the library as part of our young adult periodicals. It should be put out for the public in a week or so to use.

I don't read a whole lot of magazines. I find most magazine articles to be too short for my taste. There is not a whole lot of substance to most magazines. I might glance through Popular Science of Popular Mechanics. I much prefer websites and blogs over magazines for light reading.

For serious searching for articles, online magazine databases are almost always superior to print magazines. I usually search Proquest or Ebsco for most patron requests for articles. A separate magazine department is becoming more and more antiquated. It is like relying on phone books for phone numbers. worldpages.com and other sites are superior to most phone books.

I put a book on reserve after reading Kirkus Reviews by Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.

There is another title which looks very interesting. It is one of those nearly perfect titles. How To Rule The World: The Coming Battle Over The Global Economy by Mark Engler. It is a leftist diatribe about globalism, but it sounds like it could be a supervillains plan for world domination, or a secret plan for control of the economy be a cabal of business and political leaders. I am rather disappointed that they did not have it at the library yet.

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After a while, I have figured out that this is basically not a commercial site in any way. I have earned in 3 months, two dollars and forty cents from adsense, about 56 cents from Project Wonderful, and 48 cents from Amazon. Considering the amount of hours I have put in, this is not a commercial success. I sold two books from Amazon, How To Start Your Own Blogging Business, and The Elements of Style Illustrated.

I think I will let the Adsense go. It is not worth 80 cents a month for traffic. I will leave Project Wonderful and keep the Amazon inserts.

Now, I am blogging for pleasure and to keep track of what I am reading. I should relax a a bit and enjoy what I am doing.

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3 comments:

Kat Hooper said...

We love Patrick Rothfuss's book at FanLit.net, and have named it our favorite book of 2007: http://www.fantasyliterature.net/bestandworst.html

I've read some of your thoughts about social networking. Let me know if you can think of any ideas for collaborating on something like that.
Katherine
FanLit.net

Unknown said...

I have had time to read more of Patrick Rothfuss's book, it is very absorbing.

Anonymous said...

If you like fantasy, may I recommend a title to you? "Outcasts of Skagaray" is by a new author, and has gained some complimentary reviews. For some insights, check www.threeswans.com.au where there are excerpts and comments. It would be interesting to hear your opinion of it. Happy reading. I love it too.