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"The Search: How Google & Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business & Transformed" by John Battelle Length: 10 hours and 4 min. ISBN: Business Week Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that’s exactly what Google has been doing.

Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google’s triumph. It’s also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls “the Database of Intentions”. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on.

No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who co-founded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology. And he has finally found it in search.

For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded, The Search is an eye-opening and indispensable read.

Tags: the search: how google & its rivals rewrote the rules of business & transformed our culture, john battelle, audibleoriginals, business, nonfiction, science, technology, google, search engine, marketing, best of 2006

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"The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson Length: 8 hours and 1 min. ISBN: 1-4013-8414-5 Business Week Best Seller New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Our world is being transformed by the Internet and the near limitless choice that it provides to consumers; tomorrow’s markets belong to those who can take advantage of this. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance, an entirely new model for business that is just starting to show its power as unlimited selection reveals new truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it. The record business has been transformed by iTunes and Rhapsody; a similar transformation is coming to just about every industry imaginable.

What happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? When a bunch of kids with no profit motive can record a song or make a video and get the same electronic distribution for it as the most powerful corporation?

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, first explored “The Long Tail” in an article that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. Using the worlds of movies, books, and music, he showed how the Internet has made possible a new world in which the combined value of modest sellers and quirky titles equals the sales of the top hits. He coined the term “The Long Tail” to describe this phenomenon, a phrase that’s since appeared in boardrooms and media around the world.

“In short, though we still obsess over hits,” Anderson writes, “they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into a thousand niches.”

Tags: the long tail: why the future of business is selling less of more, chris anderson, nonfiction, technology, business, economics, internet

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"Desperate Networks" by Bill Carter Length: 5 hours and 19 min. ISBN: 0-7393-2514-0 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In the executive offices of the four major networks, sweeping changes are taking place and billions of dollars are at stake. Now Bill Carter, best-selling author of The Late Shift, goes behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the television industry, capturing the true portraits of the larger-than-life moguls and stars who make it such a cutthroat business.

In a time of sweeping media change, the four major networks struggle for the attention of American viewers increasingly distracted by cable, video games, and the Internet. Behind boardroom doors, tempers flare in the search for hit shows, which often get on the air purely by accident.

The fierce competition creates a pressure-cooker environment where anything can happen.

Tags: desperate networks, bill carter, bios & memoirs, nonfiction, technology, media, networks, katie couric

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"The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of" by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed Length: 10 hours and 28 min. ISBN: 1-4159-2493-7 Business Week Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors’ and Ford’s combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room run by the Grateful Dead’s former chef, and its employees traverse the firm’s colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.

The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world’s most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, “change the world” through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.

While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google’s quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database. Listeners will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; and the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft’s dominance and shake up Wall Street. Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders’ mantra: DO NO EVIL.

Tags: the google story: inside the hottest business, media, and technology success of our time, david a. vise and mark malseed, technology, search, internet, advertising, website, inside the hottest business, media, and technology success of our time

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"Dot.Bomb" by J. David Kuo Length: 5 hours and 56 min. ISBN: 1-58621-182-X Good Morning America Book Club Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In 1999, at the pinnacle of dot.com fever, David Kuo was invited to walk through the magic portal. It was a huge Internet start-up called Value America, and in his new job as communications SVP, Kuo would spread their gospel: a new kind of retailing, linking customers directly to distributors or other middlemen. Ahead for Kuo lay the chance to be part of a new business paradigm. Not to mention the riches when his stock options bore fruit.

Dot.Bomb is the amazing story of the Internet gold rush as it could only be told by an insider. David Kuo saw it all: the sky’s-the-limit optimism, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in a giddy grab for eyeballs and market share, the investors slavering to be on the inside, the belief that there really were new rules. He also saw what happened when gravity reasserted itself, Wall Street demanded results, and flaws and failures that had been glossed over suddenly loomed huge. In the blink of an eye, Value America crashed back to earth, filed for bankruptcy, and was gone.

David Kuo’s account of his days and nights at Value America captures with the intensity of a great novel the people who made this such a powerful experience with their incredibly hard work, their genuine belief, and their humor. Just as vividly it portrays their unbridled greed, wretched excesses, ego-driven blunders, and unmitigated power grabbing.

Tags: dot.bomb, j. david kuo, business, technology, gma’s read this!, book club