Try a Little Help From Our Friends
There are a few new tools available from a couple of the big boys. I’ve been playing with these a little and I thought I’d tell you about them. I don’t want to keep all the fun to myself.
The first new tool we’ll look at is from the gang over at Amazon.com. They have just released the beta version of aStore. Here’s their official description:
"Build your own professional online store featuring Amazon.com products in minutes with no programming skills required. Because aStore is a dedicated shopping area for your site, it is a great complimentary product for your existing Amazon product links. Visitors to your site get a professional shopping experience through your unique selection of products and categories and the features of Amazon.com you have chosen including Customer Reviews, Listmania, and more. The checkout process is completed through Amazon.com."
I’ve been an Amazon Associate for a while now (it’s free) so I thought I’d put a quick store together just to see how easy it really is. I wanted to feature graphics products for the website I reference in my soon-to-be-released book, “The Public Domain Code Book.” You can see the results of my store building for yourself at: http://www.thegraphicsexpert.com/. I didn’t do any fancy graphics like I usually do (at least, not yet) and the whole process took me less than half an hour. Plus, I make a percentage of every sale made through the site! This is so simple EVERYONE should have one of these stores…especially since you can customize it to whatever niche you want.
I plan to use the aStore program to build my new Native American Bookstore, which will replace our marketplace at www.healingtheland.com/store.
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The next tool I want to look at isn’t really a tool but a service. Google just made available their service for searching for and downloading Public Domain books. Here’s what they have to say about this awesome new goldmine:
Download the Classics: 8/30/2006
Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search
"Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You’re free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles—from well-known classics to obscure gems.Before the rise of the public library—a story chronicled in this 1897 edition of The Free Library—access to large collections of books was the privilege of a wealthy minority. Now, with the help of our wonderful library partners, we’re able to offer you the ability to download and read PDF versions of out-of-copyright books from some of the world’s greatest collections.
Using Google Book Search, you can find The Free Library and many other extraordinary old books, such as:
• Ferriar’s The Bibliomania
• A futurist from 1881’s 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
• Aesop’s Fables
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• Abbott’s Flatland
• Hugo’s Marion De Lorme
• Dunant’s Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
• Bolívar’s Proclamas
• Dante’s Inferno
To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, simply select the “Full view” radio button when you search on books.google.com. (Please note that we do not enable downloading of any book currently under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only small snippets of text—at most, two or three sentences surrounding your search term—to help you determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for.)
Of course, this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world’s books—whether rare, common, popular or obscure—people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search."
I haven’t had a lot of time to spend digging around here but I did a few searches for some niche topics and turned up some cool results. In the near future, I plan to spend a lot more time determining how to use this new feature to its maximum benefit. Once I know, you’ll know. That’s it for now! Go build your store!
