Paralyzed by too much choice

The Internet has given us many great things, but it's also overwhelmed our senses. When given the opportunity to dive deep into uncharted territory, many of us prefer to stick to our comfort zones. 

This comes to mind after reading Eamonn Forde's excellent Word magazine story "The Tyranny of Music Choice" (no link because it's print-only). The gist of Forde's piece is that given a wealth of music online, we tend to keep going back to very popular songs. There's a reason Top 20 and classic-rock stations are a staple in every city. 

Case in point is Spotify, the brilliant music-streaming service that makes it easy to stream and share millions of songs. Despite this rich archive of music in front of us, Forde notes that a recent study of Spotify usage indicated that roughly one-third of the 4.5 million songs in its database were never played over a six-month period. And when he says "never," he means zero, nada, zilch, nil. 

More alarming is that 100,000 songs accounted for about 80 percent of Spotify's streams. 

I guess I shouldn't be surprises. Just as restaurant experts will tell you too many menu items overwhelm customers and erode their overall experience, the thought of diving into a morass of unknown talents can be intimidating. Discovering memorable music can be work, and for many of us, we're either too starved for time or just simply too lazy. 

With that in mind, I'll share a few shortcuts on new music that's captured my attention. I'm in no way on the cutting edge of music like I once was, but I do like to stay up on trends.  

Click to read more ...

On Californian Radio to plug our March Meet e-book

I co-hosted Friday's Californian Radio show with Louis Amestoy, and our topic was The Californian's new e-book, "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair with Speed, Nitro & Good Times."

The book is now for sale for iPad, Kindle and Nook tablets and e-readers.

Finally ... Apple approves our e-book

It took way too long, but Apple this afternoon finally added our March Meet iPad book to its iBookstore.

The iBookstore page offers a glimpse of what's inside our iPad book."March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair With Speed, Nitro & Good Times" can de downloaded for only $9.99.* Quite a bargain for an iPad book that contains loads of great stories, a dozen videos, more than 200 photos and much more. 

"Lighter" versions of "March Meet" are available for the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (We have reports B&N is showing off the book on devices displayed in its Temecula store.). Because most versions of the Kindle and Nook favor text over multimedia, versions for those devices contain no video and far fewer photos. 

But we're quick to point out that buyers of all versions of "March Meet" will get access to a password-protected page containing exclusive videos, most of the great photos (plus access to high-resolution versions that can be purchased separately). 

This was our first foray into e-book publishing, so please let us know what you think.

-----

* = For some reason, Google eBooks is/was selling "March Meet" for $7.99, prompting Amazon to drop its price to match. We already believe $9.99 is a killer bargain, so we're going to try to pull the Google edition and see if Amazon restores its price to our starting retail price. Neither entity asked us for permission, although the fine print gives them a lot of flexibility to grind us into a nub. Sigh. 

Good news, bad news about our March Meet e-book

Check out a sample chapter from the Kindle version.I've written previously about The Californian's cool e-book documenting the world-famous March Meet held just north of Bakersfield. 

And here's some good news regarding "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair with Speed, Nitro & Good Times": Amazon and Barnes & Noble are selling versions for $9.99. The Amazon Kindle version is here and the Nook version is here. Buyers of the book will get a link and password to a special web page containing 21 videos and hundreds of photos covering a wide variety of people, events and happenings at the March Meet. 

The bad news: Our enhanced iPad edition of the e-book, featuring hundreds of embedded photos and a dozen videos, remains in queue in the iBookstore. It's been sitting there for more than one month, and Apple has told us several times it's simply backed up reviewing iBookstore submissions. Hmmm, you'd think a company with $100 billion in cash could hire a few extra people to help unclog the pipeline. 

Mad props to BookBrewer, an e-book publishing tool we used to upload the book to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Simple, easy and cost-effective. And less than a two-day turnaround to hit the Kindle and Nook stores. 

Storify makes it easy to quickly document local news

The Californian's Louis Amestoy has been experimenting with a cool software tool called Storify to quickly and easily produce local stories in an engaging way. 

You can find a few in our Bakosphere blog, but his latest example is this "Social media look at Bakersfield weather" slideshow documenting the storm that hit Bakersfield overnight. Storify's drag-and-drop tools make it easy to monitor social media and deliver a mix of content from pros and everyday people to document news around our town.