Quick reviews: Two books from Jeff Jarvis

Updated on Monday, April 2, 2012 at 7:10 PM by Logan Molen

Jeff Jarvis is a prolific digital thinker, sharing his opinions on a wide variety of topics on his BuzzMachine blog, as a panelist on "This Week in Google" and as an author of several successful books. 

I loved his first book "What Would Google Do?" and recently finished two of his newer books -- "Public Parts" and "Gutenberg the Geek" -- all of which further our understanding of digital privacy, entrepreneurial business and history. 

"Public Parts" is a long hardcover issued late last year, and the formal title says it all: "Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live" (Check out a sample here).

I bought the Audible version of "Public Parts" the day it came out but only finished the book a week or so ago. That lag time is no knock on Jarvis, who does a great job reading his books; I'm a heavy podcast listener, so it's simply difficult to find time to listen to books. 

Jarvis is as "public" as it gets when it comes to an online persona, and he shares provocative insights into why we all ought to embrace public transparency as a form of digital currency that enriches us individually and collectively. He supports those personal arguments with dozens of examples of entities big and small benefiting from open and honest interactions with customers. 

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Quick Review: 'Here, There and Everywhere'

Geoff Emerick’s "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles" is a must read if you’re interested in the history of audio fidelity and strongly recommended if you’re a hardcore Beatles fan. But beyond that, it’s an uneven biography that will leave casual music fans frustrated. 

Emerick’s story focuses mostly on a remarkable period when he lands at EMi as  a teen-age staffer and within a few years finds himself engineering The Beatles as producer George Martin’s right-hand man. The story is as much about Emerick’s revolutionary contributions to The Beatles sound as it is a look at the growth and dysfunction of the world’s greatest rock band. 

Sounds good, right?

Howard Massey -- author of the “Behind the Glass” series of books on studios producers and engineers -- is a co-writer but I’m not sure what he brings to the equation. The book is rich in detail but there are far too many elements that wreak of what we in the journalism business call “dumping your notebook.” In other words, there’s not much editing or weeding of the weaker stories recollections of minor events that do nothing to move the story along. 

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Kindle edition in the wild

An index page as seen on the Kindle Touch.The Californian has been trying to launch a Kindle edition of the daily newspaper for months. For various reasons -- some good, some not -- it's taken us way too long to launch a formal Amazon edition to supplement the two Kindle blog feeds we've had available for several years. 

But the good news is we're close. 

Attached are recent screenshots of tests on two different Kindle models and the Kindle app on iPad. 

Our work on a Kindle edition has been slowed by frustrating gremlins in trying to get a clean feed out of our newsroom publishing system that retains acceptable formatting. We're also struggling to figure out how to export black-and-white images for some Kindles and color for platforms like the Kindle Fire and the iPad. 

An index page as seen on the Kindle Keyboard model.

A section index page as seen on the Kindle iPad app.

But as I said, we seem to be in the final stages of testing. I'm hoping we can be live in the Amazon Store within a few weeks. 

Stay tuned.