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The surprise of finding a unique, fun, and relevant book in the glove compartment of your new car is still a delight, even (or especially?) in this digital ebook age.

In a promotional campaign introducing Volkswagen's Up! (@vw_up & @volkswagen_up) small car to the UK, drivers get a special treat when they find The Narrow Roads of Britain, a handsomely illustrated glove-box-size book that highlights 18 of the thinnest thoroughfares in Britain, from urban tunnels to country lanes — perfect for the Up! to slip through. GPS coordinates appear on each page, along with photos by Harry Cory Wright (@Harrycorywright).

Read this in full.

The Inspiration Room (@InspirationRoom) reports on another innovative use of a printed book: "Land Rover Edible Desert Survival Guide." The agency Y&R Dubai (@yrdubai) created a book with helpful advice in the event of an emergency in the desert and used it to promote Land Rover (@LandRover) to existing owners, gave it away as a supplement to the car's manual, and made it available in sports shops.

It was made out of edible ink and paper, and it had a nutritional value close to that of a cheeseburger. 

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish your unique content for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

NPR (@npralltech) journalist Steve Henn (@HennsEggs) reports on the mobile shopping revolution and one way store retailers can compete.

When you shop online, marketers are following your every click. But when you walk into a store they know almost nothing about you. That detailed information about in-store shoppers is exactly what retailers want. A company called Nearbuy Systems (@NearbuySystems) is using mobile technology to try to give it to merchants.

"Our challenge was, take what we already have, and most stores have — Wi-Fi and ... video for security and things — and mix those two signals together to create something that is more accurate," says Bryan Wargo, co-founder of Nearbuy Systems.

Retailers could use this technology to build apps to guide customers through their store aisles to specific products, or even deliver discounts and coupons based on where people are standing in any particular store.

Read this in full.

Bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) online dashboard designed for publishing and marketing executives.

Here’s the latest disrupter in the education field. TED (@TEDNews & @tedtalks) curator Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) announced yesterday that “after more than a year of planning and dreaming, we're finally launching our new TED-Ed website (@TED_ED), whose goal is to offer teachers a thrilling new way to use video.”

...the goal is to allow any teacher to take a video of their choice (yes, any video on YouTube, not just ours) and make it the heart of a “lesson” that can easily be assigned in class or as homework, complete with context, follow-up questions, and further resources.

This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.

In recent years at TED, we've become enamored of a strategy we call “radical openness”: Don't try to do big things yourself. Instead empower others to do them with you.

This has served us well. Sharing TEDTalks free online has built a global community of idea seekers and spreaders. Opening up our transcripts has allowed 7500 volunteers to translate the talks into 80+ languages. And giving away the TEDx brand in the form of free licenses, has spawned more than 4000 TEDx events around the world.

So it's natural that we would look to this approach as we embark on our education initiative.

Read this in full.

Also see The Atlantic’s (@TheAtlantic) article by Megan Garber (@megangarber), “The Digital Education Revolution, Cont’d: Meet TED-Ed’s New Online Learning Platform.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you take advantage of new technology to publish and market your brand’s message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Could Disney’s expertise with customer service help bookstores stem their decline? According to this feature in The New York Times (@NYTimesAd), the Disney Institute (@DisneyInstitute) is the “low-profile consulting division of the Walt Disney Company.” Disney is undeniably an expert in customer relationship management.

For instance, the company has spent so much time studying its park customers — more than 120 million of them globally last year — that it places trash cans every 27 paces, the average distance a visitor carries a candy wrapper before discarding it.

When clients send their employees to Disney for training,...some time is spent in seminars on topics like “purpose before task.” They also get tours of the parks, where Disney managers demonstrate their tricks in action, like giving directions by pointing with two fingers instead of one (it’s more polite).

Disney-led workshops emphasize 5 principles: leadership, training, customer experience, brand loyalty, and creativity. Sessions are custom tailored.

Examples of Disney’s attention to detail with its clients:

Maryland teachers were instructed to engage children by crouching and speaking to them at eye level. Chevrolet dealers were taught to think in theater metaphors: onstage, where smiles greet potential buyers, and offstage, where sales representatives can take out-of-sight cigarette breaks.

A Florida children’s hospital was advised to welcome patients in an entertaining way, prompting it to employ a ukulele-playing greeter dressed in safari gear.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “A Growing Trend: Retailers Perfuming Stores.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically communicate your brand and effectively reach consumers.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Vancouver Sun (@VanSunReporters) features this photo gallery of bookstores around the world that have décor stunning enough to make them repeated destination places. If only more stores were as beautiful.

See all the photos.

See our previous blogposts, “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores In The World” and “20 More Beautiful Bookstores from Around the World.”

If you’re a book lover like we (@smrsault) are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

From Kottke.org (@Kottke) comes word that the Internet Archive (@internetarchive) is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s an elegant 1300-page book showing 100s of typefaces and their possible use cases, as well as all the equipment, tools, and furniture of the printing trade at the turn of the 20^th century.

See this in full.

There's also a 1910 copy of what is basically the German version of the ATF book.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve.”

If you’re a lover of all things related to books like we (@smrsault) are, be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In this article, Wired’s (@wired) Angela Watercutter (@WaterSlicer) writes how “with tablets selling at mind-boggling rates, book publishers are scrambling to figure out how to bring their ancient medium into the digital realm.”

Though the rewards promise to be great, the adaptation book publishers must make is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies — creating audio, video, and interactive components for their immersive, built-for-tablets offerings.

They also face a dizzying array of decisions brought on by evolving standards and platforms: Should a certain book come to life as a dedicated app, an approach that, until iBooks 2 was released, offered more flexibility in terms of features like video and audio on the iPad? Or should it be turned into an “enhanced ebook,” which will work on Apple’s tablet as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and other devices, but must be re-created several times over to meet each device’s specs?

Read this in full.

Therein lies the rub: are enhanced ebooks a profitable return-on-investment for publishers? This is explored by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) in Andrew Rhomberg’s (@arhomberg) “Some Tough Questions for Enhanced Ebooks.”

Also see our previous blogpost, “Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading” and Mike Shatzkin’s (@MikeShatzkin) analysis, “A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks.”

And then there’s the article, “A Billion-Dollar Turning Point for Mobile Apps” by New York Times (@nytimestech) tech reporter Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) that, even though it focuses on the Web strategy of entrepreneurs and start-up companies, may have implications for publishers preparing ebooks and ebook apps for tablets.

The path for Internet start-ups used to be quite clear: establish a presence on the Web first, then come up with a version of your service for mobile devices.

Now, at a time when the mobile start-up Instagram can command $1 billion in a sale to Facebook, some start-ups are asking: who needs the Web?

“People are living in the moment and they want to share in the moment,” says professor S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Mobile gives you that immediacy and convenience.”

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Somersault (@smrsault) is attending Q’s (@Qideas) 5th annual Gathering (#QDC) today through Thursday in Washington, DC. According to its own description, “Q was birthed out of Gabe Lyons’ (@GabeLyons) vision to see Christians, especially leaders, recover a vision for their historic responsibility to renew and restore cultures.”

Q explores topics that fall into 4 broad themes: culture, future, church, and gospel. Q facilitates the investigation of deeper engagement and responsibility in each of these areas. As we continue to work through these ideas on a deeper level, so grows our commitment to equipping innovators, social entrepreneurs, entertainers, artists, church-shapers, futurists, scientists, educators, historians, environmentalists and everyday people to do extraordinary things. At Q Ideas, you'll see a broad spectrum of content represented in our small group curriculum, videos, and articles. These are all contributed and commissioned to shed light on unique areas of culture and the church.

Q is a place where leaders from every sphere of society gather to learn, reflect, collaborate and take action to renew culture. We share a common commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ and an awareness of our calling by God to join him in his redeeming work throughout every channel of culture.

Free live streaming of the opening and closing presentations is available this morning and tonight. Speakers and their topics include

·         Gabe Lyons, Founder of Q: “Ideas for the Common Good”

·         Andy Crouch (@ahc), Author: “Power”

·         Mark Batterson (@MarkBatterson), Pastor of National Community Church: “Church & Place”

·         David Brooks (@DavidBrooksNYT), Columnist, The New York Times: “Humility”

·         Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt), Author and Columnist: “Faith of Our Own”

Depend on Somersault to help you develop strategy to effectively communicate your brand message in today’s culture.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) explains how Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon (@amazon), values innovation and risk-taking. It begins with the example of Bezos’ major investment in “a gargantuan clock” being built inside the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in Texas by The Long Now Foundation (@longnow). This 10,000-year clock, designed “to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” will tick once a year, its century hand will advance once every 100 years, and its cuckoo will come out on the millennium.

Mr. Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr. Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

...[Criticism does] nothing to sway Mr. Bezos, who is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. But he believes Amazon can be one of the biggest thanks to its unique culture and capacity for reinventing itself. Even in its original incarnation as an internet retailer, it pioneered features that have since become commonplace, such as allowing customers to leave reviews of books and other products (a move that shocked literary critics at the time), or using a customer’s past purchasing history to recommend other products, often with astonishing accuracy.

Read this in full.

Also see Bezos' long view approach in "Bezos team finds Apollo 11 rocket engines on Atlantic floor."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you set your leadership vision and take advantage of technology to advance your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Innovation and Leadership tabs.

SXSW (@sxsw) (pronounced “south by southwest”), the annual Austin, Tex.-based festival of interactive ventures, music, and film, runs March 9-18, for another year’s presentations on innovation in technology, music, cinema, and new business platforms that will attract more than 20,000 attendees. SXSW Interactive runs March 9-13, focusing on books, publishing, and new media technology.

Panel presentations and discussions include “The Future of Lifestyle Media,” Making a Grand Entrance: How to Launch a Product,” and “The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence.”

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) editors Rachel Deahl (@DeahlsDeals) and Calvin Reid (@calreid) are moderating two panel discussions:

Publishing Models Transforming The Book, will examine how conventional publishing industry business models are being rearranged and reinvented, and how books and book content are being offered to consumers in the digital age. The panel features content entrepreneurs like Brian Altounian (@BrianAltounian), CEO of Wowio.com (@WOWIO) (announcing the rebranding of itself as Studio W), and Swanna McNair (@swannamac), founder of Creative Conduit. Also on-hand will be Molly Barton (@MollyBBarton), director of digital publishing and business development at Penguin (@penguinusa) / Book Country (@Book_Country), and Jefferson Raab, creative director at The Atavist (@theatavist).

And Reid will moderate the panel Discoverability and the New World of Book PR, organized by Austin based book media relations veterans Barbara Cave Henricks, founder of Cave Henricks Communications (@CaveHenricks) and Rusty Shelton (@RustyShelton), owner of Shelton Interactive as well as Hollis Heimbouch (@heimbouch), vp and publisher at Harper Business (@HarperCollins). The panel will examine book marketing and promotion at a time when physical bookstore shelf space is declining and more books are being released.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “Discoverability in the Digital Age: Personal Recommendations and Bookstores.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you identify blue ocean strategy for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.