I have just finished reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin, I bought it after seeing Arrington recommend at his recent Startup School talk. I liked the book and I agreed with the central thesis that if you are doing the same thing as everyone else you are wasting your time. That said it suffered from the same problem as a lot of these tech/startup books in that it spins things out too long. It is a long magazine article or a short book at best. The problem with it is that towards the end Godin starts to chuck in a million half page examples to pad the thing out. The upshot is that it the end of the book reads like one of my university essays when I was desperate to get to a respectable word count, ditch it and go out.
The same can be said of the book I am currently reading: Pirate’s Dilemma, which I bought after seeing the author Matt Mason’s speech on Torrentfreak. Once again it is a reasonably good read but I get the slight feeling Mason is, like me, a frustrated screenwriter conjuring cinematic images when you wish he’d just get on with it. Matthew – we all know Homebrew Computer Club spawned Apple so there’s no need to give us an overlong description then shock us with the news Steves Jobs and Wozniak were members. Mason also goes into far too much detail about things I don’t care about like remix culture which obscures the general thesis. He compounds this by using too many footnotes which interrupt the flow with a lot of self indulgent detail, that said the chapter about David Mancuso is a gem.
There are lots of worthy (from a start-up founder’s point of view) and interesting books to read like Founders at Work but the best by far is Boo Hoo by Ernst Malmsten, the tale of him and his chums burning through $180m on boo.com. It’s like a hi-tech Swedish version of A Confederacy of Dunces, pure genius.
