Want to meet tomorrow night and talk about “books, business and beyond”?

I am starting to run a book club in Seattle. It is going to be a monthly meeting which I am running using a website called Biznik.com .

Biznik has become the last month my favorite business networking tool and is very useful in getting the word out there about who I am and what I do. It is also one of those websites that are also a real community, which means that by giving you are also receiving. Sounds corny, I know, but in this case it is unbelievably true.

Providing a book club for biznik members is just a way for me to give something back, and maybe slip in a word or two about Eco-Libris while at it.

So check it out if you’re in Seattle:

http://tinyurl.com/5v9ny9

And if you decide to sign up to Biznik please use this link:

http://biznik.com/join/eylon-israely

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Mainly I think this blog will be about my green business adventures in Seattle, the emerald city, with the occasional random thought. A professional focused blog, with a personal touch

Seattle? Yep. I moved here a couple of months ago and working my way into the green network. It’s been Green Drinks, LinkedIn and Biznik so far. I am actually co-hosting a green biznik event in about two week, and I will write more about it shortly.

Ok, over and out.

Eylon

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http://ecolibris.blogspot.com/2007/11/special-offer-for-oprahs-book-club-new.html

I read yesterday on USA TODAY on Oprah Winfrey’s book club new selection - The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. This is a great book and a great choice!

Eco-Libris believes that this 973-pages book should not be only a celebration of a great book and the joy of reading, but also an opportunity to discuss the urgent need in sustainable reading, which does not harm the environment. I read in the article that New American Library has printed 612,000 new “deluxe” Oprah editions. That’s a lot of paper and a lot of trees that are cut down for this special edition.

Eco-Libris aims to raise the awareness to the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and for the need in printing books in an eco-friendly manner.

Therefore, we are having a special offer for all the eco-conscious readers out there that want to buy the new edition of the book:

If you buy the book and you want to help the environment, please send us an email to info@ecolibris.net with your address and the first sentence of Chapter 4 (just to show us you bought the book..). Eco-Libris will balance out the book for the first 50 people who email us with the right sentence.

It means that one tree will be planted by our planting partners to balance out the paper used for the book. And we will send you our sticker made of recycled paper saying “One tree planted for this book” you can later proudly display on the book’s sleeve showing your commitment to the environment. And yes, we’ll send it in an envelope made of recycled paper.

We truly hope to see Oprah’s book club assist in promoting sustainable reading in the same way it helped with a great success to promote reading.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

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Let me explain. Open source can make software free. Some famous examples of open source software that is used by many companies are the Apache web server, the MySQL database, Asterix telephony system and so on. Imagine the web without these free options and you imagine one that is years behind in research and development or infrastructure deployment.

Now what if we found a set of software tools that are essential to the development of green technologies, but are now still pretty expensive? And then started open source projects to make them free for developers to use? That would be great wouldn’t it? Of course! Or at least that was my theory.

So I posted a question to LinkedIn about it, hoping to generate some interest and ideas. Not everyone got it. Admittedly my explanation there was not as fluent as here. But I still got some good feedback.

I’ll summarize some of it here:

• Create simple and efficient tools for on-line collaboration to minimize the need to travel for work related collaborations (Michael Trup, Keith Milner)

• The Cyclos project was given as an example of an open source barter system developed by an NGO. (Fred Jonkhart)

On the other hand some problems were raised. First, that enabling green technologies will create more waste than they were saving (Robert Jackson). My answer to this is that if a technology is more wasteful than the problem it comes to solve then it is not really green by definition.

David Bird, however said that the fact that the open source solutions such as the Apache and Asterix servers enabled start-up to use the money for funding hardware, rack space, and bandwidth and to build out (yet another) globally load-balanced and fault tolerant on-line infrastructure. This instead of exploring resource sharing (web space, database etc.) And he’s got a point.

Thoughts? Ideas? Any Green developer out there that can share his or her perspective?

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Congratulation to Eco-Libris! TreeHugger published yesterday its 2007 Gift Guide for the upcoming holidays, and Eco-Libris made the cut

Here is the recommendation:

Ecolibris (book geek)
For the book geek on your list, Eco-Libris helps readers to put something back for all their bookworm pleasures. They figure that 20 million trees meet their demise for each year of US book sales; to get those trees growing they’ve teamed with three conservation groups to keep the world’s forests going strong. TH Link Product Link

I can definitely agree that we will be a perfect fit for the book geeks on your list, or any other eco-conscious reader (not only geeks..) you have there that loves books and also wants to help the environment.

We hope to see many people go green this holiday season with Eco-Libris. We’re soon going to offer more options for the holidays, such as gift certificates and sending our stickers with a beautiful greeting cards made of recycled paper as a unique and affordable green gift.

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Eco-Libris, the green business owned by Redwood Visions, has posted the following update:

“Good news! I’m happy to announce that Eco-Libris passed the 5,000 books milestone. Yes, we have balanced out 5,000 books for eco-conscious book readers from all over the world in our first four months of operation.

These books are balanced out when new trees are planted by our planting partners in Central America and Africa for the benefit of both the environment and local communities. One tree for every book.

Actually, we add a little extra and make sure 1.3 trees are planted for every tree you pay for to make sure that at least one tree will reach maturity for every book balanced out.

We keep receiving your great feedbacks and it energizes us to keep on with our mission - making reading more sustainable. So, keep on. we like it
We have a lot of interesting news and announcements coming up this month, so stay tuned to the blog.”

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“Robert Jordan, the author of the Wheel of Time fantasy series, died on Sunday of the rare blood disease amyloidosis. He was 58.

Tor publisher Tom Doherty called Jordan “one of the great storytellers of the 20th and early 21st centuries; Jim’s Wheel of Time is a towering epic of power and scope, he was a man of courage and heart and vision but for me, first of all, he was my friend of 30 years.”

Jordan, whose given name was James Oliver Rigney Jr., taught himself to read at age four and began reading Mark Twain and Jules Verne a year later. He was a graduate of the Citadel, where he studied physics, and was a Vietnam veteran. He started writing in 1977. He wrote the Michael Fallon historical romance trilogy under the nom de plume Reagan O’Neal and seven of the Conan novels. His Wheel of Time series, which includes 11 volumes and a prequel, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Jordan was reportedly working on an 12th volume at the time of his death. His blog is at dragonmount.com ”

I’ve read all 11 volumes in the series, and plan to get my hands on the prequel. I discovered Jordan while living on an island with only one ok book store, and an outrageous customs policy on importing books privately. Luckily they stocked the series, and I discovered it while browsing the shelves. Throughout the better part of 2 years I always had a Wheel of Time book somewhere in my vicinity, and I am grateful of that.

Best,
Eylon Israely

Published first at the Eco-Libris Blog

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So how does this work? Martin Daniels explains:

“The consumer selects the book and then selects the sponsors with their placement on your book until the price of the book drops to zero. The book is then printed and posted.

For every free book, you need to have a book ticket, which you get once you have registered. You then earn further book tickets by referring new users or orders or buying into an account, which will issue new tickets every month.

Every advertising sponsor can only be selected by an individual once so promoting you to spread your sponsors and in effect find out about others. The sponsor receives all personal information.

Finally the books are printed on demand by Bookgg and contain your sponsors adverts.”

So although I personally don’t relish the idea of flipping through my new book while being annoyed by ads, I do believe that I would go for it to get a very expensive book I really want for half the price. And frankly I don’t mind my purchases being sponsored, especially when I can choose the sponsor, and if sponsors are categorized for me with some conscious labels such as “fair-trade” and “organic”.

But what most appeals to me from a Sustainable Reading point of view is the fact, that a successful venture like this in the west can also help popularize print-on-demand technology, which is apparently already quite popular in oh so unsustainable, or so they say, China.

So let’s wait and see, shall we?

Best,
Eylon

This is republished from the Eco-Libris Blog

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Just published this post in the Eco-Libris blog. It links to a very nice Guardian article about tree climbing and tree climbing literature. Check it out!

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