Tweeting an Entire Ebook: Take Control of Your Paperless Office

Well, I’m doing something kind of crazy: I’m tweeting the complete text of one of my ebooks! That’s right, the entire contents of Take Control of Your Paperless Office is about to be released for free—in plain text, one 140-character segment at a time. You can watch the exciting drama unfold in real time (at the rate of one tweet every 15 minutes) by following @zapmypaper on Twitter. It’ll take 17 days to tweet the whole 118-page ebook, but anyone who’s sufficiently motivated (or crazy) can read the whole thing on the Twitter Web site or via their favorite client. For those who would rather read the book in a more conventional format, Take Control is offering the book at a 30% discount for the duration of this project.

In my ebook, I talk about scanning paper documents and then shredding the originals. So this is my attempt to “shred” an ebook via Twitter—and the first time I know of that anyone has tried to do anything quite like this. I don’t know if this is going to turn out to be the best idea ever or a complete waste of time, but either way, it should be entertaining.

I wrote up a separate page detailing how I’m pulling this off, and talking about things like special styles I use to give Twitter followers some sense of the original style and structure of the ebook. You can read all the gory details at Tweeting an Ebook.

The tweeting commences at noon Eastern time on Monday, March 21, 2011. I hope you’ll join me at @zapmypaper and help spread the word!

March 20, 2011 by Books Mac Stuff News

Joe Talks Backups on MacVoicesTV

Over the years I’ve done lots and lots of podcast interviews about various things I’ve written, and I’ve become one of the more frequent guests on MacVoices, hosted by Chuck Joiner. Now Chuck is moving more into video with MacVoicesTV, and as a result our most recent interview is available in either video format (embedded below) or audio format. In this episode we talk about the latest versions of my two Take Control ebooks about backups—Take Control of Mac OS X Backups and Take Control of Easy Mac Backups.

Due to bandwidth constraints and the limitations of my Mac’s built-in iSight camera, the video on my side is a bit choppy in places, and the sound is slightly out of sync. We discussed how to improve this next time (I’ll try to obtain a better camera; we’ll also do simultaneous recording on both ends and then edit together the footage), but it’s passable as is. Now I need to work on my video presence—I can see that years of doing audio-only interviews have led to some bad habits. And with some luck, we’ll move to a larger apartment in a few months so we can get that playpen out of the background!

March 17, 2011 by Mac Stuff News

What I Did in 2010

It’s now less than 24 hours into 2011, and I already feel hopelessly behind. My list of tasks that absolutely, positively, without any question or wiggle room whatsoever, had to be done by the end of 2010—and are in fact not yet done—is agonizingly long. So I’ll be spending the first part of 2011 catching up with all that stuff, putting me that much further behind on all the incredibly urgent things that have to happen this year. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but to be honest, I have a feeling that even “Polish off my 2010 list” is too ambitious a goal for 2011. That makes me feel kind of, you know, unhappy.

On December 31, 2009, I wrote up a little post here called What I Did in 2009. As I explained in that post, I did it as a sort of therapeutic exercise to help me overcome the disappointment of unfinished tasks and unrealized goals at the time, and the feeling that the year had been woefully underproductive. It worked so well I decided to do the same thing this year. Maybe I’ll make it an annual tradition.

So here we go—what I accomplished in 2010:

I also spent quite a bit of time doing non-work-related stuff:

That’s a long list—but then, in 2009 I did a similar number of things plus wrote a 900-page book on Mac security. On the other hand, Morgen and I have the cutest baby in the world, and I am not one to exaggerate. And I find that playing with our baby (or, to be honest, even changing poopy diapers while he’s screaming his head off) is about 37.5 times more fun than writing that book was. So there’s that. Also, as is my custom, I ate large quantities of chocolate, which makes me feel a whole lot better. And I would have ended the year with an empty inbox if a couple of people hadn’t sent me messages right before midnight that I was really not going to interrupt my movie watching, wine drinking, and family time to deal with. (It’s empty now.)

In just over a week I turn 44. Back when I turned 30, I predicted that my 40s would be my decade of wealth and influence. I’ve made some meaningful strides in that direction, but I can now say I’m actively cultivating a plan to make that a reality. This could be a very big year indeed, but if I’m too distracted by the smiles and giggles of my wonderful son to achieve fame and fortune in the next 12 months, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.

January 1, 2011 by Bricolage

Soren Thomas Kissell

One week ago today, Morgen and I welcomed our son, Soren Thomas Kissell, to the world. In the days since, I’ve been much too busy and sleep-deprived to pay much attention to things like writing blog posts or answering email. But we’re thrilled to have this new addition to our family, and if you’d like to see pictures and videos and keep up with the latest news, you can visit a separate site we set up for that purpose: Morgen & Joe’s Baby.

May 27, 2010 by News
Joe Kissell is a best-selling, award-winning, hyphen-overusing author and technologist, and the publisher of Take Control Books. He enjoys making complicated topics easy to understand. He’s also a husband, dad, and dreamer. Having lived in numerous places in the U.S., Canada, and France, Joe has now settled in Saskatoon.

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