Our selection this week:

1) The Future of Web Video, by Scott Kirshner
Mr. Kirshner writes: “After a year of work, and more than 100 interviews, I’ve just published a book called The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers. It’s available in eBook/PDF form (which you can download immediately), or as a paperback, which requires a few days for shipping.
“Initially, my objective with the book was to put together something that would be useful for independent “creatives” — filmmakers, freelance TV producers, anyone with a camera and an idea — who want to understand how they can make money in this Web video economy. I hope I’ve achieved that. But as I was writing, I expanded the scope quite a bit, getting into the the challenges and opportunities Web video creates for big media companies, advertisers, and entrepreneurs. There are lots of interviews, data points, and case studies.”

2) Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century, by Alex Steffen, Al Gore, and Bruce Sterling
Via our friends at Pantopicon:
The future is not only about tomorrow, but very much about today. Choices we make today influence what our lives will be like in the future. Vice versa, the ways we think about the future today, the ways in which we envision it, also influences the way we look at our choices for tomorrow. The bottom line of all this: start today.
Our long-term thinking friends over at worldchanging.com (also check out their manifesto) have published a fascinating book, titled: “Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century”. As their website describes it, the book is “a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.” It features a plethora of articles bundled together under seven headings:

1. stuff: about the things we make, buy, use and live with. articles include entries about green design, biomimicry, sustainable food, clothing, trade and technology etc.
2. shelter: about building future-friendly homes. articles deal with themes such as green building and landscaping, clean energy, water, disaster relief and humanitarian design
3. cities: about living green by living urban. the chapter informs about developments in terms of smart growth, sustainable communities, transportation, greening infrastructure, product-service systems, leapfrogging and megacity challenges
4. community: about working together for the common good. think: education, women’s rights, public health, holistic approaches to community development, South-South science, social entrepreneurship and micro-lending, and philanthropy
5. business: about growing sustainable prosperity. articles deal with themes such as socially responsible investment, worldchanging start-ups, ecological economics, corporate social responsibility and green business
6. politics: about progressing toward a free and fair world. the chapter explores developments in networked politics, new media, transparency, human rights, non-violent revolution and peacemaking
7. planet: about restoring and exploring the earth. this final chapter is about the big picture, about everything from placing oneself in a bioregion to climate foresight to environmental history to green space exploration

More information can be found on the book’s website.

3) Revolutionary Wealth, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler
As publicized on the book’s website:
Starting with the publication of their seminal best-seller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in today’s high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and daily lives. Now, writing with the same rare grasp and clarity that made their earlier books classics, the Tofflers turn their attention to the revolution in wealth now sweeping the planet. And once again, they provide a startling, penetrating, coherent way to make sense of the seemingly senseless.
Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow’s wealth will be created, who will get it and how. But 21st Century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and childrearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and lies to what they call our “Third Job” — the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country.
They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the “surplus complexity” in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence.

4) The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition by Michael H Shuman
Extracted from Dave Pollard’s extraordinary blog:
Michael Shuman, one of the co-founders of BALLE, has written an excellent book diagnosing the reasons entrepreneurial businesses face an uneven playing field and an unfair competitive disadvantage versus the multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs). This book, The Small-Mart Revolution, also prescribes 95 ways we can help rectify this damaging distortion of the ‘market’ economy — as customers, investors, public policy-setters, community members, citizens, and entrepreneurs ourselves.
Shuman introduces a useful acronym to differentiate the types of entrepreneurial business we need to encourage and support: LOIS (local ownership & import substitution). Only when owners live and work in the communities they operate in do they really care about the people and environment in those communities, he argues. And only by replacing shoddy products and services transported half way around the globe (at enormous social and environmental cost) with goods and services produced right in the community can we hope to build strong, healthy and resilient local economies where people can both live and make a reasonable living.

5) The Economics of Attention, by Richard Lanham
Pat Kane, of Play Ethic fame, wrote this review for the Independent, on a fascinating book that combines humanistic scholarship with the most nerdy interest in web and info-tech – Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention. The opening lines:

If there’s one thing the internet has not brought about, contrary to all prediction, it’s the destruction of literature. As the author of this consistently interesting argument notes, we have been liberated into a bibliotopia almost unimaginable to previous generations, with Amazon selling millions of second-hand books at cut-price rates, and Google digitising university libraries for (hopefully) free usage. It’s not literary or artistic values that are under threat, but the opportunity to pay even the most cursory attention to what lies before us. Our true scarcity is attention, not culture.

If the definition of economics is the “allocation of scarce resources”, then Richard Lanham suggests we might need a new version of that dismal science to account for our hyper-mediated lives.

The Play Ethic, Revolutionary Wealth, and other recommended books can be found in the P2P Foundation’s recently opened Bookstore.