1) Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age by Alison H. Fine
[From the book’s website:]
How can we move from serving soup until our elbows ache to solving chronic social ills like hunger or homelessness? How can we break the disastrous cycle of low expectations that leads to chronic social failures?
The answers to these questions lie within […] Momentum, a fresh, zestful way of thinking about and organizing social change work. Today’s digital tools–including but not limited to e-mail, the Web, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), even iPods–promote interactivity and connectedness. But as Momentum shows, these new social media tools are important not for their wizardry but because they connect us to one another in inexpensive, accessible, and massively scalable ways.

NB: Find Momentum and related books in our newly expanded P2P Bookstore! Now with new sections on P2P Society, P2P Politics, and P2P Culture.

2) The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers by Scott Kirsner
[From CinemaTech’s Storefront:]
Google buys YouTube. Americans now watch an average of 100 minutes of Internet video a month. “The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments,” a short clip posted on Revver, earns its creators more than $30,000. A video ad from Dove lures more viewers to its site than a Super Bowl spot.
What does it all mean?
“The Future of Web Video” details twelve tectonic shifts reshaping the entertainment landscape. It includes interviews with senior execs from Brightcove, Revver, TiVo, Verizon, and Ogilvy & Mather, as well as Web video pioneers like Judson Laipply (“Evolution of Dance”), Fritz Grobe (“Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos”), and Gregg Spiridellis (“This Land”).
Full of up-to-date stats, original interviews, and valuable case studies, “The Future of Web Video” also contains charts covering:
> Sites that help video producers earn money
> Online viewership habits
> Devices that bring Web video to the TV
> Opportunities and challenges Web video presents

3) Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook by Rickford Grant
The title sums it up: a guide for those wishing to move beyond Windows, into the world of Linux. With humor and pragmatism. Mr. Grant walks the novice explorer through all the basics of switching to this distribution of Linux, on to the practical level of getting things done. Timely perhaps for those not exactly looking forward to dealing with Vista. Read more about it on that Directory of Wonderful Things.

4) Codev2 by Lawrence Lessig
[Lifted from codev2.cc:]
From the Preface: “This is a translation of an old book—indeed, in Internet time, it is a translation of an ancient text.” That text is Lessig’s “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.” The second version of that book is “Code v2.” The aim of Code v2 is to update the earlier work, making its argument more relevant to the current internet.
Code v2 was written in part through a collaborative Wiki. That version is still accessible here. Lessig took the Wiki text as of 12/31/05, and then added his own edits. Code v2 is the result.
The Wiki text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. So too is the derivative. Reflecting the contributions of the community to this new work, all royalties have been dedicated to Creative Commons.
You can download the full text in PDF form. The text is also available in a Wiki hosted by SocialText. And obviously, you can also buy the book at the links to the right. (A wise choice, as it is cheaper than printing the book in most contexts.)

5) The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman
[From the author’s open Wikipedia site:]
One thing that business, institutions, governments and key individuals will have to realize is spiders and starfish may look alike, but starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.
But starfish don’t just exist in the animal kingdom. Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Like starfish in the sea, starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and have clear organs and structure. You know who is in charge. You see them coming.
Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communicaton- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.
So in today’s world starfish are starting to gain the upper hand.
How can Toyota leverage starfish principles to crush their spider-like rivals, GM and Ford. How did tiny Napster cripple the global music industry Why is free, community based Wikipedia crushing Encyclopedia Britannica overnight? Why is tiny Craigslist crippling the global newspaper industry Why is Al Quaeda flourishing and even growing stronger. In today’s world to answer this it is essential to understand the potential strength of a starfish organization.