Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble think that 3M and Google have it all wrong when it comes to innovation, reports the Economist (8/28/10). Vijay and Chris are Tuck School professors and co-authors of The Other Side of Innovation: Solving The Execution Challenge. They think 3M and Google, among others, make a mistake by expecting their workers to spend a certain percentage of their time on innovation. At 3M it's 15 percent and at Google it's 20 percent. They argue that this "let-them-loose approach spreads resources thinly and indiscriminately."

The result, they say, is "a thousand small initiatives rather than focusing on a few big problems." What's more, managers must "spend weeks sorting through the chaff to find a few grains of wheat." The authors also say it's a mistake to offer employees bonuses for fixing inefficiencies, arguing that the results are typically incremental, and seldom breakthrough. And they are against the independent "skunkworks" approach because "it ignores the basic reason for working for a big company in the first place -- to use its superior resources to supercharge what you are doing."

Their solution is to build what they call "innovation machines" that are integrated with the rest of the company and are "held accountable for their ability to learn from mistakes rather than for their ability to hit their budgets." They cite BMW for having thrown together its battery and brakes specialists to design brakes for hybrids. Allstate Insurance, meanwhile, had its marketers and risk-adjusters collaborate to create "industry-changing ideas such as accident forgiveness." In short, "students of innovation must pay more attention to big companies" because "they have the muscle to chase big prizes" and the capacity "to conquer new territories while continuing to cultivate old ones."

As more of its stores close, Barnes & Noble is viewed with more affection and less animosity as "a corporate bully ... that helped squash small, independent bookstores," reports Julie Bosman in the New York Times (8/31/10). "It's a community gathering space," says Monica Blum, president of New York City's Lincoln Square Business Improvement District. "I think the larger bookstores have worked hard to become those kinds of spaces." Unfortunately, it's not enough for the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Square, which, "despite being a reliable site for readings and events focused on the performing arts," is closing.

"We recognize that this store has been an important part of the fabric of the Upper West Side community since we opened our doors on October 20, 1995," said Mary Ellen Keating, a Barnes & Noble spokesperson, in a statement. "However, the current lease is at its end of term, and the increased rent that would be required to stay in the location makes it economically impossible for us to extend the lease." Lillian Kelly is among those grieving the loss, but admits she really wasn't much of a customer.

"I love buying my greeting cards here," she says, explaining that she visits the store at least two times each week, mostly to frequent the cafe upstairs. "They're getting business out of me, I suppose," she says. "Even though I'm sitting there reading magazines for free." Roger Hawkins says he likes the store because there aren't as many park benches anymore. He says he mostly buys audiobooks, online. "I'm just killing time," says Jai Cha, who says he visits the store to read books, a chapter at a time. Barnes says its next chapter will be another store somewhere else on the Upper West Side.

"Even as people embrace Kindles and other gadgets for reading, bookstores are finding a market for titles printed in small custom batches," reports Dana Mattioli in the Wall Street Journal (8/27/10). "Of course the fun is being able to watch their book being made," says Barry Bechta of Oscar's Art Books in Vancouver, which "has sold about 1,500 digitally printed books since it bought a special printer in March." Barry says that people like to gather around and watch the books as they are printed in-store.

For Oscar's, and other smaller independent bookstores, the ability to print books on-demand provides a way to compete against the chains with bigger selections. Oscar's uses the Espresso Book Machine, made by On Demand Books, which "partners with Google Inc. to get access to older so-called 'public domain' titles, and with Ingram Content Group Inc's Lightning Source for in-copyright titles." The machine costs more than $100,000 and Google collects a $2 licensing fee with each book, while the fee varies with Lightning Source.

Because of the costs involved, profits are lower than with traditional books, but retailers feel it's worth it "because the store is getting a sale it otherwise wouldn't." The selection of current titles isn't exactly comprehensive, either, but the on-demand demand is good and growing: "About four percent of books are currently printed digitally, but that's expected to grow to 15 percent by 2015," according to Interquest. Some book publishers are also looking into on-demand printing, but neither Barnes & Noble nor Borders has installed printers in their stores -- although Barnes does "about $20 million in annual sales for on-demand printing."

A book that says America's obesity epidemic is caused by "obesogenic" foods that may seem healthy but that will make you fat has it all wrong, reports Allysia Finley in the Wall Street Journal (8/13/10). The book is called "The New American Diet," by Stephen Perrine and Heather Hurlock. They argue that certain pesticides and plastics, otherwise known as "obesogens" (man, I love that word) are contaminating ostensibly healthy foods, like fruit and milk. The authors say these obesogens "alter our hormones and cause our bodies to store more fat."

Well, Allysia isn't buying this. First of all, she notes that the chemicals in question -- phthalates and bisphenol A (or BPA) -- have been in widespread use for more than 50 years but "obesity didn't start surging until about 1980." She also questions the supporting research, done with lab rats, and quotes biologist Randy Seeley as saying that experiments on rats "can't necessarily be extrapolated to humans."

Obesogenic concerns have already led to a temporary US ban on phthalates in children's products, as well as a Canadian ban on BPA in baby bottles. A few US states have also banned BPA and Michelle Obama's childhood obesity report" lists obseogens as a critical front in the government's battle against the bulge." Allysia counters that obesity's causes are "myriad and complex" and says that "ringing alarm bells based on insufficient and inconclusive evidence" is subverting "serious discussion of the issue."

Americans watch about 200 billion hours of television each year, writes Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus, reviewed by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times (8/7/10). Clay's issue with this isn't so much what we're watching; it's how much we're watching. His argument is that if we turned those hours -- this "cognitive surplus" -- into something more productive, like online collaboration, the world would be a better place, and life would be both more useful and fun.

To make his point, Clay worked with an IBM researcher to add up the amount of time people have spent on Wikipedia, the "collectively edited online encyclopedia." It turns out that Wikipedia "is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought ... In other words, in the amount of time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-sized projects -- and that's just in America, and in just one year."

Clay further argues that this isn't so far-fetched, given that young people, especially, are switching their television time for "computers, mobile phones and other internet-enabled devices." In some cases, they are doing so to pursue collaborative projects, sometimes with a charitable element. But, as Farhad points out, not all online activity is "as valuable as Wikipedia," and suggests that having a "cognitive surplus" doesn't guarantee that "we'll spend it well."

Modern notions of being "on time" kicked in with the railroads in 1883, reports Bill Kauffman in a Wall Street Journal review of Turn & Jump by Howard Mansfield (8/11/10). Before the railroads and their mechanical clocks nationalized time, it was strictly a "local possession ... Each place kept its own time, pegged to the transit of the sun across the sky. The idea that Boston, on the coast, and Springfield, 90 miles inland, shared the time of day would have struck New Englanders as preposterous."

Turn & Jump is a series of essays, each in its own way making the point that "there is too much time -- too much consciousness of time, anyway, and too much uniformity in the way we think about it." The book's title "is borrowed from vaudeville, whose nomadic performers jumped from town to town for their turn on stage." One of the essays tells the story of Benjamin Franklin Keith who came up with the idea of "continuous vaudeville," a show that ran all day, and "obeyed no sun and no season."

Another essay captures the career of Clarence Derby, who ran a department store in Peterborough, New Hampshire, from 1917 to 1979. Clarence left to his local library "a seven-volume record of his story -- a collage of invoices, photos, receipts and commentary" -- all about how much he "enjoyed his business." All of that pretty much died with Clarence, as Howard puts it: "Derby's was an American clock and the clock struck midnight ... We choose strangers," he writes, "We choose mobility over community." He ends the book with a visit to New Hampshire graveyard, where clocks are, of course, irrelevant. "Time collapses in an old graveyard," he says.

"The wealthy and the powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it than others," writes Jane Brox in "Brilliant," as reviewed by Elizabeth Royte in the New York Times (7/31/10). Jane chronicles the history of light, going back 40,000 years, when Lascaux cave-painters "made lamps of animal fat puddled in hollowed-out stone" so they could see what they were painting. Over the years, humans have "lighted their way with corralled fireflies, torches of burning pine knots, or dried salmon on a stick."

And you thought compact fluorescents sucked. On the Sheltland Islands, people used to stick a wick down a dead bird's throat, mount it on a clay base and light up. When times were really tough, folks sometimes had to make a choice between burning their "candles" and eating them. But Jane's book is really more about "the cultural and psychological changes wrought by more and better light to our eventual dependence on coal-gas and the electric utilities."

With the advent of street lights, for instance, "the illuminated city and the glamour and liveliness of its night came to define almost completely what it meant to be urban and urbane." This made rural residents feel left behind, especially "after rural free delivery began distributing catalogs and magazines depicting electric irons, washers and lamps." This illumination gap persists to this day in developing countries and Jane argues for more light there and less elsewhere, quoting Cyril of Jerusalem, who asked, "What [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?"

Clive Thompson of Wired sees a future in which reading books is a social experience, reports Nick Bilton in the New York Times (6/28/10). "You'll be able to cut, paste and exchange your favorite passages using them in the same ... way we now use online text and video to argue, think or express how we're feeling," he says. "E-books will display their social and informational life ... On which pages do readers most linger? What are the world's best comments for this passage?"

It's a world that could evolve along with tablet computers, which some developers say will be "so flexible that you will literally be able to roll them up and slip them in your bag or pocket -- just as you would do with a newspaper or magazine today -- and then unfurl them on the train." That evolution actually is being led by the U.S. Army, which is working with Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center "to build flexible, nonbreakable screens and devices for use on the battlefield."

Nicholas Negroponte, of M.I.T. and One Laptop Per Child fame, is meanwhile readying for market an iPad-like device that's made of plastic and "will use so little power you should be able to shake it or wind it up to give it power." It is scheduled for a 2012 release at a price less than $100. However, the future of social reading may be as much about such devices as it is the potential to make books available on any platform, anytime, anywhere. Indeed, Clive Thompson envisions a future in which publishers offer "single chapters of some books for 99 cents each, the price for which iTunes sells single songs today."

In "Extra Lives," Tom Bissell "wonders why, despite their technical sophistication, videogames are so bad at telling stories," reports Jonathan V. Last in the Wall Street Journal (6/11/10). Perhaps it's that videogames are participatory and good storytelling is inherently authoritarian. Having control while also giving it up could be mutually exclusive where "the best narrative art forms" are concerned.

Jonathan Blow, a videogame designer, thinks a "central problem with storytelling in videogames is that the actual mechanics of playing a game -- moving your character to jump over a barrel, or eat a power pellet or punch an enemy -- are divorced from the stories that videogames are trying to tell." However, Chris Suellentrop, in a New York Times review of Extra Lives, points in the opposite direction.

Chris quotes Tom as writing that videogame interactivity can be "as gripping as any fiction I have come across." He cites Grand Theft Auto IV, in which players have to dump dead bodies, for example, as creating "an engine of a far more intimate process of implication" than a book or movie ever could, turning "narrative into active experience." And despite the lack of quality of the storytelling in most videogames, he thinks the interactivity enables "a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented."

A new book by William Powers called Hamlet's BlackBerry takes its title from a Shakespearean reference to technology, reports David Harsanyi in the Wall Street Journal (6/30/10). Here's the money quote: "Yea, from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records." It's from Hamlet and it "refers to an Elizabethan technical advance: specially coated paper or parchment that could be wiped clean. A book that included heavy, blank, erasable pages made from such paper ... was called a 'table.'"

William's book is about the many ways in which our addiction to devices like the BlackBerry have cluttered our minds, and our lives. He's no Luddite, though. He admits to being as addicted to digital connectivity as the rest of us. His argument is "that the distractions of manic connectivity often lead to a lack of productivity and, if allowed to permeate too deeply, to an assault on the beauty and meaning of everyday life." William's not saying we should give it up, just that we should seek more balance.

He convinced his family to log off during the weekend, a practice he calls the "Internet Sabbath." They discover it's not so bad, spending "more time face-to-face than Facebooking." The mild surprise is that "friends and relatives quickly adapt to the family's digital disconnect" as well. Kind of like an internet virus in reverse. Some proof, perhaps, of William's theory that we have both a "need to connect outward, as well as the opposite need for time and space apart." Or at least a nice thought that we might "be happier freeing ourselves for genuine, unfiltered experience and then reflecting on it, not tweeting about it."