Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store by Robin Sloan is a magical novel about the quest to find things out and the nature of friendship in the new millennium.   Its interesting cast of characters joins in the search for answers to century old mysteries and more modern questions like hard cover book or ebook in the age of the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad all the nature while seeking to solve the mystery of what is really going on in Penumbra's Bookstore in Great Recession, entrepreneurial San Francisco.

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store is a good read for web designers, book lovers, seekers of traditional knowledge, the A2K crowd, typologists, book scanning enthusiast, gamers, Ruby programmers, data visualizers, googlers, virtual reality wizards, wizards, warlords, and rogues.  There is even a thread of invention and innovation woven through the tale.

And, it has a glow in the dark cover if you buy the hard copy.  (You can check it out here.)

You can see the rest of the  Way Better Patents Reading List here.

Steve Jobs - American Inventor

Today is the first anniversary of Steve Job's death.  I'm writing this on my MacBook Air with my giant Cinema Display while listening to a course on economics being streamed via iTunes.  I'm sure there will be many remembrances today but I thought a more personal one might be in order.

Thank you Steve Jobs for making the whole thing possible.  For making music accessible and interesting again, for making me not want to smash my cellphone to bits when I want to send a text message, thanks for making information expressive and accessible, and well, beautiful to look at.  Thanks for the MacBook Air that saved my shoulder and my back and that looks really cool when slipped into my padfolio when I go into a meeting.  Thanks for making the iPad so that my 82 year old Mother-In-Law can play Words with Friends with her 23 year old grandson and routinely kick his butt.  Thanks for Facetime so I can talk to my kids without it costing a fortune.  Thanks for making things the platforms that make apps like Pinterest and Zite a reality so I can customize my experience beyond picking a font.  Thanks for making a platform where you can explore things in a visual way.  Thanks for all the attention to detail that you and your team put into your products.

And for the three people left in the world who haven't read the book and who would like insight into what Steve Jobs was really all about, complete with Bill Gates dropping in his Silicon Valley home through the back door, here is a link to Walter Isaacson's biography.


Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson — Inventor, genius, agent of change.

Culturematic - Cultural Machines That Spur Innovation

This book was hidden in the business marketing book section in the back of the Barnes & Noble.  Right next to the books on HTML5 and CSS3, the reason for the visit to the bricks and mortar world of technical references.  (I love my ebook readers, all of them, but they generally stink for technical references, at least of the programming variety.)  Culturematic looked a bit lonely sitting among the Google Adwords for Dummies books.  So there it was, black cover with a charmingly retro font screaming about how to create and execute breakthrough ideas.  And it has a section on the creation of fantasy football.  Skip the manuals, buy the book with the colorful cover.

Grant McCracken uses the framework of new millennial cultural happenings to explain how ideas converge and evolve to enable contemporary discovery, how we explore our world.  How people are working and thinking and exploring and doing it all at one time.  Its a fascinating look at where innovation is happening, how it is happening, and how we react to it and build business models around it.  You'll be surprised.



Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football . . . Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough Ideas by Grant McCracken — "Culturematics..create innovation. For Culturematics, there is no important difference between the personal projects and the corporate..between things that are useful and things that are artistic. Both begin as an inkling, a stirring suspicion that the present order of things is not the inevitable order of things, that there is something else out there. This is what the Culturematic is for, exploring a suspicion." A new millenium view on innovation and how it happens, hunches and explorations from all over the place.

Patent It Yourself - A Self-Help Book

We'd like to believe that you can get all of the information you need from the internet and from the vast array of information on the USPTO website.  Sadly, it doesn't work that way.  When you've worn yourself out clicking on links and reach the point where you want to smash your computer to bits, it's time for a real book.  Even as patent nerds ourself, we often find ourselves reaching for this trusty little tome to get a quick answer about the basic mechanics of creating a patent application - hence it's inclusion on the Way Better Patents Reading List.  Even if you are working with a patent agent or attorney, this book will help you speak their language.



Patent It Yourself: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Filing at the U.S. Patent Office by David Pressman — The handbook to turn to when you are tired of mousing around the USPTO web site or in need of relief from patent attorney speak on how to get a patent.

Gridlock -- Not on the Beltway This Time

Understanding all of the ins and outs of intellectual property and the whole idea that an invention is property can make your head hurt.  It's one of those esoteric tasks that has been left to the patent cognoscenti for a very long time.  The down side of the, "let us worry about this" approach to intellectual property offered by many patent professionals is that the average entrepreneur, business owner, investor, and product manager is left scratching their collective heads after they've spent a lot of money and the cease and desist letter shows up anyway.

The Grid Lock Economy presents an engaging and compelling look at the politics and reality of intellectual property as an asset and the challenges this causes for innovators, inventors, the economy, and a host of other issues.  This book provides food for thought to help the rest of us understand why intellectual property issues are so daunting.  This is the latest entry from the Way Better Patents Reading List.



The Grid Lock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives by Michael Heller — Patent thickets, the tragedy of the commons, and hard issues in intellectual property and the politics of ownership.

(We have added the link to Amazon for two reasons.  First, we thought the covers were interesting and fun to look at and second, if you follow the link and buy the book Amazon throws us some change which helps us keep our product pricing low.)

An Wang - Patent Troll - The Reading List

Next on the Inventions, Inventors, Innovation and IP Reading List reading list is the story of one of the great American inventors, a savvy businessman who sold the rights to one of the seminal inventions in core memory to fund his new research and development and then went on to build one of the top R&D and product organizations.  Sometimes he was an NPE and most of the time he was a practicing entity.

An Wang was received the Medal of Liberty awarded to distinguished naturalized citizens, Wang started the electronics laboratories that bear his name as a one-man shop six years after his arrival in 1945 from China at age 25 and built it into a multinational company.

With the "patent system is broken" being the tag line of lots of commentary on patents, patent litigation, and calls for making it illegal for non-practicing entities, the pejorative patent trolls, to enforce their patents, Lessons: An Autobiography give the reader insight into how patents, a brilliant leader, and a great team can change the way we work.

Lessons: An Autobiography by An Wang — Dr. Wang sold his patent for core memory to IBM to fund WANG Laboratories and set off an inventive juggernaut. Like other great inventors he started as a non-practicing entity and went on to build one of the largest "practicing entities" of the 1980s.

(We added the link to buy the books at Amazon for two reasons - the pictures of the covers look good and if you buy one of the books from the link on, Amazon pays us a little change.  This helps us keep our product cost low. ) 

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business — Intellectual Property 101 — The latest Way Better Patents Good Read.

Intellectual property doesn't need to be scary - that's the whole foundation of Way Better Patents.  If people are going to spend millions and millions of dollars on patents and patent enforcement, and if patent news can more markets, mere mortals should be able to figure out what's going on.  We've had quite a few meetings that went something like this:

Enter business executive toting a big thick document stylishly bound in consultant-esque fashion.

Mr. or Ms. Executive slides the bulky document across the table and says, "I just paid $50,000 for this due diligence thing and I still don't understand if I can make and sell my product.  Why do I need to bother with this stuff anyway."

IP guru starts to explain how prior art and patents work and Mr. or Ms. Executives eyes roll back in their head while they reach for the Excedrin Migraine - that is if they can find it.  Fade to dark....

This book is the one you send Ms. or Mr. Executive home with so that they can come back with a reasonable understanding about what IP is all about and why they should care.  They might even acquire the vocabulary to keep up with their patent attorney and patent examiner.

The author, Paul Goldstein, is a law professor at Stanford Law and works counsel to Morrison & Foerster, he works on intellectual property litigation and transactions.  Who doesn't want to read a book by someone who works for a law firm with the nick name Mo Fo?


Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business by Paul Goldstein — Stuff you need to know presented without the patent mumbo jumbo.

Please send us your good reads or comments on ours to feedback@waybetterpatents.com.


(We added the link to buy the books at Amazon for two reasons - the pictures of the covers look good and if you buy one of the books from the link on, Amazon pays us a little change.  This helps us keep our product cost low. ) 

Imagine - Your Brain, Your City, Your Crew

Insight and Thought Leadership or Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

An entry from the Way Better Patents Reading List that has been pulled.

This post was written before it was revealed that Jonah Lehrer fabricated material in this book, notably quotes from Bob Dylan on how he created his music.  A July 30th story in the New York Times details how Mr. Lehrer fabricated the Dylan quotes and how he was exposed by Michael C. Moynihan in a Tablet article.  It calls into question the accuracy of the rest of the book.

We present our original review here.  Perhaps we were hoodwinked too.  The publisher has pulled the book off the shelves and is recalling it.  Time will tell if it resurfaces.  But in the meantime, here's what we originally wrote.  Amazon is in the process of pulling the book off its digital shelves as well.   If you get a question mark where the image goes, we will know the deed is done.

The original review.

This book may help you answer that important question, "Why didn't I think of that?"  This book is one of the best explorations of how people create things from the vantage point of how they think about them, what factors influence their thinking, and how who you hang out with can help drive your creativity.

Mr. Lehrer presents some interesting ways patents provide indicators that creativity is happening. And they are very revealing.  An analysis of patent citations reveals that "innovation was largely a local process, citations were ten times as likely to come from the same metropolitan area as a control patent."  Inventors are inspired by people in the 'hood.  And the best hoods for making this happen are the urban ones.  This is among the interesting information Mr. Lehrer presents.  (We aren't so sure about this one and are working to see if there is any truth on the citation front.)

Here the journalistic writing style makes even detailed information about neuroscience digestible and thought provoking.

Imagine by Jonah Lehrer — A great resource on understanding where ideas and creativity come from. Good insight on how patents point to good things happening. We were a bit put off by the hackneyed and unenlightened "fix the patent system" rhetoric without a plan at the conclusion of this book. (Note to self, write to Mr. Lehrer and see what his recommendations are.)

The Periodic Table View of the World

The Disappearing Spoon - the periodic table as a historical yarn.  The latest Way Better Patents Reading List selection.

Many of us live in the world of the electrical and the mechanical with our wireless devices, semiconductors, internal combustion engines and wind turbines but sometimes we need to delve into the world of the chemical which means we need to understand the Periodic Table.

The Disappearing Spoon takes a tour of the periodic table in a journalistic fashion that's readable for those who just passed high school chemistry or who are organic chem practitioners in their real life.  Maybe if the high school exploration of the periodic table included Sam Kean's, The Disappearing Spoon more people would be scientists.  When I finished reading this one, I had the "eureka moment" where I finally got it.



The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean — A book for those of us who just couldn't get the periodic table until now.

Please send us your favorite IP articles, blogs, books to feedback@waybetterpatents.com and we'll add them to the list.

(We added the link to buy the books at Amazon for two reasons - the pictures of the covers look good and if you buy one of the books from the link on, Amazon pays us a little change.  This helps us keep our product cost low. )