The following are the 10 most viewed posts on this blog for the month of March. Maybe you read them all and want to read again, maybe you missed a few & would like to catch-up, or maybe you’d just like to share one with a friend. And perhaps you want to leave the page now. I’m cool with any of those options 🙂
1. The Porn Pandemic–I woke-up earlier than I normally do one morning and felt impressed to write this blog. Wasn’t really something I planned on writing and the content wasn’t the direction I was thinking of going when I started writing it. But it turned out the way it turned out and several folk have said they appreciated the honesty. In many ways it was written as a Dad with two boys, whom prays for God’s protection over them and God to give me wisdom in how I & my wife can help Him in that endeavor.
2. Bittersweet Moving–Two of our dear church members are moving in late July and the thought of them moving and also the reflections on what I had learned from them compelled me to write this tribute to them & encouragement to pastors & young leaders to be mentored.
3. Val Kilmer & I — This was orginally a post simply for the purpose to encourage encouragement that I wrote in February. It turned into a hit in March on the internet because the web manager of the Official Facebook U.S. fan page of Val Kilmer got a hold of the post and reposted it, due to my uncanny resemblance to said actor. That ended up getting this post a lot of traffic:)
4. Childhood Friday Nights — I love music! I especially love older Christian music & it seems like many others do as well!
5. The Apple Store — I believe churches could learn a lot about “customer” service from secular businesses! This was just another example.
6. 1 For Every 10k — I love church planting, I believe it is the best avenue by which to have mass sustained evangelism!
7. The Negativity Pandemic — I am sick of negativity!
8. Flee the Tiger — One of my members Kay Rizzo has recently published her first ebook. I was excited for her and wanted to help her get out the word.
9. Zechariah’s Beautiful Picture of the Gospel — I love Zechariah 3:1-5 and I wanted to share a couple thoughts in regards to this passage.
10. The Twitter Blessings! — I meant for this to be a compare & contrast of Facebook & Twitter with my views on why I prefer to Twitter. It turned into just a Twitter lovefest!
And those are the top 10 for the month of March & here just for good measure are the top for the first quarter of 2012:
Hope y’all enjoy and would love your feedback!
So I was going to get on here and rant about how our Adventist publishing houses were dropping the ball by not having ebooks available! But before I spouted I decided to do a quick search and I found this by Pacific Press Publishing & this by Review & Herald Publishing. So my rant is not going to be quite as intense. But I still want to rant a little. I praise the Lord that I see the church entering into the realm of ebooks, but their progression into this realm is far too slow and under marketed!
As much as I love books in my hand and as much as I didn’t want to embrace the tablet culture I find that almost all of my reading is now done on my Kindle! The only things I haven’t been able to read primarily on my Kindle, my Adventist literature. For those items I have to drive 45 minutes north to the nearest Adventist Book Center, which means I’m not reading most of the new Adventist material out there.
Every single published material of the Seventh-day Adventist church from books to magazines should be available through the kindle store, the Nook store, or whatever is the preferred reader of choice. (Pacific Press seems to be ahead of the rest on this, most of Review & Herald stuff is primarily in google book format which is cumbersome). I believe that if our publishing institutions did this then we would increase readership in many areas and spread the message much more quickly.
Let me give you two recent scenarios to illustrate my point:
Two of the preachers I appreciate most, Dwight Nelson & David Asscherick were discussing on twitter a quote by NT Wright from his book Justification. Because this book is not Adventist I knew that I could immediately go to Amazon Kindle Store and purchase that book. On the same day Pastor Dwight plugged his most recent devotional book, “The Chosen.”
Yes, there is a link to Amazon to buy the book. But if you went to Amazon as I am writing this, you would notice that there is only one copy, and it is being sold for $15, not including shipping and handling. So if I buy it there I have to wait on it and pay almost $20 for it. Or I can drive 45 mins north and buy it at the Adventist Book Center…or maybe which is what probably quite a few folk do, they just don’t buy it.
But say that same book was available through the Kindle store like Justification is. Then if a person read that tweet of Dwight’s (and a lot of folk read those tweets: Dwight has been on twitter for a little over three weeks and he already has well over 300 followers), and being a person that uses twitter so probably also uses other techno stuff, they jump on their iphone kindle or Nook app and they immediately go to the kindle store and Download the book which is sent wirelessly to their kindle, iphone, and ipad all at once and it was for only $9.99 versus $20. Answering me this, which seems more convenient?
Yes we won’t for a very long time completely get rid of books on paper, and indeed there are many people that don’t use any of the technology I am speaking of, but there are enough people that do use tablet readers that for us to not flood that market with our materials is just a lack of foresight and evangelistic creativity on our parts! 11% of all the United States alone have a tablet computer that is equal to 44 million people. And then think about these facts just in light of Amazon and their Kindle:
As of early 2011, Amazon had over 137 million active customers worldwide.
110 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers are in the Kindle Store.
Amazon’s Kindle Store pays out 70% to its Direct-to-Kindle authors.
Since April 2011, for every 100 print books sold on Amazon, it’s sold 105 Kindle books.
So far this year, Amazon has sold more than three times as many Kindle books as last year.
These statistics continue to rise. It begs the question – why aren’t Adventists marketing Kindle books like crazy! What’s holding us back from our piece of the Kindle pie?
One more area where I see us getting into the e-market really benefitting our readership, and that is with the Adventist Review, and our other magazine publications. I get the Adventist World just like all other baptized SDA’s, but I would probably subscribe to the Adventist Review if I could do so through Kindle. I mean I can read, Newsweek, Fortune, & Runner’s World on my Kindle why not the Adventist Review. I was once having a conversation with Bill Knott the editor and executive publisher of AR, and he was saying to me that one of his desires is to see readership of the Church’s flagship paper up amongst the younger generations! I would say to my friend, Elder Knott, get it on the Kindle and other such devices and market it and watch the level of subcribership potentially go up!
So that is my rant! I’m glad to see something is happening, but outside of Pacific Press, much more needs to be taking place! We should not be the tail of things, but the head!