The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools.

In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image.

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book

Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords

If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords. Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

It's good to see that Google acknowledges that not everybody wants to read everything on a screen. While you could always just print out the PDF versions of the public domain books on your own printer, the Espresso machine can quickly print library-quality books in minutes - a service that might just be worth a few dollars.

Maybe the two most noticeable new features are the improved search within books and the new way to turn pages. Before, searching within a book was already one of the most useful features of Google Books, but search results were only displayed in a small sidebar. Now, after this update, search results appear in their context in a list of short snippets from the text. In addition, instead of just seeing results sorted by page number, Google Books can now also sort results by relevance.

Page Turners

As for scrolling through books, a transparent bar at the bottom of the page now allows you to turn pages by just clicking the page turn button. We are not quite sure how useful this is going to be for users on a desktop machine, but this might turn out to be quite a boon for users on laptops and netbooks who don't use an external mouse with a scroll wheel.

Embedding, Table of Contents, Nicer Book Overview Page

Embedding books is also a nice new feature (developers were able to do this with the help of Google's APIs already), as well as the ability to access a drop-down menu with a book's table of contents. For out-of-copyright books, the Google Books team also made the plain text mode easier to find and read.

The new layout for the Book Overview page is also quite nice. In addition to all of this, Google has now moved the sidebar with additional information about a book to the left of the page (it used to be on the right), probably in order to bring the Google Books design in line with the rest of Google's search products.

Overall, this is a nice update for Google Books. There are no spectacular new features here, but better search within books is going to make a big difference for Google Books' usability, and the rest of the new features are good, evolutionary updates of Google Books.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

Making Books a Different Animal

The Telling Stories project transformed the work of six UK book authors into six different web experiences. Hon said the authors were mainstream writers whose reactions ranged from indifferent to bemused when they were first approached. After participating, all six are now enthusiastic to do more on the web, he said.

Hon's favorite of the six parts was a mystery thriller written about the streets of London that his company transformed into a Google Maps overlay; the map marker became a flying first-person narrator for the bird's-eye readers. Book chapters unfolded as map annotations.

Another author's book was serialized into 140 character abridged lines and delivered over months to followers on Twitter.

The whole Telling Stories project has been applauded as a great example of book publisher Penguin boldly stepping into a new medium. Hon says the authors were assured that visiting emissaries from the internet had not come to destroy them.

The project has brought the authors creative opportunity and substantial exposure. Personalized social serendipity service StumbleUpon has brought in half of the traffic to Telling Stories, Hon says; sometimes up to 10,000 people will Stumble on to the site on a seemingly random day.

Those visitors are encouraged to jump media and buy the full dead-tree version of the web-ified stories. Hon says though that he thinks the division between media types will become much less clear in the near future.

The Future of Stories

This CEO and I didn't talk much about monetization - emergent forms of creativity shaking up the old are more exciting. We didn't tackle the debasement of literature by Twitter because Twitter's awesome potential is more interesting.

We talked just hours after the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement was made and Hon was excited that the new Bluetooth connectivity could mean a vastly improved interface for glucose monitors, for example. He said that developments like this could be the stepping stones toward a future of ubiquitous computing.

"Soon people will realize that there is no 'mobile internet' - there is only the Internet," he says. "And stories are everywhere." Hon says web content today is like the early days of TV, when all anyone could think to do was broadcast actors from the theater in the new medium. But new types of media enable fundamentally new types of content and experiences.

For example, we're just beginning to learn how to leverage the web's social connections, Hon says. He points to the first iteration of "urban games" as something rudimentary that won't last: groups of people organizing online to meet in person dressed, let's say, as Pac-man characters, running through city streets and posting videos of their adventures on YouTube. "Those games ask people to get up and do something they don't really want to do," Hon says.

Instead, he believes that the future of interactive story telling will be pervasive - it will be available throughout your typical day. Walking to work, even while at work.

"I have no idea what we can produce in this medium," he said, "but I think it's going to be like turning the whole world into Disney Land."

Just remember, Dan, how much free time you said you discovered when you quit playing World of Warcraft. Turning the whole world into Disney Land is nothing to take lightly. That said, I'll see you when we meet up in the Harry Potter ether. I won't be surprised if you and your team help build it.

It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.

After spending a few minutes perusing the political science section I found a number of interesting titles that I've bookmarked. The business and economics section is a charming selection of very old books. You have to remember that only works old enough to be in the public domain can be viewed in full for free, but if you can accept that then there's lots of fun to be had. You can also read very old magazines. On your phone!

Check out the Google Book Search blog for more details.

In case you're unfamiliar, Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort where contributors digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. Because of copyright law and restrictions, the majority of the site's content comes from public domain books. Unbelievably, the project was created in 1971, when founder Michael Hart keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence and informed the first 100 internet users.

Given the popularity and ubiquity of mobile phones, it's somewhat surprising that Project Gutenberg didn't already have a mobile edition until now. We suppose it's better late than never, though. And considering the vast size of their catalog, any effort to transform the books into mobile formats was surely not something they took lightly.

The PG Mobile software is based on the common Java file format (JAR) readable on nearly all handsets. The mobile books are downloaded as a Java applications and can be installed either using WAP (over the air), Bluetooth, serial connection, infrared, or data cable. There's no size limit to how many you can store - you are only limited by the storage capabilities of your handset. To access these books, just visit Gutenberg.org and click on the JAR link to have the mobile book installed on your phone.

What, No iPhone App?

In our world, it's perhaps hard to imagine that someone would choose to launch a Java-based app instead of (or perhaps prior to?) an iPhone version. However, that choice was certainly made based on the fact that Java runs on billions of phones worldwide where Apple, although strong in terms of revenue and growth, only represents 2.3% of the global handset marketshare.

However, iPhone readers already have several options for accessing eBooks on their mobile phones, including the popular Stanza eBook reader (iTunes link) as well as the other options we noted before. The trick is delivering that same access to large parts of the world where literature and educational materials are less available than they are for us. That's clearly what Project Gutenberg hopes to do with this mobile offering, and we have to applaud them for that.

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

Who will turn this crisis around? We will. Who else? And how else but with innovation and entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurs: this is your time to step up to the plate. Hard as the times may be, you must remember, many, many great companies were born during recessions. And many others almost died in the midst of recessions but managed to survive through their founders' tremendous grit and resilience.

I also have a special message to convey to those of our readers who have experienced the misfortune of a layoff: do not give up hope. If you've ever dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur and imagined that you would, after all, like to be self-employed, this is your time. You have nothing more to lose. The job that held you hostage in its golden cage is gone. You are free. Free to try something new and different.

Listen to what Steve Jobs has to say about being laid off from Apple: "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." (You can read more from Jobs here.)

And here is how Rafat Ali found a job: he created his own.

Now, the best way to start a company of your own right now is to bootstrap. I have dedicated the first two chapters of my book to bootstrapping. In the recent roundtable here at ReadWriteWeb, I advised all of the entrepreneurs present to structure themselves in ways that permit bootstrapping, which means that capital-intensive ideas are out. You can listen to the roundtable recording here. I may do more of these in the future with ReadWriteWeb.

And I am also working on getting three more volumes of Entrepreneur Journeys out -- on Bootstrapping (Volume Two), Positioning (Volume Three), and Innovation (Volume Four) -- within the next 12 months.

Let's turn this crisis around together through entrepreneurship, through innovation, and through each of our personal, often unexplored capacities for leadership.

Read an excerpt from Mitra' book, Entrepreneur Journeys (PDF).

Book Rights Registry

According to Google, the Book Rights Registry will also help to address the 'orphan' works problem. For a lot of out-of-print books, it is virtually impossible to establish the current copyright holder. However, given that the Books Registry will also be responsible for distributing the income from licensing and advertising, Google hopes that this will be an incentive for rightsholders to claim their abandoned works.

Licenses for Libraries

Libraries, universities, and other organizations will also be able to purchase an institutional subscription, which will give users the ability to access the full text of all the titles in the Google Books index. This, depending on the pricing, could turn out to be a revolutionary development for libraries.

Google Books is already changing the way many of us are doing our research, and having access to even more books is only going to move this trend forward even faster.

It is important to note that this settlement only applies to U.S. copyright holders. Users outside of the U.S. will not see any changes to Google Books yet.

While there are inborn traits that help to develop character, often character comes from inspiration. Ask any enterprenuer about who set the bar for them and you will hear the name of another enterprenuer, a historical figure, a writer, even a fictional character. So in this post, we look at five very different books that share a common theme - remarkable people.

1. Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney

There's probably no one in the tech industry who doesn't know or admire Steve Jobs. Tireless innovator and one of the fathers of computer technology, Steve has had a hand in many modern marvels. His first famous 'child' was Macintosh, and the latest is iPhone. Steve also revolutionized the music industry by taking music online, and helped push computer animation by funding Pixar.

How has he done it? By being relentless, passionate and focused. Steve in the early days was reputed to be impossible to work with. Yet, he is widely admired and recognized as a great leader. The bottom line is that Steve gets the job done.

Kahney's book, which Richard recently reviewed here, is a compact edition that gives insight into Steve's character. You will learn how Steve utilizes creativity, focus, and at times the stick, to drive Apple's team to build amazing products.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is one of the best modern Japanese writers. His books are creative and unique, his writing is an inspiration. Murakami, not only a gifted writer, is also a remarkable character. In this book he describes his journey as a runner. At age 30 he quit smoking and started running.

Training tirelessly he readied himself for his first marathon. He flew to Athens and, retracing the original route, ran to the town of Marathon.

Since then, Murakami has competed in at least one marathon and triathlon a year. He trains with the same discipline with which he iterates to perfect his writing. This short book reveals simple yet powerful truths. Reading these pages, Murakami emerges as an incredible force of focus and will.

To learn more, read our companion post: What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami.

3. It's Not About the Bike, by Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong is one of the most impressive athletes in modern sport. The stamina and character needed to win the Tour De France are impressive, but Lance's most impressive race was not on the bike. Shortly after winning his first world championship at age 25 Lance confronted testicular cancer. He fought it for a year and won. This book focuses on this fight and connects the dots in his life.

Written in a simple yet profound way, the book inspires on every page. Armstrong reveals that cancer made him a different, better person. It reshaped his character from boyish, feisty, more physical rider to a wiser, patient and more tactical cyclist. Ultimately he argues that if it wasn't for cancer he could never have become great.

The book relates an inspiring journey, the crux of which is: never quit and never back down.

4. The Maverick and His Machine, by Kevin Maney

Today IBM might not be the most inspirational company around, but its story is full of innovation and character. IBM owes its status to the pair of Thomas J. Watson, Snr and Jnr, two different men passionate about business and computing. The book is a biography of IBM from its inception as CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Company to the defining player in modern computing.

Watson Snr's style was a mix of carrot and stick. He demanded a lot from employees and focused on corporate culture. He planted roots of growth and scale that were leveraged by his son, Thomas J. Watson Jnr, who succeeded his father as CEO. Watson Jnr took the company to the next level, pushing it into the mainframe business.

The father and son blend in a single narrative and what emerges is IBM's character of strength, passion, focus and success. Even though the skills that created IBM differ from those needed to build a successful startup, the book is a great read for every enterprenuer.

5. The Pixar Touch, by David Pierce

All five books on our list are full of strong characters, but the Pixar team had to endure plenty to realise their computer animation dream. For two decades the team had to work odd tangential jobs to stay alive. Remarkably the group stayed together and survived thanks to Steve Jobs, who bought Pixar for $5M from Lucas Digital and (reluctantly) kept the company going through the years until its triumphant launch of Toy Story and the later multi-billion dollar exit to Disney.

What help the Pixar team win was an obsession to make computer animation happen. Even while Disney and Lucas Digital were dismissing the promise of making movies using computer graphics, the team stuck together. They continued to build and enhance their software and algorithms, ultimately leading to a set of solutions that enabled hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. The Pixar story is an inspirational lesson on how enterpreneurs can succeed in business and life.

And now tell us about people and books that have inspired you and helped build your character.

Top image: Daniel Y. Go

reCAPTCHA combines traditional OCR with an approach similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Every text is analyzed by two different OCR programs and whenever those two program disagree on a word, it is marked as 'suspicious.' Those suspicious words are then fed into reCAPTCHA, which creates a CAPTCHA with both the suspicious word and a known control word. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself.

Overall, reCAPTCHA achieves an accuracy of 99.1%, which is on par with the accuracy achieved by having two humans type the text and then verify the results.

While it is mostly a proof of concept right now, reCAPTCHA's developers calculate that the system can be used to transcribe the equivalent of 160 books a day.

The most fascinating aspect of this idea is that it turns mental energy, which would otherwise be wasted, into something useful. Other projects like fold.it, which turns protein folding into a game, or Google's Image Labeler take a similar approach, but the user has to actively decide to play a game. reCAPTCHA, on the other hand, turns a chore into a useful project.

At its inception, Google Book Search was a controversial idea, not only among book publishers, but also among librarians. A lot of this early resistance is now giving way to a more positive attitude, as the advantages of Book Search become more apparent to most publishers. After all, publishers can decide for themselves how many pages of a given book they want Google to include in the previews, and librarians can now offer their users an easy way to assess the usefulness of a book from the comfort of their homes.

While these previews are still relatively hard to implement for individuals, we expect that developers will quickly create tools that will allow us to embed book previews on blogs or social networks.

"When the user mouses over a book, a contextual popup comes up containing information about the book and a set of associated actions. Part of the popup is a button/menu (sort of like a button and combo box) widget that allows the user to provide information about what he or she did with the book. The first thing to note is that combination of a button in a menu is not standard, yet it makes sense because it saves a click for the most important action. Secondly, the menu is effectively a popup within a popup, which is a big no-no in the classic world, but works well in this context. The elements of the menu are not buttons but check boxes, which allow multiple selection - another violation of classic user interface elements, but which works very well in this context. What is remarkable is how intuitive this gadget is - you are interacting with it in the context of a book and each choice is simple and clear.

Such clarity and simplicity was never present in the old interfaces. Clearly, this new approach to UIs is great, and early adopters are loving it. But will it cross over to the mainstream?"

To answer Alex's question, in a way it already has crossed over to the mainstream - as Borders implemented a very similar design near the end of May. But in general whether Shelfari goes mainstream will depend on how Amazon integrates it with its core business and with products such as the e-Reader Kindle.

Also it's worth noting that Amazon has been busy lately with book-related acquisitions. Earlier this month Amazon announced its acquisition of AbeBooks, an online marketplace for used and rare books. Interestingly AbeBooks owns 40% of LibraryThing!

LibraryThing is clearly worried about today's acquisition. In the above-linked piece, founder and lead developer of LibraryThing Tim Spalding notes that "Amazon can make Shelfari the choice of casual book-lovers who see a button on Amazon.com and click on it." LibraryThing hopes to compete with this by being a superior service. However it's very difficult to compete against Amazon's bulk.

Good luck to LibraryThing, we all love a feisty competitor. For now, tell us in the comments what you think Amazon will do with Shelfari now that it owns it outright.

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.

AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.

Find Your Passion and Commit to it

Murakami was a late bloomer, writing his first work at age 29. One day while watching baseball he realized his destiny was to be a writer. At the time he owned a jazz bar, yet the experience at the baseball game had a lasting effect. He started to write and over the next few years his life changed.

Whether you're a blogger or software engineer, you've experienced the same feeling: a blog post that has to be written; a piece of code that needs to exist. These moments of clarity are precious and we should follow them whenever possible.

Murakami faced a choice between his business and a career as a writer. Though the future was uncertain, he made a commitment to writing and sold his jazz bar. Soon after focusing on writing full-time, he realized his fiction suffered because he was out of shape. Murakami quit smoking and started running. Today he is a marathon man and runs every day.

Each startup always faces choices. Making a commitment, focusing, and then giving it your all, is the key. There are always obstacles, but if you know what you're after you can overcome them.

Stick With What You Know

I'd read Murakami novels before his autobigraphical piece. Now I realize how much of him is in his novels. His books frequently talk about jazz and one novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, is about an owner of a jazz bar. Murakami loves cats and uses them to create unique, mesmerizing imagery. Most of all, Murakami writes about love, passion and loneliness.

A few years back, I decided to make a real estate investment in Florida. Excited, I did a lot of research and was talking about it to my father-in-law, an experienced businessman. His advice: stick with what you know. While initially disappointed, I then realized he was right. I am a software engineer and a tech entrepreneur. I should be betting on my startup instead.

Many individuals and companies make the mistake of jumping into areas they know little about. A few succeed, but most never make it. It is better to start a company around the topic you're an expert in or know a lot about. This will give you an edge and ensure you're not wasting your time.

Start Even and Finish First

Murakami's life is a routine. He rises early around 5am and goes to bed by 10pm. He declines late-night dinners and outings. He runs and works on his books daily. He achieves his magic by pushing equally every day.

When Brad Feld, an early stage technology VC and a marathon runner, recently completed his 11th marathon, he re-learnt this lesson during the run. In the recap on his blog he wrote:

I started strong. Too strong. Rule #1 of the marathon is to hold plenty back at the beginning so you have it left at the end. I went through the halfway point (13.1m) at 2:20, on track for a sub 4:45. I tightened up at mile 15 and slowed a notch, thinking I still had a shot at sub 5:00. At mile 19 I went down another notch and was now slogging through 13-minute miles. At this point I knew I wouldn't break 5:00 and my goal shifted from "break 5 hours" to "finish this thing".

The first time I realized this lesson was watching Cathy Freeman win gold in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She won by running like a robot, with uniform speed through the entire course.

Startups are intense. Run too fast and you'll burn out. Many young entrepreneurs think startups are like sprints, when you just race from the start to the finish line. In fact, startups are more like marathons, so pace yourself.

Never Settle and Always Seek Creativity

Perhaps the most striking thing about Murakami is his creativity. My favorite Murakami book is Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a mesmerising "experiential" piece of fiction. As you read you experience a world of mystical images, ideas and characters.

Each Murakami novel is different. The author never settles, constantly seeking new ways to express himself. Remarkably, he says writing is not easy for him. Such creative work is carefully crafted. It seems like an outcome of pure passion, but it is not. The author seeks to break the methods he created yesterday and move on towards unexplored territory.

Passion and creativity are the two most important factors for a startup. Without these key ingredients, there is no success. But just like the artist needs to reinvent himself, so also do startups. It won't be the original wave of creativity that will carry you through, instead it will be the quest and the will to never settle that will make your dreams come true.

Conclusion

The beads of sweat drip off my face as I run up the hill. It is a mild summer Sunday in New Jersey and I enjoy my regular running route. With each step, the pieces of this post crystallize in my head. I know I have to write it, because Murakami can make a difference in your startup life too. Steadily as I climb I think about this man, his will and his magical fiction.

My iPod starts playing a faster beat, but I do not speed up. I've done this many times on this course to my dismay, so now I know better. I treat this course like a startup. It is a mini marathon where I run evenly and ponder these cool and creative things in my head.

And now please tell us what writer you find inspirational and helpful in your startup life.