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Good Ideas, Week One

It's been a crazy eight days since the Good Ideas World Tour launched; I've done about thirteen events in six cities, and at least twice as many interviews. Thanks to everyone who has come out, and who has bought the book or tweeted and blogged about it. All that work (and fun!) is paying off: the book will debut on next weeks' NY Times bestseller list at #23, in an insanely competitive week to be selling a new book. That's my fifth straight national bestseller, so I am going to take some time tonight to savor here in Chicago, but the tour keeps rolling tomorrow with a flight to St. Louis, followed by Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Dallas, and Austin. Come out if you can!
In the meantime, a few quick updates of interesting reviews and other responses from around the Web. The amazing Cory Doctorow wrote a review for BoingBoing that called the book a "multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness, and creativity." Salon is running an interview with me called "Epiphanies Are Overrated." Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured a very smart column by Gordon Crovitz on Facebook, The Social Network, Larry Lessig, and Good Ideas. You can watch a video of me drinking a very large glass of Malbec and discussing the book on Asylum's Drinks With Writers series.
Finally, tomorrow's Financial Times includes a long review of the book by their columnist John Gapper; it may be my favorite review yet, and it ends with these lines:
"It is much more stimulating and insightful than the average innovation tome and Johnson does not attempt to lock the reader into a Gladwellian conclusion. Instead, it is like one of the reefs that initially baffled Darwin and are so admired by Johnson – a huge diversity of bright ideas co-exist happily without destroying or spoiling each other."
I suspect that will find its way onto the paperback jacket.

Pub Day

It seems like it's been out for a month now, but my new book--Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation--officially hits the shelves in a matter of hours. I worked harder and longer on this book than any of the six books before it, and I'm as proud of it as I am of anything I've written. I hope you all get a chance to pick up a copy, and to stop by one of the events on the tour, which starts today in my old hometown of Washington, D.C. You can buy the hardcover or the Kindle edition on Amazon, or here from Barnes and Noble. And of course it should be available at your local bookseller as well. I'll be posting and tweeting from the tour as the responses come in from the events and the reviewers, so stay tuned...

Good Ideas: The First Reviews

Where Good Ideas Come From doesn't officially hit the shelves until Tuesday, but a handful of reviews started running in the past few days.

• In Portland, where I will be speaking at the end of this week, The Oregonian said my "'long zoom' view of fertile idea-ecosystems is engaging, informative and, well, inspirational." (Though I was a bit too glib about new tech platforms like Twitter apparently.)

• The Economist calls Good Ideas "the grand synthesis" of my other six books, which I think is a compliment, assuming they don't think the other six books are awful. It's a joint review with Kevin Kelly's superb What Technology Wants, and if you like that particular cocktail, you should read this fun Wired conversation between Kevin and me. (And then buy tickets for our joint event at the New York Public Library.)

• In Seattle, where I will also be appearing this week, the Times runs a very nice review that ends with this paragraph: "Johnson's own interest stops him short of saying patents and copyrights should be thrown out altogether. People who create intellectual property, including books like this, need to be paid — an argument, writes Johnson, 'I am more than sympathetic toward.' No doubt that goes also for his publisher, Riverhead Books, which is owned by Penguin, which is owned by Pearson, a great corporation based in London." I will have more to say on this theme in the coming weeks, but suffice to say that there are multiple reasons why copyright and patent law shouldn't be thrown out altogether, most of which have nothing to do with my commercial interests, and the book discusses them at some length.

• It's behind a paywall, so you're just going to have to trust me on this, but the Sunday Times in the UK ran a review this morning that began by calling Good Ideas "an exhilarating, idea-thirsty book."

• Finally, last week's Publisher's Weekly ran a long interview with me that discussed Good Ideas, but also went into some detail about my thoughts on the future of digital books, and my frustrations with the forced limitations of today's e-book software.