Book Mashups and Beyond

What do you get when you mix a book on completing tasks with a book on relationships?  Effectiveness that proliferates.  That's my take.  Glenn, over at All Business, talks about this book mashup.  Book mashups...see, when I go mining on the Internet for nuggets of different, this kind of idea is exactly what I am hoping to find.  Superb idea Glenn!

Can you come up with some book mashups?

A mashup's code, no matter the mashup, is the very essence of creativity; a combination of dissimilar entities.  Here are a couple of mashups that seem to be working pretty well:

• Reeses peanut butter cups
• UPS & Toshiba

As you traverse about, gather in data from all around, mash it up and see what you come up with.

For instance: while standing in my garage I notice my lawnmower.  I then look up and see a neighborhood kid.  What are the results of this mashup?  An afternoon on the couch watching the ballgames.

Comments

[Glenn (Customer Service Experience) Ross]

Thanks for the mention, Dave. My original intent was to find two books that compliment each other which was how I came up with the post you linked to. Although I didn't say so at the time, I was looking for two books where the sum of the whole was greater than the parts.

A different type of mashup might be where you read a fiction book and a non fiction book on the same topic. For example, history and a historical novel. I'm a big fan of Bernard Cornwell, especially his "Sharpe" series set in the Napoleonic Wars. Before I read Sharpe's adventures at Waterloo, I found a nonfiction book on the battle and read it first. It increased my enjoyment of the novel.

I know people have been doing that for years, now we have a clever name for it. I'd be interested in seeing more mashups in any genre, whether they're on two different topics as I proposed in my post or whether they're on the same topic as I mentioned above.

Regards,

Glenn

[troy]

The UPS-Toshiba story is one of my favorites from The World is Flat, because it is a great example of something huge just below the surface. I was astonished when I found out that UPS had turned final assembly into a 2 billion dollar a year business.

Regarding Glenn's book mashup idea, I love it! As Glenn wrote in his comment, people have been doing this for years, myself included, but layering mashup concept (and imagery) is a cool touch.

I wonder how this notion might be extended.