Radiohead Says Name Your Own Price for New Album: “TechDirt is reporting that the band Radiohead has apparently chosen the path less traveled when it comes to the release of their new album. They are offering two very unique methods of purchase for their new music, the ability to name your own price for a digital download or the ability to purchase a special ‘discbox’ which will contain the album on CD and vinyl in addition to a horde of goodies. Will be interesting to see how this new model works out for them and what it might do to more traditional methods.

(Via Slashdot.)

Like any other startup, we’ve adding new feature nearly every day on BookTour. But my favorite is one that we added last week. You know the music services, such as Sonic Living, that’can scan your iTunes or LastFM’libraries and then automatically tell you (via emails or RSS feeds) when’your favorite’bands are coming to your town? We wanted to do the same for books and authors.

So now if you go to your Profile page on BookTour.com, you can enter your Amazon login info and we’ll automatically look up all the books you’ve ever bought and add those authors to the list you’re tracking. If any of them are coming to your area to give talks or other appearances, we’ll send you an email or include it in your RSS feed. And you can always use the service to ping those authors and ask them to come speak to your company, organization or just book club while they’re in town.

How cool is that?!

(BTW, we don’t keep your Amazon info. The site just opens a secure connection to Amazon, fetches the books from your order history, and then closes the connection and discards the login info. That means you have to enter’the login’again when you want to refresh your favorites list in a few months, but it also ensures that your login information can never be compromised.)

(Via The Long Tail.

!¥€$!—Got three tickets for the Genesis concert in Amsterdam ArenA on Juli 1st, 2007! Woke up early this morning to set off for the Free Record Shop in Nieuwegein. While waiting at the front door around a quarter to nine, one of the employees arrived. I asked: “Do you have tickets for the Genesis Turn It On Again concert?”

“Sure,” she said. “We start selling at ten o’clock. Just a moment and I’ll get you a sequence ticket.” And a few moments later she handed me a small ticket with the number 214.

“Can I go and get a cup of coffee now? And what is a good time to get back here?”
“Sure. Come back around five to ten and you’re fine.”

So off I went, walked over to Albert Heijn, got myself a free cup of coffee, killed the time by reading and interviewing a few people and returned at ten. Got lucky. I was one of the few who was still able to get rank 2 tickets. Most of the others in line got worse places. Looking forward to see them play again.