Oh nothing major — merely its product name. What is peculiar would be the timing of it all. Sometimes you have to wonder if certain words suddenly stand out and become a popular term — by coincidence or by conspiracy — especially when you’re involved with marketing and the name of your product is literally “Kickstart”.

Take our recently released book Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started by authors Alexander Herman, Paul Matthews, and Andrew Feindel.

While the book was still in production, a social networking website for students pops up from the folks at Yahoo! — also called Kickstart.

Now the Globe and Mail is reporting that the maker of the Blackberry, Research in Motion (RIM) may be releasing a new flip phone dubbed the “Kickstart”. More on this “Kickstart” phone from the Boy Genius Report.

Courtesy of Boy Genius Report

One now has to wonder how many other kickstarts there will be this year.  One could also start connecting the three “Kickstarts” together and formulate an interesting story…

We often provide brief excerpts of our recent titles to allow people to easily check out what’s inside the book and see if they like it — see if the book is for them. One problem — the excerpt was always in PDF format. This either required someone to download it or view it through their web browser. If there is one thing to object to about the PDF format, it would have to be that it is still too slow, cumbersome and large for anyone to view over the Internet.

We’ve partnered with Google to provide you with a Google Book Search engine so that you can search through all of our books. It works excellently — in fact so much so that we’re struggling to keep up with demand and putting up our titles for you to search and browse through. Don’t forget you can search inside each individual book, not just across all Dundurn titles. Still … this is for the full book with protection, not something that is easily shared and it isn’t an excerpt. So what now?

Well we’re now happy to let you know that there’s now another way you can view our excerpts. Thanks to the good folks at Issuu who have developed an amazing PDF viewer that is fast-loading, interactive and very very smooth looking, you can even share the excerpt with your friends over sites like Facebook, over email or embed it on your own website if you really like it! We’ve decided to make use of Issuu’s technology and you’ll begin to notice that more of our excerpts in the future will accessible via Issuu’s PDF viewer.

One of our first titles to make use of Issuu’s technology is a historical true crime/biography book on a number of forgotten Canadian outlaws called Running with Dillinger by author Edward Butts who also wrote The Desperate Ones which was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award. It features John “Red” Hamilton who was happened to be a member of the notorious Dillinger Gang in the United States so check it out — see what you think of the book and this new way of viewing our excerpts. You can surf on over to the website here.

We’re definitely excited about it and we hope you are too. Here’s the excerpt in case you want direct access. This is just the beginning, we’d love to hear more about what people really want from an excerpt.