My Amazon aStore

Amazon recently came up with a really simple idea for their associates but one that is so obvious I’m surprised they hadn’t thought of it before.  Basically they let their associates specify a list of products and then they generate a mini-store for them. They call these mini-stores an "aStore."  

Amazon even provides a clean url for an associates aStore ( unlike most of the Urls on their website; yeech!) 

My aStore Url is http://astore.amazon.com/mikeschinkels-20.  On the other hand, they don’t let people define their own "Associate ID", mine being "mikeschinkels-20" for whatever reason!  I would much rather have had my aStore Url be: http://astore.amazon.com/mikeschinkel/ but as they say, ya can’t always get what you want… 

So I’ve set up an aStore that I named "Mike Schinkel’s Miscellaneous Readings" which you can see embedded below using an <iframe>. The name is a pun on the name I chose years ago for this blog, of course, but the book selection is anything but random. I only selected those business-related books that made an indelible impression on me; the ones that gave me true epiphanies. 

These are books I think every technology-related entrepreneur must read.  The good news is you can pick most of them up a used cost for most of them for next to nothing. And even if you are not in the technology industry or even an entrepreneur, these books are still great reads as long as you are interested in the wheres and whys of business success.

Update (2008-06-15): I hosted this on my blog when I was using dasBlog but I’m haven’t decided if I will host it again since I’ve updated to WordPress. I never got any revenue from Amazon for it and nobody ever emailed me and said "Thanks for creating the list."  We’ll see…