In the past few weeks, we’ve put two of our three most high-profile print-issued books dealing with the brain and thinking skills online as eBooks and are getting close to uploading the third.

If you didn’t see our e-mail announcements of this activity, we’ve made it easy to arrange for purchase on any of the major eBook services.

For the appropriate links for LEAP!, our latest book project, go here:

For the links for The Mother of All Minds, our early 2000s book on the late Dr. Clare Graves’ “biopsychosocial” theory of how the human mind matures, go here.

Our bestselling but out-of-print work, Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World, is coming shortly. If you’d like direct links for ordering the online version, go here and enter your e-mail address in the box in the top right corner.

I could have done the eBook thing for SOD sooner. But then, as my dentist once pointed out, I could have scheduled my one and only root canal procedure sooner, too.

I can hear the tut-tuts beginning already: “But why didn’t you hire somebody to do this.”

Well, I tried. But the one eBook conversion person I’ve come to trust emphatically demurred, at least at first.

The reason was that the diskettes containing the text for Strategy of the Dolphin are nowhere to be found. Even after two decades, I think they may be around somewhere. But even if I open the lid to the right storage box tomorrow, I’m going to find floppies requiring a drive and a word processing system I no longer own. My ebook techie said I’d need to have the book copied by a scanning service using optical character recognition, or OCR, software. But when he looked at the variety of typefaces and sizes in the print version of SOD, he essentially said, “Good luck with that.”

And now I know why.

I located a book scanning service in upstate New York. Their price seemed reasonable, and the online critiques of their services looked decent. Within three days of mailing them the book, their Word file arrived in my e-mail box. And was totally useless. Page after page of exploded type that looked like it had run over an IED, not been passed over by an OCR. So the scanning service did a do-over. This time, the result actually looked like it contained a readable 99.6 percent of the book once I managed to open the text boxes that contained it all. Now all I had to do was resize and reformat every last character in a 284-page print work.

It took about two weeks.

I mention the ordeal here only because of a most interesting side effect: doing all this forced me to pay careful attention to what Paul Kordis and I actually wrote in the fall and early winter of 1988 for the first time in about twenty years. And also to what has been written over the years about what we wrote in various endorsements culled from the hundreds of hits that the title of the book turns up on Google and Bing.

I’ll have more to say about my reaction to all this once the eBook version is available. It explains, or at least suggests a plausible argument for, why one admirer of the work recently called it a “cult classic” that is more than withstanding the test of time. (And thus why anyone who has read it might be justified in doing so again, now that the book is going to again be in print, even if as an eBook.) Many of those comments are going to be listed in the front of the upcoming eBook version.

Meanwhile, if you missed our e-mail promo for The Mother of All Minds, that’s what it looked like above. As you can see, the promo features photos not only of the book’s author (the “emissary” mentioned in the headline) but also of two masters. There’s a photograph of the great American poet Walt Whitman. A stanza in one of his poems (also quoted in the promo) sounds tantalizingly like it was predicting the dolphin belief system. And there’s a photo of the late Clare Graves, who a hundred years after Whitman confirmed that this psychological belief system is for real.

So all this has produced a lot of buzz lately for the dolphin strategy. We appreciate “all the cards and letters” coming in from old fans and friends and new ones. There’s also been gratifying media interest in the two new French language versions of LEAP! and Strategy of the Dolphin (see BTC’s longtime Montreal licensee Michèle Carrier on Montreal cable TV here).

Happily, our efforts to use more and more of the tools of the digital publishing world to get the dolphin philosophy and strategy on the radar of a new generation of readers and users are sailing right along.