Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Free ebooks about public speaking and presentations?


















You may find them hiding in the databases at your friendly local public library. Isn’t that a pleasant surprise? I’m not talking about ebooks that you can digitally check out only for a month or so. You can keep these forever! The only catch is that you have to download the individual chapters as Acrobat pdf files. You will need to create a file folder for storing each book.

In the Proquest Central database there are four of them. Finding them is not difficult. Either a keyword search or a subject search for “public speaking” or presentations will reveal them when you look in Results under the Books tab.

One is Public Speaking for Dummies by Malcolm L. Kushner (2004, $11.55 at Amazon). The second, also by Kushner is Presentations for Dummies (2004, $15). Somehow both books were listed as being by Anonymous. The third is The Complete Presentation Skills Handbook by Suzy Siddons (2008, $22.76). The fourth is Communicate to Win by Richard Denny (2006, $20). Together those four would cost about $70 if you bought them at Amazon.com.

1 comment:

Jack Malcollm said...

Richard,

Thanks for your excellent post. I've read tons about speaking and have never heard of this before. In my training classes, I have people deliver a 7 minute presentation, but I'm going to experiment with 4 minute presentations and see how it works.
Jack Malcolm
jackmalcolm.com