Just back from a swing through Washington, D.C., where old friends Betsy and Charlie Rackley held a reception to celebrate the launch of my book in the U.S. The food was international: Georgia peaches, North Carolina shrimp and Quebec cheese. In addition to bookstores in the District, I also checked out stock in northern Virginia and found BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion to be widely available and well displayed.

No one, not even Democrats, thought President Obama did well in his Oval Office speech about BP and the Gulf of Mexico. I thought he was all angles and elbows. He even looked too small for his desk. While some people are already saying that Obama is a one-term president, others still have hope. Larry O’Brien, son of the chairman of the Democratic Party during Watergate (it was his phone the plumbers were sent to tap) put it succinctly. After listing the possible presidential candidates for the Republican Party (Palin, Romney, McCain, etc.) he said, “You can’t fight somebody with nobody.”

Excellent review of my BlackBerry book in the Financial Times of London, my first ever in that esteemed publication. Always a treat to have your writing style called ‘jaunty.’ Here’s the link.

BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion is now available as an e-book through Kobo. You can download it and read it on any mobile device including a BlackBerry. Price is $16.89, half the cost of the hardcover edition. Here’s the link.

Time was when a book came out in hard cover, a paperback edition followed a year later, and then maybe another year or two would pass before you’d find your baby in the remainder bin. Bookstores would slash the original $26.95 price down to $6.95 or lower.

Next came the rise of Alibris and Abebooks. At first the online sites sold only used books but for the last couple of years they’ve also been selling new books at a discount of 40 per cent or more.

Today, the time between publication and a price drop has become about three months. Published in March, a copy of BlackBerry (full retail $32.95) is now available on Kijiji Kitchener for $10. Someone else recently offered a “mint” copy on eBay with bids beginning at $2.99. When there was no interest, he offered it at 99 cents. I didn’t track along to see if it sold and at what price.

For independent booksellers, such cutthroat prices mean a rough new world. Browsers spend time in the store reading books then go home and buy online. The whole pricing process has another impact: it keeps an author humble, too.

BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion has been chosen for J.P. Morgan’s 2010 Summer Reading List. JPM bankers around the world submit non-fiction books for consideration (this year there were 450 titles nominated) from which ten are chosen. “If you can’t live like the rich this summer, at least you can read like them,” says the Wall Street Journal. “It’s kind of a book club for billionaires, without the tedious monthly get-togethers over cheese and chardonnay.”

In addition to BlackBerry, this year’s eleventh annual list also includes: On the Brink, by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Life is What You Make It, by Peter Buffett (son of Warren); The Facebook Effect; and a biography of Mark Twain.

Barnes and Noble offers special pricing on the top ten as well as shipping in the U.S. or internationally through its Summer Reading Site. Books purchased through the Summer Reading Site generate funds for Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that makes books available to more than 120 million children worldwide.

Congratulations to Jeff Rubin whose book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, has won the 2010 National Business Book Award. The $20,000 prize was presented today during a swank luncheon at the Toronto Four Seasons Hotel. My book about Manulife had been shortlisted along with books by Wendy Dobson, Buzz Hargrove and John DeMont.

The book by Rubin, a former economist at CIBC, has been published in 13 countries and seven languages. Noting that no one has ever won twice in the 25-year history of the award, Rubin, who won with his first book, quipped: “I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”

Sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers and BMO Financial Group, the award has helped fuel the popularity of business books. In 1978, when I joined Maclean’s as business editor, business books was Peter C. Newman. Even in 1983, when I published my first book, The Moneyspinners, the genre was still so young that people I interviewed for the book were astonished to find themselves quoted in it despite the fact I told them what I was doing and tape-recorded all in-person interviews.

I don’t know how many books were submitted for consideration this year, but I imagine it was several dozen. Business books have become big business.

Best bit of gossip heard at the lunch: front-runner for appointment as the next governor-general is David Johnston, currently president of the University of Waterloo.

While I was researching my book about BlackBerry I kept looking for and asking about employees of Research In Motion who had departed to start their own tech companies. Where will the next Mike Lazaridis come from if not from within RIM, I wondered? The feeling was that people were happy at RIM. In a growing company there is plenty of room to satisfy all urges, even those of entrepreneurship.

Recently, however, I have been hearing anecdotal evidence that RIM is beginning to spawn startups. That’s good. We need more RIMs in Canada; such companies create jobs.

What’s even more urgent is that we need a change of thinking in Canada. After all, there are two elements to a startup: the individual and the finances to get launched. The complaint has long been that governments offer too little funding for such individuals and while that may be true, most entrepreneurs get their startup money from family and friends, people who know them and believe in them.

What Canada lacks more than startup money is people who are willing to take a risk. We are far less entrepreneurial in nature than our American neighbours where “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a far different motto than our more tepid “peace, order and good government.”

I have often wondered why it is that our immigrants seem so much different than those who end up in the U.S. given that the countries of origin are the same. I asked an immigrant recently if he could explain and he said: “If you want to make money, you go to the U.S.”

What we have is a process of self-selection. People who want to be coddled by the nanny state come here. People with more individual moxie go there. That has to stop. Canadians are lazy. We need to be more self-reliant rather than depend upon government to do everything.

A recent story I read about volunteerism in the U.S. noted that participation rates in the U.S. are higher than in any other country. The reason: Americans want to transform their society themselves rather than leave the job to government. Canadians could benefit from some of that thinking. We need new ideas, we need entrepreneurs who create personal wealth and jobs for others.

In 1995 I wrote a book called “The Last Best Hope: How to Start and Grow Your Own Business.” That theme remains true today.