Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of the most entertaining and enlightening business books of recent years.

Taleb’s new book, The Black Swan, has just been published and the excellent Book design review blog discusses the unconventional UK cover (the image on the right) versus the more traditional US cover (see: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, US and UK and The Black Swan redux).

Publishing a book cover with no title is a risky strategy, although Fooled by Randomness was such a hit that it will be difficult to judge the impact of this particular cover.

If The Black Swan is anywhere near as edgy and interesting as Taleb’s previous book, his readers are in for a treat. For a preview, the New York Times has published the book’s first chapter.

Magic Ink (via Jason Kottke) is an essay by Bret Victor on information design. The essay contains some interesting graphics, including a redesign of Amazon’s search result display (see: before and after).

On a related note, the newest edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (IAWWW) just dropped in through the mailbox. The foreword is by none other than usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Jakob’s legendary site, Useit.com, receives far too little attention in the Web 2.0 world.

IAWWW has more than doubled in size since its groundbreaking first edition and the newest version is very up to date on the newest trends. Highly recommended.

While we’re on the theme of information design, the newest edition of A List Apart has an interesting article called Contrast and Meaning which reminds me of a book I once got hold of after seeing that Jason Fried of 37signals recommended it: Designing Visual Interfaces.