Why your e-book really isn't worth fifteen dollars
Recently, there was a dust-up between Amazon, an information technology colossus that happens to sell books, and Macmillan, one of the six conglomerates behind just about every book published in the United States. Amazon wanted to price all of its Kindle e-books at $9.99 or less; Macmillan, not wanting e-books to undercut its sales of paper books, wanted a deal where they set the retail price and guaranteed Amazon a fixed proportion of the take. As negotiations bogged down, Amazon, no doubt wanting to Send A Message, decided to remove all Macmillan books from its catalog—not just the e-books, but the paper editions as well. At which point authors and fans whose books had been delisted Sent Their Own Message, along the lines of, Amazon, You Suck. So Amazon caved, and now Macmillan is free to offer $14.99 e-books to the masses.
Some people may wonder: why on earth should anyone pay fifteen bucks for a stack of bits that cost nigh-unto-zero to reproduce? In response to this argument, Tobias Buckell walked his readers through what it costs to publish a book, pointing out that even before you consider the cost of paper and ink and shipping, the editors and artists and proofreaders have to get paid. According to Scott Westerfeld, the cost of printing a book is between three and ten percent of list price.
I’m not going to argue with Real Authors (especially authors whose books I like) about the economics of the publishing industry, but I beg to point out that in the free market, prices are set by supply and demand. As a representative of the “demand” side, I think something is seriously amiss here.
I can’t stand to read long documents on an LCD screen, so if I’m ever going to take the e-book plunge, either laptop screens need to improve significantly, or I’m going to get an E-Ink-based reader. The Amazon Kindle and the B&N Nook both retail for $259.00. According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2008, that’s double what the average American spends on reading in a year. In exchange for that $259.00, I would have free access to a whole pile of out-of-copyright and freely licensed documents in e-book form, but since I’m not reading those works now, I don’t consider that access to be worth anything to me. What about all those e-books that I can buy?
I checked out Charles Stross’s titles on both Amazon and B&N. When a Stross title is available as a mass-market paperback, the paperback almost always lists for $7.99 (B&N currently is having a “everyone gets the member rate” sale, so they are actually offering them at $7.19) and the Kindle or Nook edition almost always costs $6.39. Buckell’s Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin are available for $7.99 in either mass-market paperback or Kindle form. The books in Westerfeld’s Uglies tetrology are either $8.99 or $9.99 in paperback, depending on the title; the discount on the e-book version ranges from $1.00 to $5.77 (the latter is for the Kindle version of Extras, the most recent book in the series; I assume that’s a promotional rate).
Let’s generously assume, based on the numbers in this survey, that the e-book versions of the titles I would want to buy will sell for, on average, a $2.00 discount off their paperback prices. At that rate, I’d have to buy 130 e-books before I recoup the cost of the reader itself. And who knows how many times e-book pricing and technology are going to change before I buy another 130 books?
Wait a minute. Did I say it cost $259.00 for an e-book reader? But of course, I want to be able to share my books with my wife, and sometimes we both might want to read different books at the same time. So our household would need to get two readers, the cost of which might be recovered after buying 259 books.
And on top of that, the value to me of an e-book is less than that of a paper book, because with the Digital Rights Management built into the technology, I can’t loan my e-book to a friend (unless I bought it from B&N and the title has “LendMe™” enabled as a special feature), sell it to a used book store, or donate it to a library.
Obviously there are a few people out there who find enough other value in e-books to make them worth the money. (Best-sellers seem to have very steeply discounted e-book editions, so if you’re the sort of person who likes to read a lot of best-sellers as soon as they come out, e-books may be a reasonable choice for you.) Hopefully their dollars will sustain the industry until it can come up with a business model that makes sense to the rest of us. And perhaps there are others who thought the cutting-edge technology they bought was a wise investment, and are now fuming about how their hopes have been dashed, their expectations frustrated. All of this has happened before, and it all will happen again.
In the meantime, paper books are serving me well, so I’ll keep buying them.
Overdrawn at the phone bank
I spent today volunteering for the Coakley campaign, helping it try and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (after the Democratic Party spent a month going “jaws of defeat? what jaws of defeat? we can’t possibly lose!”—but every other liberal blog in the country has that rant). I told the Organizing for America coordinator that I was interested in canvassing, but not in making phone calls, because enough of my friends, not to mention my wife, had been complaining about the incessant phone calls. (What with the mayoral election in November, the special-Senate-election primary in December, and the election itself today, it has been the season for everybody and his brother to leave us a message explaining how So-and-So is the greatest politician since Pericles and could you please remember to vote on Tuesday.)
And hanging out at the office (of a union local that was participating in the campaign), waiting for the van to come pick up us canvassers, I talked to some of the other volunteers and some of the office staff, and they too were kinda sick of all the phone calls. And this was one of the offices from which people were making phone calls on behalf of the candidate. Seeing the instructions for those folks, I could imagine what kind of technology they were using on the back end; it’s sort of cool. A good Asterisk hacker could probably build it in a month or so.
The procedure for participating in the vote-for-Coakley phone bank went something like this:
- Call a certain toll-free number and type in your ID number on the telephone keypad.
- Listen to a tutorial on how the system works.
- When you hear a beep, it means you are connected to a real live person and not an answering machine. Say “hello” and go right into your vote-for-Coakley script.
- When the call is finished, do not hang up. Instead, press the star key.
- Then type in a code indicating the kind of response you got. (I don’t remember the numbers, but it was something like 1 for “hang up”, 2 for “I already voted”, 3 for “I haven’t voted but I will”… you get the idea.)
- You will automatically be connected to the next voter; go back to step 3.
So if you were, say, a college student in California who wanted to do something for the Massachusetts Senate race (on either side—I assume the Republicans have a similar system), but you had no money to donate, you couldn’t fly out to Massachusetts, and indeed you only had the occasional half-hour between classes… no problem! The party could give you their phone bank’s toll-free number, give you an ID number, and you could do your part to grease the wheels of democracy. And with this technology, a small staff could manage to get useful work out of hundreds (thousands?) of untrained passionate volunteers all over the country. Isn’t that great?
Maybe not.
By making each voter telephone contact so cheap for the caller, even as the irritation level for the callee has stayed constant, the whole enterprise of phone-banking is starting to resemble spam. The only difference is that when you get spam in your mailbox advertising organic penile-enhancement products, you don’t really know who sent it, so you delete it (or send it to your spam filter’s tuning system) and get on with your life. If you get spammed over the phone in the name of some political candidate, you remember that candidate’s name, and not necessarily favorably.
In preparation for next fall’s Congressional elections, party committees would do themselves a big favor by deciding how many times they really needed to contact each voter by phone, setting themselves a limit, and publically pledging not to go over that limit. In some districts, this sort of discipline might force them to turn away volunteers—telling them “if all you can do for us is make phone calls, sorry, we already have enough people to reach everyone we need and we don’t want to overdo it”. It might be hard to turn down free labor, but this is a freebie that comes with a hidden cost.
Re-re-reconsidering nuclear power
I generally have a “meh” attitude towards nuclear power. I’m not one of those folks who thinks that anything with the word “nuclear” in it must automatically be Evil. But as a practical matter, nuclear plants have proven so capital-intensive and so dependent on government subsidy that their value as carbon-free power investments has been drastically oversold. Nuclear-plant operators in the United States don’t have to pay the full cost of their own liability insurance. We still don’t have a permanent location for storing high-level nuclear waste, and from what I can tell, if we ever do choose such a location, taxpayers who don’t benefit directly from nuclear-generated electricity will still have to pitch in to cover the cost of disposal. If nuclear operators had to raise capital, buy liability insurance, and dispose of their waste on the open market, nobody would dare to run a nuclear power plant; if other forms of non-fossil-fuel energy enjoyed the same level of subsidy, we’d have solar panels on every roof by now (even in towns where it rains for 364 days out of the year).
All of which is prelude to my fascination with this news: some researchers and operators are developing nuclear power plants that use thorium, rather than uranium, as their fuel. Thorium-232 is far more plentiful than uranium-235, the waste products don’t need to be stored for as long as the waste from a uranium-fueled reactor, and those waste products aren’t nearly as convenient for someone looking to construct a nuclear warhead.
In fact, there was a lot of research into thorium-based reactors in the 1950s and 1960s. (You may recall Heinlein mentioning the element in several of his works.) So why haven’t we been using thorium-fueled reactors all along? Because back in the day, the government wanted nuclear power plants to produce convenient warhead material as a side effect. With the Cold War over and antiproliferation on everyone’s agenda, new priorities and new research might lead to new models for nuclear power—maybe even models that can compete fairly with renewable sources.
via Hacker News
In which your humble servant strikes a blow for ecumenicism
ImHalal.com, meet Koshernet. Koshernet, meet ImHalal.com. Now that I’ve introduced you guys, I’m sure you can have a very fruitful collaboration.
via Hacker News
Dept. of “you can’t win for losing”
I’ve been trying to protect myself from the headaches of another massive hard-drive failure by backing up our home systems to Amazon S3, first by using JungleDisk, and more recently by using duplicity. (JungleDisk is a fine program—it’s one of the few pieces of software running on my Linux box that I’ve put down money for, and I’ve never regretted doing so—but the basic version is oriented towards backing up one user’s personal files, and knows nothing of Unix ownership, file permissions, etc.)
The one problem with this approach is that we have about 20 GB of music files on our desktop system, and our DSL connection is only 128 Kbps upstream, so the music stuff is not being backed up as frequently as everything else.
But this past week, we were on vacation in New York, and my wife and I independently hit on this brilliant idea: start One Great Big Backup right before we leave, and it should be done before we get back. (Well … mostly done. I should have worked out the math first. But that was the least of my problems.)
So I set One Great Big Backup to kick off at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning, come back at about 4:30 Friday afternoon (the bus having arrived in Boston an hour and a half late), and discover that our system is even less responsive than it usually is under high load, and the console is printing out disturbing messages regarding the hard drive, containing cheerful messages like this:
SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake Dispr LinkSeq TrStaTrns }
After a panicked reboot and some more panicked fumbling with fsck, I gave up and shut the machine down.
Did I mention that this is the computer that controls our X10 system for turning lights on and off at appropriate times?
Anyway, on Saturday night, I did a more sober assessment of the damage, and determined that:
- One Great Big Backup had not finished and seemed hopelessly corrupt, so the music files had not been backed up.
- The most recent backup of our music to JungleDisk had happened, umm, some time in July of 2008.
- Regular daily backups had been going on as expected, so at least the regular desktop files were safe.
- Googling the cheerful messages from the hard drive turned up advice along the lines of “hard drives are cheap, do you really want to keep using one that’s flaking out on you?”
So today’s adventures included a journey to Micro Center, where we picked up
- a Hitachi 500-GB internal SATA hard drive, on sale
- a Hitachi 640-GB external USB hard drive, on sale
- an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD
When I tried to install the first of these items, a little nub of plastic broke off the end of the SATA cable. Also, the drive came with two machine screws, wheres the drive bay in our desktop machine requires four screws on a drive to keep it in place. Maybe that’s why these things were on sale. Hopefully, the Micro Center folks won’t give us grief about replacing it tomorrow.
The second one seems to be working so far as well as one might expect, although VFAT’s limitations on file names and size make my attempts at recovery and forensics… well, I’ve used about as much creativity as I think I can stand right now.
The third item, though, has worked like a charm: I booted from the CD, plugged in the external drive, mounted the partition that had the music on it, and as far as I can tell, all those files were copied over without a hitch. I would have backed up disk images from the broken drive to the external one as well, but then I ran into VFAT’s 4-GB-per-file limit. See previous comment about creativity.
The incredible true story of the girl with two hearts
The Lancet, via the Guardian, the Boston Globe, and twelve thousand other media outlets, tells the story of Hannah Clark, a girl who used to live with two hearts.
Clark was diagnosed with heart failure as an infant, but because she had lung problems related to her heart disease, conventional treatment would have involved transplanting a heart and lungs. Instead, her doctors grafted a donor heart onto her own (see the diagram), in the hope that with less workload, her own heart would develop enough muscle strength to function by itself. She spent just over ten years steering between her own immune system rejecting the donor heart, and suffering cancer related to immunosuppressant therapy. Finally, the doctors removed the donor heart. She is now a healthy sixteen-year-old girl.
Quoth the Globe: “[I]f doctors can figure out how Clark’s heart healed itself and develop a treatment from that mechanism, many other cardiac patients could benefit. At the moment, doctors aren’t sure how that regeneration happens.”
Torchwood fans take note: Clark lives in Mountain Ash, Wales—near Cardiff.
The museum of institutional egotism
During my brief stay at yeshiva in Israel, we toured some of the archeological sites near Tiberias, and our guide pointed out a number of details about the Roman civil engineering from two thousand years ago. A tour guide who appreciates technology, I thought. Cool!
A few months ago, I read about the tunnel of Eupalinos, an aqueduct dug through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos by two teams starting at opposite sides. The tunnel is an impressive work of engineering when you consider that during the sixth century BCE, when it was dug, its surveyors had no magnetic compasses, nothing resembling modern surveying instruments, and possibly not even much geometry—Euclid’s Elements was written two centuries later. And yet, the two excavation teams intercepted each other in the middle of the mountain, just as Eupalinos had planned. Wow, I thought. If I could ever do a Geek’s Tour of Europe, that tunnel would be one of my stops.
So, when I heard someone had published The Geek Atlas, the first thing I did was look at the map to see if the tunnel of Eupalinos was on the list. To my surprise, it was not; in fact, not a single marker lay in Greece. The only place mentioned in Italy is the Tempio Voltiano, a museum dedicated to Alessandro Volta; nothing about classical Roman engineering here. The Neolithic excavations at Çatalhöyük are also off the list, but surely I am not the only nerd who trembles at the image of a nine-thousand-year-old city.
Perplexed, I shuffled the map to see what was in this atlas, and came across a marker near Boston. What local landmark did the author consider worth including among his 128 selections? The MIT Museum.
Oh, for the love of God and Jerome Weisner, I thought, you have got to be kidding.
My wife and I went to the MIT Museum in January, using our alumni status to get free admission, and we cannot in good conscience advise anyone to pay their own money to get in there. There are a few exhibits related to current research at the Institute, some kinetic sculptures that somebody presumably considers “art”, and a lot about our alma mater’s storied history. If you’re an MIT dean who wants to schlep naches from your department’s work being on exhibit to the public, or a rich and elderly alum looking to stoke your nostalgia for “Tech”, maybe you’ll like that kind of thing. Everyone else can give it a pass.
If you’re a geek visiting Boston and looking for something touristy, I can recommend the Museum of Science, especially if you have kids. There’s also the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Or, heck, you can just walk into MIT itself, wander the halls, and look for posters describing current research. And if you’re looking for something elsewhere in the world… I have no idea.
If anyone out there has come across a real geek atlas, please let me know. In the meantime, I’m saving my pennies for a trip to Samos and Çatalhöyük.
Unbound
A well-designed computer language, such as Lisp, strives to give its users “the illusion of infinite memory”: the programmer can allocate as many objects as he or she wants, and the language implementation is responsible for cleaning them up. As long as an object can be reached by the code that is running—as long as it is still useful, still capable of affecting the state of the world—then it remains “live”, and the garbage collector will pass it by.
Not so, alas, for human beings.
Rest in peace, Eric Naggum. You, who were passionate about denouncing the falsehoods that are commonplace in the geek world, are now in the World of Truth.
A debugging tip for weak-minded programmers (like me)
So if you have some script1 that was created with the time-honored “copy, paste, edit” method of abstraction, and it’s not doing what you expect, and you’re just tearing your hair out because the part that you edited is perfectly clear and works just fine when you try it from the command line all by itself, and you’re not really sure what one of the parts that you copied and pasted is doing but since all these other scripts use the same code surely there’s nothing wrong with it… you may want to consider the possibility that there’s some relationship between the code that you don’t understand and the output that you don’t expect.
There’s some cutting-edge engineering wisdom that I acquired through bitter and embarrassing experience. I’ll probably reacquire it next week.
1 If a one-liner2 in a Makefile can be dignified with the term “script”.
2 If five lines of shell code joined with backslashes can be dignified with the term “one-liner”.
