BlogSat

Through a thread at work, I was introduced to Kevin Kelly's site, and his Technium blog There's an incredible post about Moore's law that I just finished and highly recommend. I'm looking forward to finding the time to dig a little bit more into the site.

There's a great two-part series on ReadWriteWeb on the economics behind the book business. Part 1 Part 2 The author goes over both the current economics and how some future business models might evolve. Its a good read. Most interesting to me was the following information on the distribution of revenue on a book sale (gleaned from this site. ) Some caveats on the analysis done. The first piece seems to have been done on the distribution of costs, but assuming that carries over to the distribution of revenues and profits there's some interesting numbers here: The current distribution on books: Author: 10% (This in fact ranges between 8% and 15%, depending on the author's clout -- e.g. Stephen King does better than most. If the author has an agent, the agent's cut comes out of this. It is indeed tough for new authors.) Publisher: 30% (This ranges between 25% and 32%, again depending on the author's clout -- e.g. their percentage is less with Stephen King because t...

A few weeks ago while on the honeymoon, I noticed a person next to me in the hotel's internet business center do something strange as he fnished his Internet session. (Umm...yes I'm strange that way and sometime don't realise that its that rude to notice other people's surfing habits. :) ) As he got up to leave, he clicked on an ad on the page he was reading. Just as the ad started to load, he quickly switched back to the original page, clicked on another ad and then quickly logged out of his Internet session. He left the room without returning his chair under the desk, and with me shaking my head. Why you ask? And what was he doing? It reminded me of this head-shaker of a blog post(Ads are the new online tip jar) (that I read on Seth Godin's blog many months ago. Text below: " If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks. Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet. If every time you read a blog post or bit of onlin...

The only truly successful subscription-based online news service I know of is the Wall Street Journal I grew addicted to the Journal over a summer at b-school, and got the student subscription for my final year. I didn't renew the subscription, and then kinda waited to see if after the controversial acquisition they'd drop subscription on the site as Murdoch had hinted. They didn't; and so a few weeks ago after getting only the first paragraph of an article I really wanted to finish, I cracked and subscribed. I decided not to get the paper delivered though (just the online subscription.) The idea of more paper to get rid of around the house is scary I'm mildly annoyed that I had to spend some money to do it, but I'm really, really glad that clearly the WSJ has decided to stick with the subscription/paid-for model. I've said this before, but I do think that the whole " Content wants to be free " mantra and the idea of building distribution believing ad...

See, I actually did learn something in school....how to justify giving up on finishing a novel! :) The year before I started at the GSB, a favorite Professor actually ended his commencement speech reminding students of this. The thought process, "Oh I shouldn't do this, but I've already invested so much in to it I might as well finish it." is surprisingly common, very human and completely wrong . So as I finished about half of Brida by Paulo Coelho, whose novel The Alchemist I'd absolutely loved year ago, I had a decision to make. Would I, for the very first time, deliberately abandon a novel? It wasn't a bad novel, but it hadn't gripped me and wasn't really teaching me much or making me think of anything new. It's not a bad book, just not a great one. While as most of my friends know my standards for movies and TV are pretty low (I'll cheerfully watch almost anything), it turns out my standards for books are a trifle higher. I'm aband...

I ended up re-visiting two really great series of posts this week that I'd meant to for a while, that I wanted to share The first is a great series on TechDirt by Mike Masnick about the economics of free . (the link is the concluding article with all the other articles linked at the end.) I couldn't help thinking about how to better apply the economics of scarcity/abundance to the industries I care about. More on that later. The second is a pretty interesting series on the LSVP blog by Jeremy Liew : 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.

I'm not sure how I ended up on Scott Adams' blog last week, but this post really resonated....for a number of reasons. First of all after 2 years at UChicago, I agree that an exposure to a lot of economists/economics will change the way you think forever. You're constantly questioning why you're thinking in a certain way, why you're believing what you do and under what circumstances that belief will change. It can make life a little more complicated, but oh-so-much more interesting.:) Anyway, the main part of Scott Adams post is about cognitive dissonance. He described his reaction to an episode of the Real Time with Bill Maher show, where essentially an economist made an unconventional argument: (i.e. the cost of measures we're taking to fight global warming may basically not be worth it.) I don't know if the argument is true, but the data to prove it definitively false isn't there either. Its a classic economic argument. It should've been hea...

This kind of digressing post is exactly why my productivity can be sub-optimal sometimes. :) Last week, I ended up buying a gift card. For a couple of seconds, the thought crossed my mind, why does a gift card worth $50 cost exactly $50? The convenience of getting a gift card and the flexibility that it gave the recipient was worth something to me and I might be willing to pay a little extra for it. The marginal cost of printing the card (though minimal) did cost the store something, and there was the fixed cost of the infrastructure for the payments. Shouldn't stores then charge more for their gift cards? But then I decided the store could probably charge considerably lesser than $50 for the $50 gift card, but pricing it at $50 still made sense! The best part was the there seem to be so many different reasons for them being able to charge less than the face value of a gift card for it. These were the ones I could come up with right away. Are there any more? Time value of money: ...

Greenspan on the Daily Show: the portion on monetary policy (in the beginning) was like a flashback to Macro .Loved it! I really like Jon Stewart and his detached, look-I'm-poking-fun-at-authority-because-I'm-kinda-smart-and-curious brand of humor. But he seemed to doubt the free market there for a little bit...tsk, tsk. :) Ooo..favorite Stewart/Carell/Colbert moment from the last Emmys (enjoy it while it lasts on YouTube): While I'm embedding videos anyway, here are two more; new Pepsi commercials in India. I love it when movie stars are willing to acknowledge they're old. Also, at this point I'm comfortable saying with some confidence that the average Indian TV advertisement is better than the average US TV advert....if you get em.:) Hmm...someone seems to be taking down advertisements from Youtube too. Seriously, who wouldn't want their ads to be distributed more?