View 614 March 15 - 21, 2010 (original) (raw)
Friday, March 19, 2010
St. Joseph's Day
The Swallows are Back
The publishing industry continues to adjust -- or fail to adjust, depending on your views -- to the electronic delivery revolution. Note the importance Amazon, an enormous seller of conventionally printed books, gives to this.
�They cannot remove the �buy� buttons from two major publishers� lists without doing serious long-term damage to their own brand.�
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/technology/internet/18amazon.html>
--- Roland Dobbins
None of this is settled, of course. But now that Amazon has made it possible to read Kindle format books (including the free ones) on PC, Linux WINE, Mac, iPhone, presumably iPad, and predictably every other possible system, they directly compete with paperback books however distributed (including by Amazon). That's a game changer in my judgment.
It revives questions about intellectual property and piracy, since I do not believe it will be all that long before there are programs that convert Kindle format books to something that can be redistributed on sites like scribd which use other people's works to draw a crowd to which they can display advertising. Whether anyone will have the incentive to buy a Kindle book, decode it, then repost it for everyone else is debated by many of those who say piracy isn't important in ebook markets; we do know that scanned versions of books have long been made available to pirates, then reposted. The entire oeuvre of the estates of several authors including Poul Anderson and Jack Chalker were available on scribd until the (now disbanded) SFWA copyright rights protection team intervened.
Anderson's works have been collected into relevant volumes, some with introductory matter by his widow Karen, and are being published by Baen Books. The entire Terran saga from the early League through the Empire and beyond. It begins with The Van Rijn Method, continues with David Falkayn Star Trader, and then the early Empire stories, after which comes the entire Flandry Saga beginning with Young Flandry (which Poul really wanted to give the title Mr. Midshipman Flandry; he wasn't shy about admitting his indebtedness to C. S. Forester) and continuing in a number of volumes. All those stories hold up pretty well. They're good space opera done by a master story teller. That fact that Baen Books is bringing these out in print editions (some appeared just this year, and there are still some to come) augurs well for the future of paper book competition with pirated editions of print editions.
Whether paid for e-Books can compete with pirated e-Books isn't quite so clear, and we'll have to see what happens. My own experience is that there isn't a lot of money in e-Books; on the other hand I've had significant royalties from Audible editions of many of my works, both mine solo and the collaborations with Niven. I haven't worried much about Kindle's text-to-speech capabilities; no one I know really wants to listen to those if they can possibly afford the Audible edition.
In any event this is another part of a long and continuing story. The outcome will be important. My guess is that over time the Information Delivery Revolution will win out in that a very great part of the publishing industry -- books, newspapers, magazines, music and music videos, movies -- will be through electronic delivery systems, and much of that will be to hand-held devices. How rapidly that happens is subject to debate, but I note that few of us predicted just how rapidly the Internet would influence commerce and buying habits.
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The frantic search for enough votes to pass something that can be called health care continues, and no one know for sure what will happen. The Democrats claim they have enough votes or will shortly; other sources say the number of undecided remains at 30 or so, and there are not enough votes to pass a Slaughter Rule adoption of the Senate Bill, much less a straight up or down vote on the Senate Bill. I have few inside sources, and those I have are divided.
"Will Altmire Walk the Plank" poses the picture of Democratic waverers bound and driven out on a plank above the voters as circling sharks. It describes some of the measure the Democrat leadership is taking to get a bare majority.
Limbaugh thinks that if they do get a Slaughter Rule adoption, the Democrats will take the Senate Bill directly to the White House and get it signed. Then they'll worry about changes later. This means that the Nebraska Corn Husker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, SEIU sweep, and all the other stuff will be law. That will make the November Election even more interesting. Of course I don't know that Limbaugh has any better sources than the rest of us, but it's certainly possible.
There's little point in speculation on all this because it's not settled.. We'll know soon enough.
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According to the Wall Street Journal "Why Canada Avoided a Mortgage Meltdown" by Alex Pollock,
Here's the home ownership rate in Canada: 68%. In the U.S. it's 67%. The U.S. rate peaked at the top of the housing bubble at 69%. In other words, two very different housing finance systems, one much riskier than the other, produced virtually the same home ownership rate.
Canada has no Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, and wasn't bitten by a horrible housing bubble and subsequent collapse. The US has not yet paid for the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we've just barely paid off the savings and loan collapse of a generation ago. Will we continue with government actions injecting money into the housing market and then pretending to be astonished when prices rise?
If you inject more money into a market, prices will rise. Economics isn't all that scientific, but this one "law" isn't hard to understand.
When things change in November, this is one of the things we have to fix. We really do not need to allow Barney Frank's empire to continue.
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For your delectation - The Multiplying Mystery of Moonwater:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/
y2010/18mar_moonwater.htm?list1067857"We thought we understood the Moon, but we don't," says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. "It's clear now that water exists up there in a variety of concentrations and geologic settings. And who'd have thought that today we'd be pondering the Moon's hydrosphere?"
"So far we've found three types of moonwater," says Spudis. "We have Mini-SAR's thick lenses of nearly pure crater ice, LCROSS's fluffy mix of ice crystals and dirt, and M-cube's thin layer that comes and goes all across the surface of the Moon."
"It contains even more water ice plus a treasure chest of other compounds we weren't even looking for,"
Hmm. When you go exploring, literally turning over rocks, you learn new things. Who would have thunk it?
Ed
Indeed.
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>Will we continue with government actions injecting money into the housing market and then pretending to be astonished when prices rise?
Ditto for higher ed.
Steve Chu (getting ready to send a daughter to college)
Indeed. When you inject money into a market -- as in "making it possible for the poor to have that service" -- you will inevitably raise the cost of the goods in that market. Subsidies always raise prices. Over a long enough run there will be, in a free economy, more of the good manufactured, and prices will go back down, but if you continue to inject money into the system it's never likely to stabilize.
Education is a perfect example of this. If you are going to make something available to everyone you will have to provide more of it; when you can't instantly expand the supply, while the demand is rising, the result is an increase in price. This is of course an elementary fact of the first principle of economics, and is intuitive when thought about, but alas, many don't think about it.
Of course America seems to believe that a really good investment is higher pay and much higher pensions for unionized education employees. It is not entirely clear what the return on that investment will be. Something of that sort was tried back in the Depression under the name Townsend Plan. The State of Washington pretty well went broke on the Townsend Plan without getting the economic benefits it had hoped for. (I simplify, but it's a reasonable summary.)
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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/hacker-bricks-cars/ May be interesting...
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Apple Swears iPad Partners to Secrecy (Business Week)
COMPUTERS March 19, 2010, 12:05AM EST text size: TT Apple Swears iPad Partners to Secrecy Developers must sequester the tablet computer in rooms with blacked-out windows, reflecting secrecy around a product that may mean billions of dollars in sales
By Douglas MacMillan
Apple makes big demands of software developers who want an early crack at the iPad. Would-be testers of the tablet-style computer, due to be released Apr. 3, must promise to keep it isolated in a room with blacked-out windows, according to four people familiar with the more than 10-page pact that bars partners from disclosing information about the iPad.
To ensure that it can't be removed, the iPad must also remain tethered to a fixed object, said the people, who asked not to be named because their plans for the iPad have not been made public. Apple (AAPL) won't send out an iPad until potential partners send photographic evidence that they've complied.
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