Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Culture

  • What Should an eBook Cost?

    Back to the Amazon/Hachette dispute. Again, I am not an expert here.

    Amazon says eBooks should be $9.99. They obviously have a lot of data on this. That’s what they do. And they’ve concluded that a book at $9.99 earns more than the same book at $14.95 because more people buy it. And it’s not like there’s added cost to producing one more eBook.

    That’s a really important concept. Each physical book costs at least X, but after the first one, the cost of producing an eBook is just keeping the website up.

    As a software developer I’m quite familiar with this concept. Once the software is built, for a subscription web product, additional user licenses are basically all profit. We like license revenue.

    It sounds like this dispute is completely over the book price. Hachette apparently wants $14.99 with the extra margin (for them). Amazon says $9.99. It is not about the percentage that Amazon takes. They want 30%, which is pretty standard (see Apple).

    I’ve become more and more on Amazon’s side here. Hachette has been getting their authors to publish scathing comments about Amazon and Amazon has largely remained silent. Today they posted a blog explaining their position:

    A key objective is lower e-book prices. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out-of-stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market — e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can be and should be less expensive.

    And they save the Hachette slam for the end:

    One more note on our proposal for how the total revenue should be shared. While we believe 35% should go to the author and 35% to Hachette, the way this would actually work is that we would send 70% of the total revenue to Hachette, and they would decide how much to share with the author. We believe Hachette is sharing too small a portion with the author today, but ultimately that is not our call.

    I translate that as “greedy Hachette bastards”…

  • Diversity (or lack thereof) in Tech

    Twitter followed Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Yahoo and released stats on workplace diversity. First of all, what other companies are doing this? So even if the stats are bad, transparency is a step forward.

    The charts are below. To me they are not surprising.

    My undergrad degree is in music and I did a masters in Comp Sci (which I frankly didn’t finish). I went to Brooklyn College for my masters. It’s a good school overall. It’s part of CUNY, which is the City University of NY. It’s a good university system, but it’s fundamentally inexpensive for city kids (did I mention I was a musician? not swimming in money).

    You would think that the expensive schools would be the most exclusive and the cheaper city colleges would be more diverse.

    You’d think.

    A representative class for me at Brooklyn College (yes, a while ago) had about 30 people. There would be one African American, and generally it was a truly African immigrant. There would be one woman (typically Russian). And there’s be a bunch of white guys and Asian guys.

    I don’t know why this is true. But I’ve been in tech for a long time. I’ve asked recruiters to try to send more diverse candidates. I’ve never seen a good ratio.

    So I guess I’m saying, don’t bash Twitter (or the others). They are admitting it’s an issue and showing the bad stats. That’s the first step.

    I can’t answer the race part of this. I can say that I encourage my daughters all the time to get technical. Danielle is like me, a math whiz. She will not allow anyone to tell her “girls aren’t good at math”. We’ve been very clear that she should be kicking all boys butts in math.

    Verizon has some good commercials on this topic. It’s a long fight. Tech is tech. Smart wins. But it will take a while…

    Twitter Stats:

  • Crazy Brooklyn Filming Tonight

    No clue what is going on. Our block and two blocks either way are filled with film trucks. A store across the street that is currently vacant has crazy bright lights in front, with some older folks dressed up who look like you they might be famous but you wouldn’t remember exactly. Filming is clearly going on inside.

    The no parking signs mention UR&R Projects and Broken Record Productions, neither of which give me a clue on Google..

    So I went to the source, the guy running one of the trucks that does food for everyone.

    He said HBO, some rock & roll movie about the 70s, Woodstock, etc.

    They say if you want to know where a Google data center is, ask the pizza delivery guys. It’s all about the food…

  • Misleading Stat o’ the Day

    The Atlantic’s “The Misguided Freakout About Basement-Dwelling Millennials” points out a critical issue with the “young people are living with their parents” statistics:

    From the Census reports:

    It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents’ home.

    Well that changes things rather a lot, doesn’t it. College enrollment is at an all time high. Hmm, perhaps you should break out in college, vs. not in college.

    Hard to see a frightening trend in that chart.

  • Statue of Liberty

    I so rarely see the full poem, you just see the last line. So perhaps a day late…

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
    With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  • Amazon v Hachette

    I haven’t followed this debate too closely. There was plenty of press discussing big bad Amazon but Amazon was being totally quiet. So I was reserving any judgment.

    I still am, but this blog post from the co-publisher of The Permanent Press, a small literary fiction publisher, is an important data point in my overall opinion:

    I give Amazon a four star review for not only their efficiency and  work they do, but for leveling the playing field, and here are the four reasons why.

    1) When you send orders to a store, distributor or wholesaler, publishers can count on returns of 20 to 80%. If Amazon orders books (which they do in increasingly larger numbers) it’s rare to get more than one or two percent returned. They are masters at this and consequently enable us to cut-down on our print runs.

    2) Amazon makes it easy to post reviews of our books, whether they are online or print reviews. Nor is there any discrimination, space-wise, between the coverage we get for individual titles or Hachette gets. Additionally, when one of our books is ordered, they list other titles of ours that might be of interest, proving themselves to be great marketers.

    3) Earnings from Kindle sales are excellent as both publisher and author find more profit (especially when we, as publishers, split eBook income on a 50:50 basis with our writers) with virtually no production costs. I’ve heard that most of the bigger houses don’t do this, writing contracts giving most authors only 25% of electronic income. Perhaps some of the authors complaining about Amazon on social media, would be better served if they complained to their publishers, like Melville or Hachette, if they are not getting 50% of this pie.

    4) Amazon generally pays us within 30 days, with wire transfers to our bank. Nobody else in the industry come anywhere close to them and enables us to keep up with printing costs and salaries.

    Point (1) is something I never would have considered, but must be a big deal. As a small business owner, point (4) is huge. No big companies pay within 30 days. Stalling beyond 90 seems to be standard corporate practice these days.

  • Waffles?

    Down the street from my favorite bar is a British pub called Chip Shop. They’ve obviously been a big World Cup pub.

    This is their sign today:

    20140702_135033

  • Every Sperm is Sacred

    Something about today reminded me of this Monty Python classic:

  • Writing’s on the Wall

    More from OK Go. This one is an optical illusion fan’s dream:

  • The Gunfighter

    Language clearly NSFW but also hilarious. Worth watching full screen.