Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • 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:

  • Verizon Throttling Netflix

    A technical but reasonably concise explanation of how Verizon is slowing down Netflix, from Level 3.

  • Comcast

    Via The New Yorker

  • Never Use Comcast

    Assuming you have a choice…

    https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service

  • Two Factor Security Relies on Both Factors

    This is kind of amusing. Two factor security is really very cool. Gmail handles it very well. If I log into Gmail from a coffee shop or random computer, Gmail sends my phone a text to make sure it’s me. Much harder to hack my email.

    But a Wall Street Journal reporter decided to show how cool two factor security was by publishing his Twitter password. Not realizing that the key word in “two factor security” is “two”.

    No one hacked his Twitter account, he just got so many text messages that his phone became unusable.

    So use two factor authentication. Really, it’s the best. Just don’t hand out one of the factors…

  • Take Back One Kadam

    Another title I never thought I’d write, on the topic of iWatch sales. From It’s a Very Nice Website:

    Now, it might seem ridiculous to try to predict how many of a thing we know nothing about will sell, but it’s simple, really. You just take the total number of watches ever sold ever, take the cosine (always take the cosine… take it AND RUN AND NEVER STOP RUNNING), adjust for inflation, apply the least squares method (because only squares wear smartwatches) and then — and this is the part people always forget — take back  one kadam to honor the Hebrew God, whose iWatch this is.

    Actually, the geek in me really likes the least squares reference…

  • Number Needed to Treat/Harm

    Two well explained videos on evaluating health treatment’s effectiveness, via Healthcare Triage. Watch them in order.

  • Free Electricity

    This is in Australia, but still.

    Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day

    To think that rooftop solar has had such an impact as to make the cost of electricity negative in the middle of the day anywhere is pretty amazing.

  • The New Fourth Amendment

    Zach Weinersmith, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame has a serious privacy blog post up.

    He states that the Fourth Amendment can be violated as gently as you please any time digital information enters or leaves your home. So, perhaps an amended amendment is in order:

    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, unless we’re really totally subtle about it.

    It’s definitely worth a read. His final comment:

    I no longer expect to have a Fourth Amendment. I really don’t. But do I have to be a good sport about it too?