Category: Books
Kindle and DRM and Netflix too
After reading this post, I realize I don't understand my status quo DRM rights with Kindle. That's not a good sign. I did notice this sentence, which I didn't feel the need to parse any further:
Here is the major problem with this scenario.
As a reader, I find it good policy to keep the number of books on my Kindle to below twenty. That forces me to read the ones I order and it also protects me from "stranded" consumer durables. Uncertainty and confusion about my rights only strengthens my desire to keep that policy.
As a writer, I expect the Kindle is temporarily in my financial self-interest, as it gets more "influentials" reading my work and perhaps talking it up. In the longer run I suspect it means a lower equilibrium price for books. One question is whether publishers use "sticky" or inconvenient DRM practices as an implicit collusive method for limiting the spread of Kindle.
Today I was struck by this passage about the origins of Netflix:
Netflix's selection of more than 100,000 DVD rental titles is made possible by the "first-sale doctrine" of U.S. copyright law, which permits buyers of DVDs to lend them out without studios' consent.
In Netflix's early days, its buying team would sometimes purchase DVDs at local Wal-Marts or Best Buys if it couldn't get copies through studios, says Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer.
In contrast, to deliver movies and television shows over the Internet, Netflix has to license them from studios. So far, it has gotten only about 12,000 titles, a hodgepodge of older films such as "Diehard," episodes of popular TV shows including "30 Rock" and a smattering of new releases.
That's right, we had more innovation because some of the usual copyright strictures about negotiating rights did not apply. I am pro-copyright, but once again the default settings make it too hard for successful negotiations to occur.
*Create Your Own Economy*, standing on one foot
A number of readers have asked me for a "one-sentence" review of my book to come. I don't so much like the Amazon summary, so let me try a short enumeration instead. The book offers:
1. A "big picture" analysis of how current economic, social, scientific, and political trends all fit together.
2. A new vision for how "autistic cognitive strengths" are a major dynamic element in human history and that includes a revisionist view of the autism spectrum.
3. New ways of thinking about what you're really good at (and not so good at).
4. A view of why education is much more than just signaling, but why you should be cynical about most education nonetheless.
5. An unapologetic defense of contemporary web culture and also social networks. Google is making us smarter, not stupider.
6. How commerce is shaping the culture of the world to come and what I didn't see in my previous writings on this topic. Why culture is becoming more like marriage.
7. Why the Sherlock Holmes stories are a lot more interesting than most people think.
8. What neuroeconomics should be studying and why. Instead of just doing more brain scans, neuroeconomists should look more closely at already-understood cross-sectional variations in human neurology.
9. An account of how behavioral economics misses the importance of marketplace competition and how and why some behavioral results need to be modified as a result.
10. The importance of neurology for unpacking debates about aesthetics, especially when it comes to music.
11. A discussion of Milton Friedman's greatest tragedy.
12. A definite prediction about the long-run future of humanity.
Here is the table of contents for the book. You can pre-order the book here.
*Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry*
The authors are Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard and the subtitle is The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. Here is one good two-sentence excerpt:
The "evidence" from "oral histories" is even more problematic when economic interests are involved. Oral histories have been known to change when a claim is necessary to obtain access to valuable resources.
This book is too polemic for my tastes and it doesn't try hard enough to understand the other side of the issue. But it makes many very good points backed up by many very real examples. It is strongest when arguing against the lowering of intellectual standards for arguments made on behalf of indigenous groups.
What I’ve been reading
1. Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, by Gene Heyman. This book overstates its claims, but if you wish to see a non-economist defending a (broadly) Beckerian model of addiction, here you go. I couldn't put it down!
2. Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care. I felt I should try one by her to stay in touch. It was better than I had expected though not really smarter than I had expected. Here is an NYT article about her.
3. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. This new translation by Julie Rose is more or less definitive. But it is heavy. If any book ought to be on Kindle…
4. Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us, by Alyssa Katz. There is lots of good material about our social and policy infatuation with housing, but she commits a mistake that I have been "waiting for" — she blames part of the housing bubble on the decline of rent control
5. Javier Cercas, AnatomÃa de un instante. A micro-study of one moment of time (Feb.23) when, post-Franco, Spain ended up sticking with the path to democracy rather than falling back to autocracy. The focus is on conservative Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez and the book blends fictional and non-fictional narrative techniques very effectively. Here is one review. This is a very strong book also with relevance to current events in Iran.
6. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, From Poverty to Prosperity. I've only been reading the Amazon blurb for it — the book isn't out yet — and here is Arnold on the book.
China library of the day
It is supposed to be the world's third largest. Here is the outside view. Here is one good article (with another photo).
*Create Your Own Economy*, table of contents
1. The Future of Thinking Differently
2. Hidden Creativity
3. Why Modern Culture is Like Marriage, in all its Glory
4. IM, Cell Phones, and Facebook [this chapter discusses Twitter as well]
5. The Buddha as Savior and the Professor as Shaman
6. The New Economy of Stories
7. Heroes
8. Beauty isn't What You Think
9. Autistic Politics
10. The Future of the Universe
This is definitely a book you should buy. And unlike Discover Your Inner Economist, no more than a page or two of its content has been presented on MarginalRevolution.
My Bloggingheads with Robert Wright on *The Evolution of God*
It is on theology and religion and you will find it here. They list some of the specific topics as follows:
Bob’s new book, “The Evolution of God” (09:34)
On being a bad secular Buddhist (03:28)
The God Bob believes in (03:17)
Why agnostic Tyler loves the Hebrew Bible (03:26)
How Bob and Tyler came to their personal theologies (06:49)
Quantum physics and king-sized video games as paths to God (07:42)
For me it was a very interesting exchange, but given the topic I cannot predict that everyone will feel the same way. Other points we touched upon were the beautiful elements in Islam and its notion of religious ecstasy, the appeal of Sufism, why Unitarianism is not more popular, the pagan polytheistic versions of Catholicism, penalty and punishment in Haitian voodoo, the preconditions of tolerance, my views on meta-ethics, what does the concept of God really mean anyway, why dogmatic atheism is so unfortunate, and what is the real metaphysical problem that everyone needs to face up to. Bob of course just wrote a book on religion but from my end I view this as a personal dialog rather than me communicating verified scholarly information in an educational manner.
You can buy Bob's book, The Evolution of God, here.
The Singularity is Near
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the excellent Traffic, has a very good piece in the latest NYTimes Magazine on data centers.
The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles – and three milliseconds – from Philadelphia, and into NJ2, where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)
…It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial news stories to help make decisions, you didn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his observation that industry will strive to “produce machines by means of machines” – as well as his prediction that the “more developed the capital,” the more it would seek the “annihilation of space by time.”
I like the quote but doubt that Marx is the best guide to this new world. try Charlie Stross instead.
Assorted links
1. The seven types of bookstore customer. Guess which kind I am?
2. Red playdoh = blue crayon? A study in the nature of humor.
I especially like today's assorted links. I've been thinking about #2 for more than a week.
Fearless Critic
The subtitle is Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide and the author is Robin Goldstein. I am a Contributing Editor and yes he did listen to my most valuable pieces of advice. Described as "brutally honest," this is much, much better than Zagat's and the like. It is the best book of its kind.
Elsewhere on the new book front, there is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss (I hope to review it) and Robert Wright's The Evolution of God; there is some chance I will be doing a BloggingHeads with Wright on this book.
Shop Class as Soulcraft
This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as "knowledge work." Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.
That's from Matthew B. Crawford, who has a Ph.d. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago yet now runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. I would cite shooting baskets, walking, and cooking as three of my analogous "intellectual" activities.
Recommended.
How Cooking Made Us Human
How much can you hate a book that has sentences like these?:
Instinctotherapists, a minority group among raw-foodists, believe that because we are closely related to apes we should model our eating behavior on theirs.
In fact I liked the book — How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham — very much. Here is a good review of the book. The one sentence version is:
We are cooks more than carnivores.
I also liked this fragment:
…a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…
Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain
That's the new and interesting Hugh Thomas book about the leading Spanish businessman of the 20th century, Eduardo Barreiros. Barreiros entered into car manufacturing, but with the Cuban government as his business partner:
Luis Morente, more subtly, thought that the Cuban government wanted to use Eduardo to see whether Communism could collaborate with capitalism as it has done in recent years in China. Businesses that were half-private, half-state-controlled (empresas mixtas) followed. But there were innumerable difficulties: first, the government would select personnel to work with Eduardo according to their political position; second, the "second-rank executives" often found themselves being analysed by their subordinates; absenteeism was not denounced and indeed not considered as such; in Pinar del Rio, workers had to be allowed off to work in the tobacco harvest; incentives and productivity played no part. The party, the Bank of Cuba, the unions, the provincial government were always intervening; energy supplies were irregular; parts were delivered very slowly; no one cared if supplies deteriorated before delivery; and in 1988, after a hurricane, the factory was flooded. All these things needed Eduardo's continual attention.
It should be noted that, relative to the standards of the Cuban economy, the venture was a success.
Vernon Smith’s autobiography
It's called Discovery — A Memoir and I enjoyed it very much. If you, like me, wish that more books were just a bit wilder, weirder (I mean that in the good sense), and real, you will like this one. Here's one brief bit:
…I will grow up to be a loner, protecting myself from distractions, but thereby projecting an image of aloofness that was never part of what I felt inside.
It's a hard book to summarize. It offers a discussion of whether soda tastes different from the can as opposed to the bottle, a detailed recipe for perfect hamburger, an even more detailed recipe for perfect chili, how and why Vernon used to refer to himself in the third person ("Dingy"), the economic history of Kansas before WWII, Vernon and his mother working for CORE in the 1940s, what it was like to get an economics Ph.d. at Harvard back then, Vernon's lifelong pacifist and anti-war stance, how he almost gave up professional economics and ended up setting rail rates in 1957, a splendid history of thought of economics at Purdue University, an excellent memorial to Jonathan Hughes (and a discussion of Hughes as an ex-Mormon), why experimental economics is important, talk of Vernon's abilities and disabilities when it comes to focus and "attention-shifting," why it is rational to believe in God, and a thought on Kahlil Gibran.
The style eschews silky narration and expects that you can keep up with the flow of information. Not everyone can.
If you think you might be interested, you probably are, One Amazon reviewer writes:
'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no
self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential
economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he
thinks.
*Chief Culture Officer*
That's the new Grant McCracken book and do check out the subtitle at this link. It is very exciting, very worthwhile. I need to send Tim Sullivan a blurb and I can't find his current email. How about this?
"Grant McCracken is a leading guru of ideas who combines a mastery of marketing, culture, anthropology, and modern business practice. I love his work and this will prove one of the most stimulating books of the year."