Category: Books

Many of you wrote in to recommend www.bookcrossing.com for discarded books.  The system works as follows:

1. Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
2. Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
3. Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it.

Claudia Morgenstern directs me to the Wikipedia entry on BookCrossing.  Some readers report that coffee shops are especially popular places to leave books.  The "hunting" aspect may make this more efficient than simply leaving your book somewhere.  Furthermore BookCrossing seems like an alternative means of finding dates.  Here is a list of BookCrossing meet-up groups.

When I finish a book, I dislike keeping it, unless I expect to read it again.  My Russian wife claims I throw things out for the sake of the action itself; she is right.  I also enjoy giving books away.  But when you are traveling, who should receive the book?

At times I engage in serendipitous fantasy, by leaving the book on a park bench and imagining what might happen to it, how seditious ideas might change lives around the globe.  But lately the practical economist in me has taken over.  How should I discard books so as to maximize social welfare?

In Singapore I tried leaving a book — a slightly salacious one at that — in the public library.  Surely it will be found there.  But will anyone be allowed to check it out?  Alternatively, you might think that the greatest number of people will see it in a crowded train or bus station.

One radical option is to leave the book, well…in a bookstore.  Most likely, the book will be sold.  If you bring it to the counter they will be puzzled but I suspect will be willing to ring it up and punch in a code.

Of course now the book has a price, which can restrict the chance it is ever read.  But the chance of it getting into the right hands — the high-valuing user — has gone way up.  This is a testament to the role of middlemen in a capitalist economy.  The book is probably worth more to the world at full price, in a bookstore, than lying on a bench for free.

So now you know where to leave your discarded books.

They are now published by Liberty Fund, that is the Sraffa edition, order them here, all for a mere $106.  Or download here.  Here is a searchable on-line edition of his Principles.  I’ve loved Ricardo since I first read him; no economist more tightly mixed superb common sense and counterintuitive absurdities (theory of rent and implicit notion of opportunity cost), but there is more of the former.  He is an excellent writer as well, and a classical liberal thinker of importance.

Professors Ghose, Smith and Telang chose a random sample of books in print and studied how often used copies were available on Amazon. In their sample, they found, on average, more than 22 competitive offers to sell used books, with a striking 241 competitive offers for used best sellers. The prices of the secondhand books were substantially cheaper than the new, but of course the quality of the used books (in terms of wear and tear) varied considerably.

According to the researchers’ calculations, Amazon earns, on average, $5.29 for a new book and about $2.94 on a used book. If each used sale displaced one new sale, this would be a less profitable proposition for Amazon.

But Mr. Bezos is not foolish. Used books, the economists found, are not strong substitutes for new books. An increase of 10 percent in new book prices would raise used sales by less than 1 percent. In economics jargon, the cross-price elasticity of demand is small.

One plausible explanation of this finding is that there are two distinct types of buyers: some purchase only new books, while others are quite happy to buy used books. As a result, the used market does not have a big impact in terms of lost sales in the new market.

Moreover, the presence of lower-priced books on the Amazon Web site, Mr. Bezos has noted, may lead customers to "visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books." The data appear to support Mr. Bezos on this point.

Applying the authors’ estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon’s sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon’s used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.

Furthermore, consumers greatly benefit from this market: the study’s authors estimate that consumers gain about $67.6 million. Adding in Amazon’s profits and subtracting out the $45.3 million of losses to authors and publishers leaves a net gain of $85.5 million.

…advertising in essentially un-English…Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and selling, is by definition boastful – and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.

For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule.  The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.

That is from Kate Fox’s excellent Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.  If you enjoy the blogging of Grant McCracken, or simply wish to understand the English better, this book is for you.

One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is europemuede [weary of Europe] and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star.  Or there is another direction, but still extensive.  One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; wearying of that, one eats on gold; one burns down half of Rome in order to visualize the Trojan conflagration.  This method cancels itself and is the spurious infinity…

The method I propose…consists in changing the method of cultivation and the kinds of crops.  Here at once is the principle of limitation, the sole saving principle in the world.  The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.  A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement.

Two points: a) mid-19th century Denmark cannot have been so much fun, and b) it is time to move on to Singapore…

By the way, that quotation is from "Rotation of Crops," in Either/Or.

Fiction:

1. The da Vinci Code (in English)

2-9. All in English, four more Dan Brown titles plus Paulo Coelho, etc.

10. The da Vinci Code (in Arabic)

Non-fiction:

1. Easiest Way to Learn Arabic

The bottom line: English is the number one language here, and the natives truly are a minority.

I just stopped in to the Fairfax County Public Library, and found it was flat out empty.  Could it be that everyone is at home reading…?

Yes the new Harry Potter will be a big hit, but the real growth in publishing revenue is coming elsewhere:

In 2004, religious books represented 7 percent of all book sales, with $1.95 billion in net revenues. The book industry overall totaled $26.45 billion in net revenues, according to the Book Industry Study Group. Translated into consumer spending, readers spent $3.7 billion on religious books, a category that includes Christian books. That is an increase of nearly 285 percent from 1983.  "It is the only book category where we’ve seen that kind of growth rate," Greco said.

Here is the full story.

Last year before leaving for Liberia, I solicited book recommendations from a few friends (including Alex).  I wanted to come up with a fairly short list of books that Liberian leaders should read if they were interested in building an economic system that would be conducive to economic growth.

Here is the list of books that I took and donated to a college library:

1. The Birth of Plenty, by William Bernstein
2. The Noblest Triumph, by Tom Bethell
3. The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto
4. The Elusive Quest for Growth, by William Easterly
5. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes
6. How the West Grew Rich, by Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell

My lectures last year were essentially built around the material in Easterly’s book.  This year, I’ll be lecturing from Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, et al.  In fact, Jim Gwartney personally donated twenty-five copies of this book for me to take along for the Liberians!

So what books would you take if you were headed off to sub-Saharan Africa, with the chance to lecture to academicians and policy makers?  I have opened up the comments section for you to post your suggestions.

Remember Reason Papers?  Starting in 1974, they provided serious discussions of "nutty" libertarian issues before the mainstream took notice.  Here is the link.  Here are the archives.  Here is Jeff Hummel’s excellent Problems with Austrian Business Cycle Theory, circa 1979.  Here is Loren Lomasky’s review of Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, plus his review of Derek Parfit.  Or try this familiar guy on the economics of epistemology.

In a new blog, Radley Balko destroys Morgan Spurlock and his new book on the fast food industry – and it didn’t take him thirty days.  Lots of amazing stuff including this hilarious takedown of ACORN.

Thanks to Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run for the link.

Read it here, and thanks to Craig Newmark for the pointer.

I am writing this after only ten fun-filled pages of John Twelve Hawks’s The Traveler, the new publishing sensation.  I dragged Alex and Robin Hanson to Borders after lunch yesterday and picked up a copy from the front table on the first day of release.  Is it a spy story?  Fantasy?  Science fiction? 

The author, by the way, claims to "live off the grid," here is a profile (of sorts).  To maintain his anonymity he (supposedly) speaks only by satellite phone to his publisher and agent.  Here is the book’s entertaining website, which includes Q&A with the author.  Here is a strong Janet Maslin review, from The New York Times.