The Gong Show

Books and Price

I’m reading a great piece by Clay Shirky on the local bookstore business model and the American Booksellers Association’s effort to stop Amazon, Walmart and Target from selling new bestsellers for under cost.  And, it’s making me wonder about what technology has done to book prices throughout time.

Lets take content out of the equation for a second. How can we analyze book costs without discussing content? How about the Bible… its content has remained relatively consistent for a long period of time and has always been in the public domain.

What is the cost of the Bible over time?  Starting with say the 5th century through the 21st century? My guess is it would be very high from 5th through 15th century, with, at best, a lightly linear decline in cost. But, then in the 15th century, Gutenberg invents movable type, and all of the sudden, the price drops off a cliff.  A new baseline is set (deep in the basement of the old baseline) and then there is a continual decline (likely more logarithmic than linear in shape) until the price hits zero in the 20th century once the Bible can be distributed digitally.

Based on this Bible example, I posit that a “book” without content (Can a book really exist without content?  Especially a digital one?) is worth zero today and has been zero for over 20 years now.  But, bestsellers today do not cost zero (nor should they). When I buy a digitally distributed bestseller on Amazon today, what is the value of content?

Sam Lessin makes a convincing argument that information’s value is inversely proportional to the number of people that know the information.  This argument does apply to books: books start out at a high price when they are first released and become nearly worthless once many people have read them. For example, I purchased a copy of Barbarians at the Gate for $0.01 on eBay a few years ago and in the same year purchased a brand new copy of The Ghost Map for $20.

I wish I had a more optimistic conclusion here. The American Booksellers Association will not accept the idea that their archive of popular book inventory is nearly worthless, and the only thing valuable is the new books they release that people have not read yet.  Today, people will pay a reasonable price for archive books, but those customers are typically paying for either A) the convenience of paper over digital distribution or B) the book is still under copyright and the reader doesn’t want to deal with the secondary market.

In the end, I return to Clay’s piece, in which he recommends that local bookstores that support the community and create a home-away-from-home for people consider a non-profit or co-op model.  Clays admits this a really crazy idea, but then ends with “However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try.”

Direct Giving

The drama over Kiva’s slightly misleading social stance has boiled over onto the NYTimes.  To summarize, Kiva has been marketing itself as a model to loan money directly to third world entrepreneurs.  But, the truth is that most entrepreneurs on the site already have an outstanding loan with a local micro-finance institution (MFI), and Kiva appearance of direct giving is really just a layer of marketing to enable people to give small loans to web-enabled MFIs around the world.

This layer of abstraction is fine by me… Kiva rocks. But for most of Kiva’s lenders, the idea that a lender’s choice of project is irrelevant on Kiva is surprising and disillusioning to most lenders.

The NYTimes piece gives the impression that the web is too nascent to enable direct Peer-to-Peer giving. That’s why I’m so impressed by DonorsChoose, who actually does enable direct giving to a specific classroom.  100% of the funds from a DonorsChoose donation goes to purchase the materials for the project you choose, and they implemented an e-procurement solution in order significantly reduce the opportunity for fraud.

Similarly, in the for-profit space, I’m excited by the prospects of Kickstarter, which is the new form of patronage online.  There’s no layer of abstraction in Kickstarter, the project you select to sponsor is the project that receives your funds, the giving is direct.

In areas where there is already an infrastructure in place and widespread internet connectivity penetration, direct giving online is possible and is already happening today.  It takes a ton of legwork to pull off and is not the easiest path to sponsorship.  But, it’s worth clearing the hurdles to enable direct giving because the resulting transparency and lender empowerment is worth the effort.

USV.com

We launched a new website at Union Square Ventures. It’s still a blog, just like it was 4 years ago, built on top of Movable Type.  But, now, we’ve got a whole bunch of other dynamic content widgets (powered by Magnify).  So, the latest blog posts, tweets, job postings and rich media from all our portfolio companies will be aggregated in one place.

@EricFriedman is the rockstar at USV that ran with this.  And, I’m incredibly impressed by the design talent of Phoebe Espiritu. Props to both.

Recession Statistics Sliced by Demographics

The New York Times consistently steps up the level of journalism in a digital age by publishing flash charts like this one.  It’s a fantastic, yet painfully transparent, visualization of how the recession affects varying demographics differently.

The unemployment rate for my demographic (white, male, college graduate, Age 25-44) is one of the lowest of all possible demographic combinations at 3.9%. What is particularly painful about this visual analysis is the effect race has on the statistics.  By contrast the unemployment rate for a black, male, college graduate, Age 25-44 is 8.3%, which is twice as high as its white equivalent.

Kudos to the NYTimes for a strikingly interesting and interactive piece of journalism.

(via HackerNews and great comment thread there)

Android's Affordances

I had an opportunity to play with the Droid yesterday (thanks to @ericfriedman). It was an overall positive experience. But, it felt like the user experience was missing a final coat of polish.  Here’s one small example that is very typical of the whole Android experience.

When using an iPhone, there is only 1 physical button on the face of the device, the home button.  This button always does what it says: takes you home.  Why does 1 dedicated button with consistent action matter?  Because it means all the available choices for interaction must be visible on the touchscreen.  In HCI terms, all interaction choices have a visible, explicit affordance.

By contrast, in Android there are 4 face buttons: back, options, home, and search.  Many interaction choices are hidden behind the options button.  So, I often found myself staring at the screen, asking myself where XYZ feature is, only to find it hidden behind an options button click.  But, that experience was not consistent it that the choices behind the options button changed based on the mode or app I was in.  By having an options button, many of the advanced functionality could be removed from the touchscreen, which simplified the interface, but it meant I was often guessing what feature were hidden behind options.  In HCI terms: there are no affordances for the choices behind the options button.

It’s not surprising that Apple decided to not to incorporate an options button like Android.  Apple’s operating systems have been optimized for a single-click mouse for years, based on the exact same arguement: don’t hide options behind a right click with no visible affordance.  They took this design paradigm and applied it to the iPhone.  It’s yet another way in which the following SAT-style analogy applies… iPhone:Android::Mac:PC