Fractals of Change

Kindle Travel Test

I could read books on my Amazon Kindle even when the bright sun was over my shoulder, not just when it was in front of me making me squint as in the very posed picture above. Like a book, Kindle isn’t backlit; it has crisp black type on a grayish surface. At night the gray is slightly less reflective than pulp paper so I couldn’t read Kindle quite as far into the evening as Mary could read her traditional books; had to give up and turn on the light slightly sooner which mattered on our vacation because we were either draining the house battery of a boat or using the last few watts of solar-generated electricity in a rain-swept cabin on land.

Although I did have an opportunity to recharge, Kindle’s own battery – since it’s not providing light and since I wasn’t using the radio – seems as if it would have easily lasted through two weeks and the two books I read on it.

Kindle was more than worth its 10.3 ounces in books I didn’t have to carry. Running out of things to read is not acceptable on a vacation and outdoor adventure-type vacations both make it difficult to predict how much involuntary down (reading) time you’ll have and make it undesirable to carry a lot of extra weight.

I needed to bring one book to read during takeoffs and landings when airlines don’t allow “anything with an on-off switch” to be on. That was Vito Dumas’ Alone Through the Roaring Forties, a good read for someone doing a little tame sailing in the Sea of Cortez. He went around the world single handled in the “wrong direction” (West to East) around all three fearsome southern capes, usually at forty degrees south latitude.

While still in the US, I loaded Kindle with The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  Only read the first two so Kite Runner was backup.

The reading experience was very similar to reading a paperback: better in some ways because, if you leave Kindle next to your plate and use your hands to eat, it doesn’t spring closed like a paperback wants to. The pages (at a typesize I can read) have less words on them than a book and there’s a slight pause and flicker at page turn which takes a little getting used to, not much though. The design is flawed in having active controls three-quarters of the way down both sides of the case: it’s almost impossible to avoid accidental page turn in one direction or the other – especially when using the cursor or trying to turn Kindle off. BTW, when you turn Kindle back on, it knows what page you were reading.

My crew was in to word games and Kindle’s onboard copy of The New Oxford American Dictionary was invaluable in solving disputes which would have been tough otherwise with no way to access wiktionary.

Other Kindle posts on FOC:

Kindle – Web Browsing Reviewed

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Kindle – Free Internet Browsing for Just $400

Kindle – Shape of the Web to Come?

Kindle – Reader Questions and Comments

Happy Hour

Next Tuesday, Feb 5th, I'll be a guest on the Happy Hour show hosted by my friend Cody Willard (2d from left). The show is on FoxBusiness Network every weekday from 5 to 6 PM; appropriately, it's broadcast from the Bull and Bear Bar in the Waldorf Astoria. Below is an episode from last week.

Note: If you can't see the video below, link here.

Even if your local cable or satellite network doesn't carry Fox Business (DirecTV channel is 359, not on Dish) all segments from the show are available as video at www.foxbusiness.com. Trick is to go there, click on VIDEO in the horizontal menu bar, then scroll down to the Search for Videos box in the middle of the new page (don't use the search box at the top of the page), enter "Happy Hour", and click Search.  Each segment (guest) of each Happy Hour show is then accessible. Since it's broadcast live (and then, again, at 11 PM) the segment obviously won't be on the web until after it appears on the air but they do seem to go up almost immediately after they happen.

Don't know quite what we'll talk about but Cody is good at making almost anything fun and puncturing pomposity in guests. Hope you'll join us on TV or on the Web. BTW, you can rate the segment on the web. If you come to the bar, we can have a drink and you can tell me how I did in person.

America’s Creation as a Secular Republic – Long May It Stand

While on tour for his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph J. Ellis often heard variants of the question “Why must we choose between Al Gore and George W. Bush, whereas American voters two hundred years ago could choose between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson?” According to its foreword, he wrote American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies At The Founding of The Republic to answer the question “how did the American founding happen?” given that the founders were neither saints nor demigods.

The book tells the stories of what Ellis believes were the triumphs and failures of the founders. Literally, Ellis recounts these historic events as stories so that he can illuminate the characters of the founders who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed but “somehow managed to establish a set of ideas and institutions that, over the stretch of time, became the blueprint for political and economic success for the nation-state in the modern world. ... representative government bottomed on the principal of popular sovereignty, a market economy fueled by the energies of unfettered citizens, a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion [emphasis mine], and the rule of law that presumed the equality of all citizens. What seemed so improbable at the time has become the accepted global formula for national success. The only alternative, apart from North Korea’s and Cuba’s last-stand versions of communism is Islamic fundamentalism. And its essentially medieval values appear to be fighting a desperate rearguard action against modernity itself.”

Ellis doesn’t give a definitive answer to his question. Among the possible answers, he quotes George Washington: “the foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Suspicion but an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period. At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own.” In other words, as Ellis explained, the Enlightenment had happened and the founders were Enlightenment men (and at least Abigail Adams was certainly an Enlightenment woman).

The founders were not religious– far from it. Jefferson said that men were endowed by “their creator” with “certain inalienable rights” but he was deliberately vague as to who or what that creator might be. They were not as radical as Thomas Paine who “believed that a society of genuine equality and justice would materialize naturally once the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest” but they “created the first wholly secular state…[at a time when] it was broadly assumed that shared religious convictions were the primary basis for the common values that linked together the people of any community…” They did their best to make sure the new republic would be ruled by neither kings nor priests nor, worst of all, the combination of the two.

Ellis’ book is about much more than the secularism of the republic which the founders created. In fact, because a secular republic was one of the very few things they actually agreed on, it doesn’t get much attention in the book besides the phrases I’ve quoted. However, I think that this separation of church and state and the prohibition of a state religion were essential to success then and, more to the point, are essential to our success now.

Almost as if by induction, the rise of religious fundamentalism in one society or country seems to give rise to fundamentalism in other societies and countries as well. As a liberal in the sense the founders used the word, I can’t be in favor of denying other people, even fundamentalists, their religious beliefs – but do face the liberal conundrum that, when fundamentalists of almost any stripe get what they want, among the first casualties are liberal beliefs and, not far behind that, those who hold them.

It sounds like prejudice, it may be a prejudice, but I won’t vote for the likable Mike Huckabee BECAUSE he was a Baptist Minister. I also wouldn’t vote for a priest, rabbi (I’m ethnically Jewish) , or inman. It’s way too dangerous to let church and state get intertwined; it’s way too dangerous to have leaders who have even the faintest suspicion that they get their orders directly from God (whatever god). Too much horror and too much terror have been committed on the orders of “God” (as interpreted by his priests).

Chinese and Eastern European communism proved that Thomas Paine was wrong: you don’t need priests to have a tyranny; Karl Marx to the contrary, religion is not the only opiate of the masses.

But religion has no place in politics. That was one of the things, one of the most important things, the founders got right. We can’t let the dangerous political power of Islamic fundamentalism draw us into remingling church and state or giving political power to our own fundamentalists. If we do, the fault will be “intirely” our own.

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader came and got buried among the holiday packages. But it emerged from post-holiday pile of cardboard, wrapping paper, and ribbons. Since we were planning a three day trip, it was a good time for a road test.

Not surprisingly, there is no access to the Sprint network – the network which underlies Amazon’ WhisperNet - in ruralVermont so couldn’t download any books before leaving home. Contented myself with reading the introduction already loaded onto Kindle and with practice page-turning.

The electronic ink IS amazing. As you “turn” each page by pressing a next page bar on the side of the unit, there’s a flicker as the ink drops rush from their old positions to their new ones. Reminds me of the Harvard University Marching Band which, in my day, eschewed marching; a pistol was fired and each player ran from his current location to wherever he was supposed to be in the next formation.

Once the ink drops reassemble, the look is much more like good ink on good paper than dots on a screen. You read by reflected light; no light comes from the screen – just like a “real” book.  Better in some ways because you can change the font size on Kindle to suit your eyes. Black ink on a white screen is the only option – just like the first Macintosh.

This architecture not only makes Kindle pages very readable, it also prolongs battery life since there is no backlight and energy is only required to move the dots, not to keep them in position.

Kindle travels in a felt covered case about the size of a paperback and clearly designed to say “book”. Only quibble is that there’s nowhere for the Kindle charger in the case so it goes with the rest of the tangle of wires in your computer bag.

At Burlington airport Sprint was four bars and, immediately, my novel hackoff.com:an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble and Fractals of Change – both of which I’d ordered when I ordered Kindle – downloaded. Whole download took no more than a minute or so. Note excellent Amazon customer experience: didn’t have to register because Amazon knew I’d bought the unit; didn’t have to register for the Sprint service because it comes with the unit; didn’t have to ask for what I’d already ordered to be downloaded. Got a nice thank you letter from Jeff Bezos, too. Device can hold 200 books BEFORE you add expansion memory AND everything you buy is archived forever at Amazon for redownload in case you lose or have to delete some.

I looked for books for the trip in the Kindle Store, which is never more than a click away. Naturally Amazon’s suggestions based on my past orders and promotional fees paid my publishers were there just as if I’d been on my computer. I downloaded Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks and, once I noticed that I had the option to do this free, the first chapter of No Country for Old Men.

Weak Links appears not to have been formatted correctly for an electronic edition (more on this when I post on implications for authors). Some of the letters are incomplete; there are spaces in the middle of words and hyphenation in the middle of lines. I wrote Amazon and asked for a refund (book content seems interesting though). Update: Amazon responded to my email to customer service within 24 hours, verified what I saw, apologized, and gave me a credit

No Country formatted well and was a pleasant reading experience except that the pages are a little smaller than those of a paperback, the lines a little short for the way I read, and the flicker at page turn a little distracting. My guess is these are all things readers’ll get over quickly and we’ll retrain ourselves. Decided not to order the book based on its style but that’s a plus for the first chapter free policy.

Noticed that all three books on my Kindle opened in strange places when first accessed although it’s easy enough to get back to the cover or table of contents. I suspect this is a problem in book prep seeing how much trouble I had with this when preparing the e-book edition of hackoff.com. Still annoying.

Reading Fractals of Change as a paid subscription ($.99/month) was a good experience on Kindle. Formatting was right; color pictures rendered well into black, white, and grey; links were live. However, reading Fractals and other things in the browser (which provides FREE Internet access), is problematic. See this post for a review of Kindle’s browser for more on that and even more in an upcoming author’s post.

The flight attendants say “the cabin door is closed. Please turn off all devices with an on-off switch. We will tell you when it’s safe to turn on approved electronics.” Of course this means that you have to carry at least a magazine to read during taxi, takeoffs, and landings. Else you might find yourself talking to the person next to you.

Kindle does have a simple switch to turn off its radio for use aloft where radios are forbidden.

I give it a B+ as a book reader based on initial experience.

Nice Review

Steve Rucinski, executive producer of Small Business Trends Radio posted a very nice review of the podcast edition of my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble.

“This novel turned podcast takes you through the fun, games and hysteria of the turn of the century Internet bubble and blowup.

“With all the best features of a true mystery novel, sexually charged players and of course technology, this novel set to podcast will pull you in and not let go.

“The sound is great, the narration and character play terrific. Before you know it hours will have passed while you listen to the story…”

[music to an author’s ears]

He also writes:

“Pluses: I love this whole idea of a relevant fictional story set in recent times, revolving around technology in both print and podcasted format (complete with stock charts). The site is great, the graphics are effective and the visitor choice is maximized. You can even bookmark your place if you stop part of the way through the story. I even learned a new term ‘Blooks’ blogs as books or books as blogs, whichever you prefer.

“Minuses: Occasionally the sound is a little echoey but I can find no other fault with this great and creative podcast.

Recommendation: If you like great stories you need to try out the Hackoff.com Podcast.”

The hackoff.com podcast is free and you can subscribe to it by email or RSS or get it from iTunes. You can also read the online edition free. However, if you prefer to pay for books [nb. not a bad thing], you can buy the handsome hardcover from Amazon [great holiday gift] or download to the new Kindle you just got.

Kindle – Reader Questions and Comments

In a recent post, I opined that Kindle may be more important as a crude opening wedge for free (sponsored) Internet access than as a change-agent for the way people read books.

Reader ellen has a good question:

“The free internet service after the $400 buy price sounds too good to be true. I would certainly buy one for that reason alone.

“I am going to ask a really dumb question. Does getting wireless access to the internet mean every time you are near any wireless you will be able to log on or does it mean you have to go through the same towers as cell phone access? Having had so much trouble with at and t cellular for my phone would sprint have to be well covered in my state? No one around here uses sprint for cell access. Everyone uses verizon, because for some reason it is best in my area of massachusetts. After many years and 4000 leftover rollover minutes I a dumping at and t for verizon.”

Ellen, that’s a good question. You shouldn’t buy a Kindle if you aren’t usually in a place where there is a good signal from Sprint. EVDO uses the same towers as voice service; so, if Sprint voice isn’t good where you are, EVDO won’t be either. Verizon also supports EVDO but that won’t do you any good with Kindle because it’s tied to Sprint’s network. Moreover, it is possible to be in a place where voice service is good and data not. If you know someone with a reasonably modern cellphone who has Sprint service, ask him or her to look at it near your house and see whether it says “EV” or “1X” where it shows the data connection (different phones display this differently). 1X is a slow data network and Kindle won’t work on that; it is rapidly being replaced by EVDO by both Sprint and Verizon.

Reader Aswath, who is a smart guy, is confused:

“I am a bit confused about the "free" access to the Internet. If I am right in interpreting this, then why do I have to pay a monthly fee to read FOC? That is why I thought that I could access only those sites to which I have subscribed (signified by a bookmark in the browser?). But then both you and Pogue [nb. NY Times writer David Pogue in this article] say it differently. Hence the confusion.”

Internet access IS free through the builtin browser on Kindle. You can, for example, read Fractals of Change in the browser – free – just as you do in the browser on your PC or Mac. However, you can also elect to pay 99 cents/month to subscribe to FOC. That is confusing; why would you pay for something you can have free?

Well, two possible reasons. One, the version you pay for is presumably (I don’t have a Kindle yet) better formatted for the Kindle screen. It has no ads and doesn’t have the sidebars that the browser version does. The Kindle browser is described by Amazon as “basic” so that may make FOC pretty ugly when viewed that way.

More important in the case of a blog or other periodicals which you can subscribe to is that they are downloaded to the Kindle automagically rather than being fetched from the web. That makes a difference if you are going to want to read this content when you’re offline – on a plane, for example, or traveling through country where Sprint EVDO (and therefore Amazon Whispernet) is not available – assuming you were online at some time so that the download could take place.

Both of these reasons for buying content rather than consuming it free are even more important for books. You can read my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble free at www.hackoff.com. Many people, however, don’t want to read a whole book online. You can also download and print PDFs free.(but not on Kindle). Or you can get it nicely formatted so that you turn pages as in a book rather than scrolling and read it on Kindle offline – but that costs $4.76. If you do that, BTW, Amazon stores it on your virtual bookshelf forever even if you delete it from Kindle to make room for more books. Probably the real comparison here is with the hardcover edition available from Amazon for $18.96.

Reader Marc Orchant did try hackoff.com on Kindle: “hackoff.com looks great on the Kindle. The formatting is clean (e.g. Q&A in the first chapter) and I'm looking forward to reading it as I count myself among the survivors of those perilous bubble days.” Nice to hear. Thanks, Marc.

Reader Terry Gold also likes Kindle (wish I had mine): “I've had a Kindle all weekend, and I'm already planning on how I can get rid of most of my paper books. I'll keep the ones that mean the most to me, but for everything else, this is the way to read. I just had Amazon send me a sample of your book even though I have the hard copy and I can read it on the web. The Kindle changes reading for me.”

On a somber note, reader Dylan Salisbury asks: “What happens after someone hacks into a Kindle and tethers their PC to the internet connection? If they had really "bought" that internet connection, it wouldn't be a problem (you can run any traffic you want over your own connection, right?) -- but I have a feeling such uses will be shut down or denied.”

I think Dylan’s right. If such hacking becomes noticeable, it probably would be shut down in some way. And that raises an interesting question: is it a violation of Net Neutrality to shut down some uses of “free” Internet access? I’d say no in this case since Amazon hasn’t been using the free access to the web as a selling point and it’s pretty clear what it’s for; but certainly there may be plenty of argument over this.

A Probability Puzzle

From Randomness by Deborah J Bennett:

“If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is one in a thousand has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease, assuming you know nothing about the person’s symptoms or signs?”

For extra credit: what percentage of the physicians, residents, and fourth year medical students at a prominent medical school who were asked this question got it right?

Extra, extra credit: why is it critically important that doctors be able to get this one right? Give one example.

This is an honor system non-open book test.

Answers in comments, please. Will highlight correct answers in a subsequent post. Hat tip to Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness for citing Bennett’s test.

Answers here.

A Turkey Connects the Wrong Dots and Finds a Black Swan

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is simply a great book. Not flawless, sometimes annoying, always stimulating, but overall great. Here’s an example about connecting the wrong dots:

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day, Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interests,’ as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”

Back to the title: doesn’t matter how many white swans you see in a row; they don’t prove the non-existence of black swans. On the other hand, you only need to see one black swan to DISPROVE the proposition that all swans are white. That’s why good thinkers in general and good scientists in particular set out to DISPROVE rather than affirm their own hypothesis. You don’t add much credibility to the “all swans are white” theory by finding yet one more white swan; you learn a lot about the truth of the theory by finding one black swan.

Black swans are, according to Taleb, unexpected and unpredictable rare events. By their nature, we can’t know which black swans are about to reverse an orderly flow of dots and shatter our complacency; but, by the nature of the universe, we can be sure that sooner or later one will come along. Black swans can be good or bad: a book becoming a hit (unpredictable), suddenly becoming rich (or poor), the Internet, the rise to dominance of Google – all examples given by Taleb.

If you think that each day that a stock or a class of stocks goes up makes it more likely that owning those stocks will make you rich, you’re making the same mistake as the turkey. Actually, it’s statistically true that a stock is slightly more likely to go up than down on the day following an up day, but the odds of losing rather then making money on the stock go up rather than down following a rise. That’s because a decline, even though it is less likely than an advance for a stock with “up momentum”, is more likely to be big. A stock or a market which has been rising quickly is more and more vulnerable to a black swan event.

Taleb honed his skill as a trader but applies the black swan (and Fooled by Randomness) lessons to much more:

“The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider the case of the increasingly integrated German Jews in the 1930s – or my description in Chapter 1 of how the population of Lebanon got lulled into a false sense of security by the appearance of mutual friendliness and tolerance.”

Being a Jew born during WWII, I was brought up on the first example. Taleb is Lebanese and grew up there as the country went from peace and prosperity to a chaos which still hasn’t ended.

The Black Swan is a book of contradictions. Taleb warns us against our predilection for making up stories to explain events yet he is a master story teller himself; his books work better because we learn through well-told stories like the fate of the turkey.

Taleb warns us against the fallacy of thinking that a trader who is rich is necessarily smart; very likely that she or he is just lucky. After all, if hundreds of thousands of people start out as apprentice traders – and if all trading were governed by pure luck, at the end of a year randomness would assure that there were some who were extremely successful as well as a whole bunch of losers. But Taleb’s credibility comes partly from HIS success as a trader. He’s even written a book on his techniques called Dynamic Hedging, which I’ve ordered. I’ll let you know if it makes me rich – maybe.

Taleb loves to puncture arrogance and does so fiercely and effectively – Nobel laureates in Economics are a particular target; but Taleb is quite arrogant himself, says he has no intent or reading random reviews and please don’t send him notes about typos or how to make his website better (it’s a mess).

But read The Black Swan if you haven’t.

Random thought: Hansel DIDN’T make the turkey’s mistake. He figured out why the witch was fattening him up and, every day, gave her a skinny stick rather than his fat finger to test for plumpness. Skepticism is a good but not infallible weapon against black swans.

Causes of Global Warming – Are We Fooled By Hubris?

According to Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness we like to tell ourselves stories, perhaps to aid in remembering otherwise unrelated events. Often these stories can mislead us because we tend to assume that events which come first are the cause of events which come after even though the events may actually be either unrelated or both the independent results of some unknown third event. Philosophers are sufficiently aware of this fallacy to give it a Latin name – post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Among other examples, Taleb, who is a trader, points to the absurd sound bites in the daily financial press which ascribe a cause to every statistically insignificant market move. If the market moves fast enough, the same cause is often used for the move in both directions.

Taleb points out that scientists are no more immune to bad logic and group think than the rest of us. Those who mistook scientific consensus for proven fact “knew” that the earth was flat and that the sun circled it.

We have another tendency in our storytelling according to me: we humans like to be the cause of everything. We hate being helpless. Think of all the stories about the wrath of various gods in all the mythologies of the world. The people were sinful so God destroyed the city; the woman was vain so the Goddess punished her; the sacrifice was not properly prepared and therefore…

What these stories really say is that we control the gods and not vice versa. My friend W, who prefers to remain anonymous, pointed out to me that the sale of indulgences to those who felt a need for some kind of forgiveness is another example of man controlling God. He also pointed out that there are resemblances between individual purchases of carbon credits and indulgences. Hmm….

The arguments in favor of the hypothesis that human-caused increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are unfortunately laced with post hoc ergo proctor hoc thinking:  many past warming cycles have been accompanied by a significant increase in CO2 (fact); therefore, the current increase in atmospheric CO2 (which is probably attributable mostly to human activity) MUST be causing the causing the recent short-term (so far) acceleration in global warming (conjecture) and that warming will continue unless humans reduce their production of CO2 (prediction).

It is quite possible that all of the above hypothesis, conjectures, and predictions are right. It is also possible that some or all of them are wrong. Unfortunately, it is critically important that we figure this all out. For example, if the oceans are going to continue to rise no matter what we do (as they have many times in the past clearly without our help because we weren’t there) and if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are NOT causing global warming, we should be spending money directly on plans to deal with billions of coastal refugees rather than on reducing coal burning or in carbon sequestration (or on rebuilding coastal properties destroyed by storms in the same about-to-be-inundated places).

It hurts to believe that we have almost no control over our environment. Somehow it’s psychologically more comfortable to believe that it’s all our fault (or at least the fault of our neighbors with SUVs) and we have it within our control to placate the gods or nature with some well-designed sacrifice.

The assumption that climate is within our control is hubris even though it may eventually be true. There is stuff – lots of stuff – that we neither understand nor control. Many civilizations spent much of their declining fortunes in rituals and monuments designed to ward off the effects of climate change and other catastrophes they didn’t cause – but wanted to believe they were in control of. Everyone knew that witches were responsible for crop failures – most people even “knew” who the witches were.

We have to answer critically important questions like is the current warming trend short or long-term? Is it reversible? Did we contribute to it or cause it? In either case, can we reverse it? if warming continues, will seas continue to rise (not  a given because snowfall patterns as well as temperature govern glacier extent)? We’ll have to takes many actions before all the results are known since no action is an action in itself.

This will all take our best thinking but Nassim Taleb’s point is that we are not actually designed to think very well. We have the same brains as the people who believed the earth was flat and who conducted witch trials. In order to do good thinking, we have to be aware of and fight against our tendency to tell ourselves stories when no story line actually exists. I’d add that we also have to watch our tendency to cast ourselves as major characters – even villains – rather than believe that we are just bystanders.

Does skepticism imply inaction? Nope – next post.

BookTour.com and Amazon

BookTour.com, the site which links touring authors with readers, has a cool new feature which takes advantage of the fact that many readers are also customers of Amazon.com. If you give BookTour your Amazon credentials, it logs into Amazon, finds out what authors’ books you’ve been buying, and then lets you know by email or RSS when these authors are touring near you.

This supplements a feature which BookTour has had since the beginning: you can tell BookTour explicitly which authors you’re interested in meeting if they should be nearby and have it alert you to their upcoming appearances. You can also use BookTour to invite your favorite authors to your book club, library, or store.

Only those authors who have currently signed up with BookTour.com will get added to your profile. There is this chicken and egg thing with new web services that match providers and consumers. Providers don’t have much incentive to sign up until consumers do; consumers don’t have much incentive until there are providers. But, full disclosure, I’m signed up as an author with BookTour.com so; if you bought hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble or “The Interpreter’s Tale” (an Amazon short) from Amazon, you’ll find me on your author list automagically if you use this new feature.

Once your Amazon authors have been added, you can manually delete the ones you DON’T want to hear from or about.

Chris Anderson, cofounder of BookTour and author of The Long Tail, says that BookTour protects your privacy by promptly forgetting your Amazon credentials. You need to give them again in order to refresh your author list. I’d like to see this polite behavior be the default option with an override allowing the site to remember my Amazon credentials but this is just a quibble.

BookTour is free for both authors and readers although authors can buy ads. I haven’t tried that yet.

BookTour.com

BookTour.com debuted last week as a web solution to a real world problem: book tours don’t work well (in fact, hardly work at all) except for very famous authors who probably don’t need them anyway. Appropriately, one of BookTour.com’s founders is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of the Long Tail book and blog. Although his own book is at the head of the power curve, Chris understands the needs of the rest of us out on the long tail of the curve and the opportunities in serving those needs – that’s what his book and blog are all about.

From the about page of BookTour.com: “For authors, BookTour.com serves as a one-stop tool for book promotion, allowing authors at all levels of their careers to locate receptive live audiences. For readers and audiences, BookTour.com makes finding when a favorite author is coming to your town as easy as checking the weather.”

Full disclosure:  I was a pre-release author on BookTour.com and have a vested interest in seeing it succeed in its promotional aspirations.

Back in my father’s day, publishers arranged book tours for their authors. They didn’t do a great job of this except for their stars. Later authors turned to their own publicists to help with tours (I did that). Independent publicists seem to be able to get bookings but not to be able to drive enough local publicity or get the book stores to do enough promotion to draw crowds. If you have friends or relatives in a town, you can get turnout; if not, not. I sat in a coffee shop attached to a bookstore in Connecticut for an hour and a half making conversation with a very nice lady from the store and looking sadly at the pile of hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble stacked nicely waiting to be signed. In my home town of Stowe, on the other hand, there was a very nice turnout at the library (Mary promoted that one).

Book tours can’t be justified by the number of books you sell while you’re there although selling signed books is an incidental benefit and helps cover the expenses. The purpose of book tours is to create buzz about your book a city at a time; ideally a stop in a city involves a couple of appearances and readings as well as some newspaper publicity and a stop at a couple of radio and/or TV stations. A single appearance at a single book store in a large town is likely wasted effort.

Since each author’s schedule appears on BookTour.com, readers can find out who’s coming when to their town; libraries and other venues can ask to be added when they know the author is going to be nearby; and we authors can fill our dance card and all those empty seats in front of the lectern. You can go to my page on the site (where you’ll find that I’m not currently touring) and invite me to come talk to your group or at your store. I won’t be able to honor all invitations but chances are I can come to some.

Computers, communication, and eventually the Internet created the long tail – the opportunity for niche products and non-hits to be available to those who want them; Chris Anderson calls this the endless shelf because there is no limit to shelf space in a virtual store while brick and mortar stores have to remove slow sellers from their finite shelves. What’s not so clear is how consumers find out about the niche products or even those that are not immediate hits; if it succeeds, BookTour.com’ll be part of the answer. It will succeed, ironically, if it becomes a hit and is THE marketplace where readers find touring authors and vice versa.

hackoff.com – e-book Edition

My novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble is now available as an e-book from a number of online retailers affiliated with MobiPocket which is owned by Amazon.  This edition is suitable for downloading to book-reader devices, PDAs, and of course, computers.

hackoff.com was first released as a blook: a book serialized in the form of a blog. It’s still available for free viewing, subscribing to the serialization, downloading (as PDFs), or even podcast listening at www.hackoff.com. For those who like physical books which go to the beach (it is a mystery, after all), the hardcover edition is available from Amazon or by order from bookstores.

So why would you want to pay $5.95 to download what you could otherwise get for free?  If you’re happy with the blook edition or want the hardcover (also not free), you probably don’t want to buy the download. However, if you read on a PDA or a bookreader, this may be the edition for you. The technology supplied by MobiPocket means that the book formats itself for whatever device you read it on. Seems to work as far as I’ve been able to tell from the device emulators supplied to authors by MobiPocket.

For those who do download, please tell me what the experience is like from buying through reading.

Note to authors: You set the suggested selling price for your e-book.  Commissions are 50% of that suggested price (retailers can discount but can’t discount your royalty).  You get an additional 10% if the referral for the sale is by link from your website (there’s  a link in the right sidebar of Fractals of Change).  Another way to use the service is to sell your e-book directly from your own site, which I’m not doing..  If you do that, you pay them a 10% fee for the formatting an digital rights management (DRM).  BTW, DRM is mandatory or they won’t distribute.

MobiPocket sells through a large number of online retailers.  Unlike Amazon Shorts, they have a strong international presence and can sell where VAT collection is required.  No exclusivity is required; they are just another outlet.

If your book is a single Word file, PDF, or HTML document, conversion to ebook format with the free tools supplied by MobiPocket should be fairly easy. If you have fifteen big Word files too big for Word to combine without cra