Unqualified Offerings

Amazon caves! Macmillan wins! Here’s what they won.
Macmillan wanted less cash per book from Amazon than they’re already getting. You’d think that would be easy enough.
“Hey Amazon. You’re paying us $12-15 for each frontlist ebook sale. But we only want $9-10.50.”
“What an oddly good deal for us, Macmillan. What’s the catch?”
“We want you to charge [...]

By Thoreau
I plan to give a lecture on the  use of symmetry in deriving certain results about forces.  One of the results that I’ll get, concerning electric fields from a point charge, can also be obtained by the use of a theorem from topology called, I kid you not, The Hairy Ball Theorem.
I assume that  [...]

By Thoreau
To paraphrase a former California governor.  I don’t know what this has to do with eBooks or Amazon, but I’ll blog it anyway:  A marijuana legalization ballot measure is expected to make it on the ballot in November.
If this does indeed make it on the ballot, I may have to quit my job to [...]

I think with one more post on Amazon and Macmillan I can drive away the blog’s very last reader, leaving me more free time for crystal meth and masturbation.
I’m comfortable with “who gets the windfall?” as the essential question in the ebook price wars. (See previous post.) But I’m still trying to get a better [...]

You would think Macmillan and Amazon were Muhammad and Malvo the way I am obsessively blogging their doings, but I do have some follow-up items:
1. KT Bradford’s piece for Laptop mag has been much-tweeted since yesterday. Either Laptop magazine has proofreading issues or Bradford just writes down whatever someone says, because the article contains an [...]

Felix Salmon on locavorism for the poor.

Loyal Readers know that the layout of this website has been screwed up in single-page view for years now. I lacked the PHP chops to fix it; the one time I paid someone to upgrade the site he couldn’t figure it out; and since it didn’t keep the site from being read, I let it [...]

In the immortal words of dead novelist and critic Algis Budrys, I would now like to review the money involved. Because while we surely all agree that the fate of civilization itself rests on the Amazon-Macmillan controversy, it is a dispute about money before it’s anything else. So I will don my day-job hat for [...]

As of this morning, Amazon and Macmillan are locked in a dispute over ebook pricing. For its part, Amazon pulled many Macmillan books from their website – after a fashion, which we’ll get to. You can read comment threads at Making Light, blog posts by Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, and the Twitterstorm (using the [...]

By Thoreau
The thing that makes this quarter all-consuming is that I was given the sophomore class, which is the first one that physics majors and physics minors take after the intro classes that all science and engineering students take.  This is super-critical to the fate of our department, because we need to retain all of [...]