@Randem

Wow, I’m noticing a follow-your-dreams theme in my writing today.

I picked up this little book last night called It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, by Paul Arden, and read the entire thing on my train ride home.

Arden instructs readers to aim high, set lofty goals, and accept nothing less. He says to be who you want to be, instead of who you are: talk big, and make it happen. He talks about how to please your clients and earn their trust. Most importantly, he encourages you to take responsibility for yourself, and constantly push forward, rather than becoming complacent and settling for less than what you truly want.

The book is filled with zen-like truth that applies to today’s world. It’s straight to the point, and brutally honest. Some of the advice is obviously related to advertising and creative endeavors, but the wisdom in this book is universal. I’ll read this again and again.

In the year 2000, Stephen King drew tons of media attention when he released Riding the Bullet exclusively as an eBook. In the first 24 hours, more than 400,000 copies were sold, at $2.50 per copy. That works out quite cleanly to revenue of $1-million in one day, with no cost for printing, binding, or shipping.

From that point on, the idea of eBooks has been imagined as a hidden source of unlimited revenue — a license to print money. The question is, if the eBook revolution began nearly eight years ago, why do people keep buying printed books?

How many eBooks do you have? Maybe you got suckered into some self-help book online, or the great strategy guide for how to pick up women, or a cheat sheet for your mid-term… but these are things you can’t easily find anywhere else. How many of those 400,000 people who bought Riding the Bullet actually read it?

I’m tempted to think that people were willing to spend $2.50 for the privilege of being on the cutting edge, or maybe just trying it out and seeing if they would like it. For that matter, there are probably a good number of people who proudly claim to have everything ever written by Stephen King, and they couldn’t continue to wear that identity if they didn’t get his eBook.

So is a revolution coming?
Gadget gurus and über-nerds have all played with (or maybe even purchased) a Sony Reader, for $299, and gotten on the bandwagon. And today, Amazon announced the launch of Kindle, their new eBook reader, for $399.

Wait a second. Did you read that right? Did I really say $299, and $399? Hmmm… well, as long as books are cheap, it could still work out in the long run, right? A quick Google search for Stephen King eBooks turned up eBookMall.com, who are asking $16.99 for Cell, a book that can be had at Amazon — in hardback, no less — for $9.99, and could probably be found on the shelf at chain stores like Target or Walmart for even less.

Okay, let me get this straight. I have to pay $299 for a device that reads a file which, in spite of its lack of printing, publishing, and shipping, still actually costs more than a paperback book? Hmmm, well, there must be some advantage to reading electronically, right? What might that be?

Buying the reader, of course, means you’re not stuck in front of your computer reading a PDF. Thank God, because there is little in life that is worse, in my opinion, than sitting in front of a computer and clicking through a PDF file. But I can carry a paperback with me, so portability is still no advantage for eBooks. And the advantages for printed books don’t stop there…

I don’t have to recharge my paperback book, nor buy batteries for it, before I can read it. It goes everywhere easily, and I don’t have to put it away when I’m on an airplane. If someone bumps into me and I drop my paperback on the ground, I just pick it up and keep reading. If I drop it into a puddle of water, I may have to pay $9.99 for a new copy.

Printed books also have hidden benefits. A shelf filled with books serves as a status symbol — a social indicator of intelligence. Books can be loaned, sold, or donated, without intellectual property hounds knocking on your door. And if you happen to find yourself in a blackout in the middle of winter, books burn nicely too.

Imagine you’re just getting to the part where the killer identifies himself as the hero’s brother, and as you excitedly read along wondering if his wife is really dead or if it was all just a trick, suddenly a red light comes on and a little beep starts telling you that your battery is low. Spoiled!

If you take your eBook reader on vacation with you, you also have to take along the charger and cords. You have to turn it off for 15 minutes while the stewardess tries to convince you that some black magic in your electronic device could mess up the computers in the cockpit. If you drop it, you don’t pick it up and keep reading… you instead spend 20 minutes inspecting every inch for cracks. And if you manage to damage it, you don’t get a new one for $9.99.

A license to print money
And most insulting is, of course, the fact that eBooks are priced so high. Do these people think we don’t know the difference? There is a major printing industry being fed by the marginal costs in paperbacks that we buy for $9.99 per copy, but there is no such industry involved in the manufacture of an eBook. The author could write it and publish it himself!

If good eBooks were available for $2, the avid reader of one or two books per week might see a financial incentive to switch, but it would still take him over a year to break even on the proposition and there would have to be enough desirable titles available at that price to make it worth it to him.

Of course this avid reader with real incentive to switch would be the one who other people see and whose opinion other people trust, so getting the avid reader would get you the casual readers, gradually over time.

But there is no way on earth that it will ever work in the other direction. Gadget gurus buy every gadget that comes along, while everyone else waits to see what pans out. The nerds get their cool points and geek status for having the coolest, newest toy, but the paperback reader will continue to read paperback books.

I like data mining. I like numbers. I like indicators. I didn’t realize it, but I like economics.

Freakonomics is a look at some of the issues of the real world through the eyes of an economist. Morality is irrelevant. Common wisdom is useless. All that matters is data.

The authors find some interesting answers buried in data. They find evidence that a child is significantly safer in a house with a gun than in a house with a swimming pool. They give valuable insight into why a child’s name matters. They also reveal data which shows that legalized abortion has been the single most effective thing we’ve done to lower crime in America.

In addition to the stunning revelation about the very positive effects of legallized abortion, I was also quite impressed with the data analysis showing which factors matter regarding the raising of a child and which don’t. They reveal that having a full-time, stay-at-home mother made almost no difference, whereas the age when the mother had her first child make a huge difference — one that cannot be corrected for later. Likewise, frequent visits to museums had no relation to a child’s education, whereas parent involvement in PTA did. Also interesting was the data which showed that urban children generally test higher than suburban and rural children.

When you look at life through the realistic eyes of an economist, rather than through the filters of morals and common wisdom, you begin to see a very different world. I, like many people I know, always thought that having a full-time parent, or frequent visits to museums were important to a child’s development, but now I see that those beliefs are quite plainly wrong, and that those things are irrelevant. Far more important are the education of the child’s parents, their involvement in PTA, and the age at which the mother had her first child.

Moreover, it seemed clear that these things are not causes, but rather indicators of the real cause: breeding. In fact, on the whole, it seems that there is very little you can do for your child once it is born. The best chances of raising a smart child seems to come from your choice of mate more than anything else.

I’d like to thank Clay Eals, for emailing me in response to this weekend’s Go, Cubs, Go post. Clay recently had a book published about Steve Goodman, and he goes into some detail about the origin of “Go, Cubs, Go” and “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request”.

You can get more info on his web site: www.clayeals.com

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene (ISBN: 0199291152) explains the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) in terms of Game Theory.

He describes the give and take of numeric representation of possible sides of an genetic disposition, showing how some traits evolve to become dominant while others fall into an ESS where more than one side are represented in varying proportion.

Of particular interest is how this relates to lying, as a genetic trait:

Obviously, it is vitally important in the war of attrition that individuals should give no inkling of when they are going to give up. Anybody who betrayed, by the merest flicker of a whisker, that he was beginning to think of throwing in the sponge, would be a an instant disadvantage. If, say, whisker-flickering happened to be a reliable sign that retreat would follow within one minute, there would be a very simple strategy: ‘If your opponent’s whiskers flicker, wait one more minute, regardless of what your own previous plans for giving up might have been. If your opponent’s whiskers have not yet flickered, and you are within one minute of the time when you intend to give up anyway, give up immediately and don’t waste any more time. Never flicker your own whiskers.’ So natural selection would quickly penalize whisker-flickering and any analogous betrayals of future behaviour. The poker face would evolve.

Why the poker face rather than out-and-out lies? Once again, because lying is not stable. Suppose it happened to be the case that the majority of individuals raised their hackles only when they were truly intending to go on for a very long time in a war of attrition. The obvious counterploy would evolve: individuals would give up immediately when an opponent raised his hackles. But now, liars might start to evolve. Individuals who really had no intention of going on for a long time would raise their hackles on every occasion, and reap the benefits of easy and quick victory. So liar genes would spread. When liars became the majority, selection would not favour individuals who called their bluff. Therefore liars would decrease in numbers again. In the war of attrition, telling lies is no more evolutionarily stable than telling the truth. The poker face is evolutionarily stable. Surrender, when it finally comes, will be sudden and unpredictable.

The Selfish Gene is an excellent source for understanding why the altruistic society can never be. It also serves to point out the folly in generalizations, such as the ever-popular “why do men lie?”

Last week I read Everything’s Eventual, a book of short stories by Stephen King. Most of them weren’t really my thing, but there were a few that I got into. The one that really messed with me, though, was “Autopsy Room 4”, about a man who is alive but paralyzed describing the things he sees, hears, and feels during the fearful moments before the medical examiner cuts into him.

The idea of being conscious of everything that happens after death kind of scared me. Worse, the idea of actually not being dead but knowing that you will be if they start cutting into you.

Funny, then, that I see this story today about that actually happening. The medical examiners thought it weird when Carlos Camejo’s “corpse” started bleeding. When they started stitching his wound, the pain woke him up. He wasn’t dead at all!

I’ve created a new recommended reading list, which consists of the books that have been most helpful to me growing as a person.

I’ve read a lot of books in order to find these. I hope we’re all trying to learn and grow with every new day, and for my readers who are, I feel these books are excellent places to start.