None of the target audience for this device will care (or notice). Sure, there are plenty of geeks that will buy the device and root it and get rid of the ads, but nearly all of the people who buy an Amazon branded tablet are fine with Amazon ads and being locked to the Amazon ecosystem. Most people just want a device that works, they don't care how "open" it is, whether it's FOSS compliant, or whether or not it shows them an ad.
You're confusing expectation of privacy (being secure in your papers) with encryption (hardening access.) They're not the same thing at all.
No, I'm pointing out that using law to grant people an "expectation of privacy" doesn't give them anything. The government could pass a law saying that it's illegal to eavesdrop on conversations in restaurants, yet people would understand that they should not conduct private conversations withing earshot of other patrons because they realize that the law gives them no real protection.
However, when it comes to technology, people think that the law actually offers something, much like the law that made it illegal to listen to analog cell phone transmissions even though they were broadcast without encryption - users thought that they were safe and secure and conducted credit card transactions and other business over cell phones despite having no real protection at all.
If the government had just said "Sorry, unless your carrier encrypts your cell phone transmissions, they are fair game for anyone to listen to", many people either would have pushed their carriers for encryption and/or stopped conducting private business over open communications channels.
I think that the difference between your conversations and pizza ordering on an analog transmission and on a digital one WRT 4th amendment protection should be zero.
Because you have an expectation of privacy
The problem is that the law gave the illusion of privacy for cell phone calls rather than actual privacy - scanners that can listen to analog cellular were easy to come by even after the ban and there were a number of "private" cell phone conversations made public in the media even after the ban. Some scanners required a simple hardware mod, others could be ordered from overseas sellers that weren't subject to the ban.
It's the same thing with Wifi -- making intercepting unencrypted Wifi transmissions illegal only makes people think that their open Wifi is secure.
Much better to tell people explicitly that it an open Wifi network is not at all private and that the onus is on them to lock it down. After all, the whole point of an open network is that you're inviting people to connect by broadcasting your SSID.
If I open my front door and yell out to the world "Hey, my door is open, come on in! Then I shouldn't be surprised when people come in and read the letters I left sitting in plain view on my coffee table". If I'm going to invite the public to connect to my Wifi network (or come into my home), then I should encrypt (or hide) anything I don't want them to see. A law saying otherwise is just giving people a false sense of security.
If you read TFA, you'd know that they are brought in by filthy immigrants from filthy countries. The note that the infestations are taking root in California is a big indicator of that, with California being a sanctuary state and all. Come on in, all you stinky unbathed barefoot burrito eaters! You get everything for free at the taxpayers' expense!
While it's always heartening to see an ethnic rant, not all of California's disadvantaged immigrants come from the south, and not all of them get welfare assistance.
> Most of the time, the vapors won't be thick enough, particularly if you handle the gasoline properly (but somebody smoking near gasoline *already* isn't > handling it properly
But you just explained why the conditions are generally not right for a cig to light off gas vapors....
so what are you basing the idea that smoking around gasoline is not handling it properly, after acknowledging that its a combination of factors, all of which are easily controlled?
Well no, he said that "most" of the time the gasoline won't ignite. Are you willing to bet your life on "most"?
Not smoking is pretty much at the top of the list of things not to do around gasoline... if there's one other failure then you could easily end up with conditions where the gasoline could ignite.
Factors are never controlled, instead, risks are mitigated by reducing the chance that there will an environment that allows ignition. For example, you regularly inspect hoses and couplers to prevent failure (well except *you* don't, the 17 year old kid at the gas station does it and checks it off on a checklist, but how carefully did he look?), but there's still that one time out of a thousand when something fails and you end up with a fuel spill and when that happens you don't want to have a cigarette in your mouth at the time. Maybe it's not even your fault, maybe the guy next to you accidentally squeezes the trigger when he swings the nozzle over to his tank and he sprays you down with gasoline. And now your shirt soaked in gasoline with the cigarette dangling in your mouth a few inches away will give you lots of gasoline vapor to ignite.
...there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products.
That's like saying if we got engineers from Caterpillar, Peterbilt, BMW and Kawasaki to just work together, they would make a better product.
Well, I think it's more like saying that if we got engineers from Caterpillar, Euclid, Komatsu, and Terex together and asked them to build a heavy dump truck -- they are all in the same heavy equipment industry and each has useful innovations that could work well together if they were motivated to come up with the best product for customers without trying to compete with each other.
Hmm, I agree on the API part. So maybe a single toolkit like GTK (or some such). I disagree about the single desktop environment. I like Gnome, some people like KDE and you like XKCD. Which one to choose? Is it even possible to have one desktop environment to cater to everyones wishes? MS and Apple seem to think so, but that's why I don't use their OSs.
I do like XKCD, but I find it makes a lousy desktop environment as it's too distracting. I prefer Xfce as a desktop environment.
You just contradicted yourself. On the one hand, you call for a "unified" (one-size-fits-all) system. In other words, things would be better in the absence of choice. But in the end, you admit that you capitalized on the availability of choice (you use XFCE). So in your opinion, is choice both good AND bad?
You must not be a developer if this is the first time you've noticed a user being inconsistent between his desires and actual behavior.
Maybe if GnoKDEUnity were the standard and well supported I'd use that, but I've hit enough quirky bugs in all 3 to make me fall back on something more stable.
While being drawn, a cigarette has a temperature of around 400 - 500 degC, while the auto ignition temperature of gasoline is 280 degC.
You may be able to throw a lit cigarette in a pool of gasoline and extinguish the cigarette, but I woudn't want to bend down and tie my shoe with my mouth near the gas filler nozzle with gasoline vapor escaping from my gas tank (which admittedly with modern sealed tanks and vapor recovery nozzles is minimal, but I still wouldn't bet my life on it).
Granted, there's a limited set of conditions where a cigarette could ignite gasoline vapors, but that was my point - a cigarette canignite gasoline, but other conditions have to be just right to make it happen.
Not strictly (well, at all) GUI related, but I'd love to see something more like Windows Powershell in Linux.
I love the Linux pipeline and being able to pipe text streams between tools is very powerful, but the more I get into Windows Powershell, the more I like it. The ability to pass objects through the pipeline and operate on those objects can be much more powerful than processing text streams.
Make it so I NEVER have to touch the CLI to do anything on the OS. Install drivers, games, applications, tweak the GUI, configure system settings, etc. I'm not saying get rid of it, I'm saying make it so I don't HAVE to in order to do any of those those things.
Don't modern distributions already do that? I don't think I've ever *had* to use the CLI to configure my Ubuntu system, though I sometimes fall back to the CLI to do some things because I find it more convenient.
I'd rather that Linux went in the other direction -- keep the CLI and write GUI wrappers around it, but don't even make it so you *have* to use the GUI to configure something.
I know I'll get flamed for this since it goes against the Linux philosophy, but how about getting rid of competing Gnome and KDE (and now Unity) desktops and agree on one standard desktop with a single API for everyone to write to. And maintain backwards compatibility for the API so an application written for GnoKDE 2.0 still still run unaltered on GnoKDE 3.0.
I know that having multiple desktops gives users choice, but there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products. Oh, and stop pushing out alpha releases (I'm talking about you, Ubuntu/Unity) as the default desktop and telling users that it's for their own good.
But hey, don't trust me, I use Xfce since it does everything I need in a desktop.
Any price is too high if the ebook has DRM. I would happily pay for non-DRM ebooks, though, up to something around half the price of the paperback.
I'll settle for easy-to-strip DRM, and so far I've had no trouble stripping DRM from my Nook and Kindle purchases. And I always strip DRM immediately when I purchase a book so it's really mine to read on any device I like and my access to the title can't be revoked by the publisher.
The new readings, taken by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, reveal that the pressure is at 1.6 megapascals, nearly 16 times the 0.1 megapascals it takes to trigger an eruption
If that's what it takes to trigger an eruption, why didn't it happen 1.5 megapascals ago?
Probably the same reason why even though a cigarette is enough to trigger a gasoline explosion, people still manage to smoke while fueling their cars without blowing themselves up - a cigarette is sufficient to set it off, but it takes a combination of factors to make it happen.
could they maybe drill a set of holes and 1 steer the lava to someplace NOT populated 2 prevent the lava camber from going full bore BOOM
when using Po^HMnt Fuji for your scam always set your clock for Volcano Day
I say we send Bruce Willis and his team of oil roughnecks to drill the holes and relieve the pressure. He saved the planet once, he may as well do it again.
Why is the paperback priced lower than the Kindle?
Because the ebook is delivered instantly (less than a minute) whereas the paperback shipping maxes out at next day.
I rarely care how quickly the book is delivered, so if that's why eBooks cost more, I would be more than willing to take a delayed delivery in exchange for lower cost. But I think that's going to be a hard sell with consumers - it's easy to justify a premium to ship a phyiscal product more quickly, everyone knows and accepts that express delivery costs more. But publishers may face a backlash if they tried to charge more for something that everyone knows costs them nothing.
Even though I'd accept delayed delivery, I do think that the fact that I paid $100 of my own money for the eBook reader should entitles me to instant delivery "for free" since my eBook reader cuts out virtually all of the publisher's distribution costs of the book and it was my purchase of the ebook reader that enabled them to deliver it instantly. It's not like the publishers are handing out the eBook readers for free (though Amazon is getting closer to doing so with the $69 Kindle - in a few years they may be handing them out for "free" in the same way that the razor companies sell the initial razor for very cheap and make it up on the blades)
Did HDTV make it any cheaper to create or distribute content? If anything, it made it more espensive since studios had to upgrade their equipment.
Did increaed fuel efficiancy in cars make the car or the gasoline cheaper? Nope.
I'm not sure this is a good analogy. I think it would be more like switching to an electric car where I can cut out the gas station entirely and refuel over the power lines that already run to my house, which eliminates the need for expensive gas stations and refueling infrastructure. The electric car is more expensive than a conventionally powered car (just like an eBook reader is more expensive than no eBook reader at all), but after I own the car, refueling is cheaper than buying gas -- though currently I don't think the savings is enough to recoup the cost of the car.
The author-editor team didn't make anything from your used books.
It's a sticky topic. I don't want to go off the rails from your post, just point out that used books have that crucial payment to the creators stripped out -- it's an unsustainable comparison. Matching that price means no books produced.
Well, I'm not sure that's true, but would love to see some numbers to prove it.
When I buy a used book, that means someone originally bought the book new, and if I buy his used book for 50% of the price of a new book, I'm effectively giving him a 50% subsidy for the purchase of the book and helping him buy his next book.
Of course, that effect gets lower and lower each time a used book is resold.
But it's easy for a publisher to shortcircuit this process - a month or two paperback release (when the books are widely available on the used market), they could cut the eBook price to match the price in the used market.
Since you mentioned tech books... well, It's harder to find used book deals on Tech books because as you said the market is smaller, plus many people that buy them keep them around for reference and by the time they are willing to sell them, they are obsolete. But lets look at the pricing for a random tech book Beginning Python:
$26.23 for the Kindle eBook, $27.61 for the eBook, and $27.60 used including shipping.
The eBook is priced $1.48 lower than the paper book, but since I don't have a $300 Kindle DX with a large screen (so I can see diagrams, code samples, etc), the eBook is much less useful to me than the paper book.
Does it really cost only $1.48 to print a 700 page paperback book, warehouse it, and ship it?
So you're not only saying ebooks shouldn't cost more than paperback editions, but that they shouldn't cost more than used paperbacks? That's a bit extreme, no?
Well, not exactly, I'm saying that if publishers want me to use my expensive eReader to purchase books that have virtually no distribution cost to them, then they'll need to match the pricing of my other options to buy books -- including used.
Otherwise, they'll lose out on my money, they get very little money when I purchase a used book (it's not zero since my used book purchase helps subsidize someone else's full-price purchase of the new book), but if they sell the eBook for what I consider to be a reasonable price, they'll get much more of my money.
It could be that publishers just don't care, maybe they get so much revenue from people willing to pay high eBook prices that they don't care if they are losing money on the used market.
On many highways with 65 or 70mph speed limit, I've seen a separate 55mph limit for trucks and cars towing trailers.
If this is the same on this highway, then cars will be driving at 90mph (drivers always seem to add 5mph), and closing in on 55mph trucks at a 35mph speed differential.
On highways, I always thought that speed doesn't kill as much as speed differential does. If everyone drove at the same speed, there'd be fewer opportunities for accidents.
What are you willing to pay? I personally buy books from Amazon all the time for Kindle, even though I have a Nexus 7 now. Amazon offers the best prices out of everyone I've checked.
Ideally, I'd pay around $6 or so, which is what I typically pay for a used book to be delivered to my door. (and I usually pay $4 - $6 on Smashwords or Baen)
Here's an example of pricing that makes no sense (assuming free Amazon Prime shipping)
The Amateur - $16.99 hardcover, $9.99 eBook, $6.99 paperback, $6.88 used
Even moving off the bestseller list and going to an older book doesn't help
Why is the paperback priced lower than the Kindle? I paid $100 for an eReader and publishers want me to pay more for the privilege of reducing their distribution costs?
It does go the other way sometimes too -- usually (but not always), the eBook is cheaper than the hardcover, but more often than not, the eBook seems to be priced more than the paperback, and is almost always more than a used book.
I, for one, hope this results in lower eBook prices.
I have a Kindle (and Nook tablet) that are underutilized because I refuse to pay more for an eBook than I do to have a paper book delivered to my house. About the only eBooks I read are from Smashwords or Baen. Almost every book I've bought from Amazon has been a used paper book because they are typically about half the price of an eBook.
After 2 years with the Kindle, I've bought exactly 3 Amazon eBooks - all purchased before traveling since I didn't want to carry around heavy paper books. I've never gotten around to reselling my used books (which would net me another dollar or two of savings), so my local thrift shop has been getting them.
Amazon can make up the difference on other products that the user may purchase from Amazon when they stop in to buy a book. Other retailers (like B&N and Apple) have a less diverse product catalog so if they take a loss on eBooks it's harder to make up the difference somewhere else.
"But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"
Red flag. Badly designed system.
Well, it's a made-up scenario, so it's not a poorly designed system, it's an imaginary system.
Not everyone is able to design a system such that it can accommodate all possible future enhancements without some of them requiring a major rewrite. And, this might come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of poorly designed systems out there, many of them maintained by people that didn't design it in the first place.
A word to the wise when trying to get people excited about fundmental science: the number "1" followed by a lot of zeroes is meaningless to most people (even scientists). Please give us something to relate that number to and put it in scientific notation!
They did give a unit that scientists can relate to when they said "67 attoseconds". The 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 notation is just there for the layman for whom scientific notation means nothing, 1 x 10^-18 means little to most people, but lots of zeros make it clear that it's a very small number.
67 attoseconds = 6.7 x 10^–18 seconds
You're off by 10 -- 67 attoseconds = 67 x 10^-18, or 6.7 x 10^-17
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None of the target audience for this device will care (or notice). Sure, there are plenty of geeks that will buy the device and root it and get rid of the ads, but nearly all of the people who buy an Amazon branded tablet are fine with Amazon ads and being locked to the Amazon ecosystem. Most people just want a device that works, they don't care how "open" it is, whether it's FOSS compliant, or whether or not it shows them an ad.
You're confusing expectation of privacy (being secure in your papers) with encryption (hardening access.) They're not the same thing at all.
No, I'm pointing out that using law to grant people an "expectation of privacy" doesn't give them anything. The government could pass a law saying that it's illegal to eavesdrop on conversations in restaurants, yet people would understand that they should not conduct private conversations withing earshot of other patrons because they realize that the law gives them no real protection.
However, when it comes to technology, people think that the law actually offers something, much like the law that made it illegal to listen to analog cell phone transmissions even though they were broadcast without encryption - users thought that they were safe and secure and conducted credit card transactions and other business over cell phones despite having no real protection at all.
If the government had just said "Sorry, unless your carrier encrypts your cell phone transmissions, they are fair game for anyone to listen to", many people either would have pushed their carriers for encryption and/or stopped conducting private business over open communications channels.
I think that the difference between your conversations and pizza ordering on an analog transmission and on a digital one WRT 4th amendment protection should be zero.
Because you have an expectation of privacy
The problem is that the law gave the illusion of privacy for cell phone calls rather than actual privacy - scanners that can listen to analog cellular were easy to come by even after the ban and there were a number of "private" cell phone conversations made public in the media even after the ban. Some scanners required a simple hardware mod, others could be ordered from overseas sellers that weren't subject to the ban.
It's the same thing with Wifi -- making intercepting unencrypted Wifi transmissions illegal only makes people think that their open Wifi is secure.
Much better to tell people explicitly that it an open Wifi network is not at all private and that the onus is on them to lock it down. After all, the whole point of an open network is that you're inviting people to connect by broadcasting your SSID.
If I open my front door and yell out to the world "Hey, my door is open, come on in! Then I shouldn't be surprised when people come in and read the letters I left sitting in plain view on my coffee table". If I'm going to invite the public to connect to my Wifi network (or come into my home), then I should encrypt (or hide) anything I don't want them to see. A law saying otherwise is just giving people a false sense of security.
If you read TFA, you'd know that they are brought in by filthy immigrants from filthy countries. The note that the infestations are taking root in California is a big indicator of that, with California being a sanctuary state and all. Come on in, all you stinky unbathed barefoot burrito eaters! You get everything for free at the taxpayers' expense!
While it's always heartening to see an ethnic rant, not all of California's disadvantaged immigrants come from the south, and not all of them get welfare assistance.
> Most of the time, the vapors won't be thick enough, particularly if you handle the gasoline properly (but somebody smoking near gasoline *already* isn't
> handling it properly
But you just explained why the conditions are generally not right for a cig to light off gas vapors....
so what are you basing the idea that smoking around gasoline is not handling it properly, after acknowledging that its a combination of factors, all of which are easily controlled?
Well no, he said that "most" of the time the gasoline won't ignite. Are you willing to bet your life on "most"?
Not smoking is pretty much at the top of the list of things not to do around gasoline... if there's one other failure then you could easily end up with conditions where the gasoline could ignite.
Factors are never controlled, instead, risks are mitigated by reducing the chance that there will an environment that allows ignition. For example, you regularly inspect hoses and couplers to prevent failure (well except *you* don't, the 17 year old kid at the gas station does it and checks it off on a checklist, but how carefully did he look?), but there's still that one time out of a thousand when something fails and you end up with a fuel spill and when that happens you don't want to have a cigarette in your mouth at the time. Maybe it's not even your fault, maybe the guy next to you accidentally squeezes the trigger when he swings the nozzle over to his tank and he sprays you down with gasoline. And now your shirt soaked in gasoline with the cigarette dangling in your mouth a few inches away will give you lots of gasoline vapor to ignite.
...there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products.
That's like saying if we got engineers from Caterpillar, Peterbilt, BMW and Kawasaki to just work together, they would make a better product.
Well, I think it's more like saying that if we got engineers from Caterpillar, Euclid, Komatsu, and Terex together and asked them to build a heavy dump truck -- they are all in the same heavy equipment industry and each has useful innovations that could work well together if they were motivated to come up with the best product for customers without trying to compete with each other.
Hmm, I agree on the API part. So maybe a single toolkit like GTK (or some such). I disagree about the single desktop environment. I like Gnome, some people like KDE and you like XKCD. Which one to choose? Is it even possible to have one desktop environment to cater to everyones wishes? MS and Apple seem to think so, but that's why I don't use their OSs.
I do like XKCD, but I find it makes a lousy desktop environment as it's too distracting. I prefer Xfce as a desktop environment.
You just contradicted yourself. On the one hand, you call for a "unified" (one-size-fits-all) system. In other words, things would be better in the absence of choice. But in the end, you admit that you capitalized on the availability of choice (you use XFCE). So in your opinion, is choice both good AND bad?
You must not be a developer if this is the first time you've noticed a user being inconsistent between his desires and actual behavior.
Maybe if GnoKDEUnity were the standard and well supported I'd use that, but I've hit enough quirky bugs in all 3 to make me fall back on something more stable.
Reference?
While being drawn, a cigarette has a temperature of around 400 - 500 degC, while the auto ignition temperature of gasoline is 280 degC.
You may be able to throw a lit cigarette in a pool of gasoline and extinguish the cigarette, but I woudn't want to bend down and tie my shoe with my mouth near the gas filler nozzle with gasoline vapor escaping from my gas tank (which admittedly with modern sealed tanks and vapor recovery nozzles is minimal, but I still wouldn't bet my life on it).
http://wandererh.hubpages.com/hub/Can-The-Tip-Of-A-Lit-Cigarette-Butt-Ignite-Gasoline
Even those bastions of science, the Mythbusters, say it's partially plausible: http://mythbustersresults.com/special7
Granted, there's a limited set of conditions where a cigarette could ignite gasoline vapors, but that was my point - a cigarette canignite gasoline, but other conditions have to be just right to make it happen.
Not strictly (well, at all) GUI related, but I'd love to see something more like Windows Powershell in Linux.
I love the Linux pipeline and being able to pipe text streams between tools is very powerful, but the more I get into Windows Powershell, the more I like it. The ability to pass objects through the pipeline and operate on those objects can be much more powerful than processing text streams.
Make it so I NEVER have to touch the CLI to do anything on the OS. Install drivers, games, applications, tweak the GUI, configure system settings, etc. I'm not saying get rid of it, I'm saying make it so I don't HAVE to in order to do any of those those things.
Don't modern distributions already do that? I don't think I've ever *had* to use the CLI to configure my Ubuntu system, though I sometimes fall back to the CLI to do some things because I find it more convenient.
I'd rather that Linux went in the other direction -- keep the CLI and write GUI wrappers around it, but don't even make it so you *have* to use the GUI to configure something.
I know I'll get flamed for this since it goes against the Linux philosophy, but how about getting rid of competing Gnome and KDE (and now Unity) desktops and agree on one standard desktop with a single API for everyone to write to. And maintain backwards compatibility for the API so an application written for GnoKDE 2.0 still still run unaltered on GnoKDE 3.0.
I know that having multiple desktops gives users choice, but there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products. Oh, and stop pushing out alpha releases (I'm talking about you, Ubuntu/Unity) as the default desktop and telling users that it's for their own good.
But hey, don't trust me, I use Xfce since it does everything I need in a desktop.
Any price is too high if the ebook has DRM. I would happily pay for non-DRM ebooks, though, up to something around half the price of the paperback.
I'll settle for easy-to-strip DRM, and so far I've had no trouble stripping DRM from my Nook and Kindle purchases. And I always strip DRM immediately when I purchase a book so it's really mine to read on any device I like and my access to the title can't be revoked by the publisher.
The new readings, taken by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, reveal that the pressure is at 1.6 megapascals, nearly 16 times the 0.1 megapascals it takes to trigger an eruption
If that's what it takes to trigger an eruption, why didn't it happen 1.5 megapascals ago?
Probably the same reason why even though a cigarette is enough to trigger a gasoline explosion, people still manage to smoke while fueling their cars without blowing themselves up - a cigarette is sufficient to set it off, but it takes a combination of factors to make it happen.
could they maybe drill a set of holes and
1 steer the lava to someplace NOT populated
2 prevent the lava camber from going full bore BOOM
when using Po^HMnt Fuji for your scam always set your clock for Volcano Day
I say we send Bruce Willis and his team of oil roughnecks to drill the holes and relieve the pressure. He saved the planet once, he may as well do it again.
Why is the paperback priced lower than the Kindle?
Because the ebook is delivered instantly (less than a minute) whereas the paperback shipping maxes out at next day.
I rarely care how quickly the book is delivered, so if that's why eBooks cost more, I would be more than willing to take a delayed delivery in exchange for lower cost. But I think that's going to be a hard sell with consumers - it's easy to justify a premium to ship a phyiscal product more quickly, everyone knows and accepts that express delivery costs more. But publishers may face a backlash if they tried to charge more for something that everyone knows costs them nothing.
Even though I'd accept delayed delivery, I do think that the fact that I paid $100 of my own money for the eBook reader should entitles me to instant delivery "for free" since my eBook reader cuts out virtually all of the publisher's distribution costs of the book and it was my purchase of the ebook reader that enabled them to deliver it instantly. It's not like the publishers are handing out the eBook readers for free (though Amazon is getting closer to doing so with the $69 Kindle - in a few years they may be handing them out for "free" in the same way that the razor companies sell the initial razor for very cheap and make it up on the blades)
Did HD make TV cheaper? It didn't for me.
Did HDTV make it any cheaper to create or distribute content? If anything, it made it more espensive since studios had to upgrade their equipment.
Did increaed fuel efficiancy in cars make the car or the gasoline cheaper? Nope.
I'm not sure this is a good analogy. I think it would be more like switching to an electric car where I can cut out the gas station entirely and refuel over the power lines that already run to my house, which eliminates the need for expensive gas stations and refueling infrastructure. The electric car is more expensive than a conventionally powered car (just like an eBook reader is more expensive than no eBook reader at all), but after I own the car, refueling is cheaper than buying gas -- though currently I don't think the savings is enough to recoup the cost of the car.
The author-editor team didn't make anything from your used books.
It's a sticky topic. I don't want to go off the rails from your post, just point out that used books have that crucial payment to the creators stripped out -- it's an unsustainable comparison. Matching that price means no books produced.
Well, I'm not sure that's true, but would love to see some numbers to prove it.
When I buy a used book, that means someone originally bought the book new, and if I buy his used book for 50% of the price of a new book, I'm effectively giving him a 50% subsidy for the purchase of the book and helping him buy his next book.
Of course, that effect gets lower and lower each time a used book is resold.
But it's easy for a publisher to shortcircuit this process - a month or two paperback release (when the books are widely available on the used market), they could cut the eBook price to match the price in the used market.
Since you mentioned tech books... well, It's harder to find used book deals on Tech books because as you said the market is smaller, plus many people that buy them keep them around for reference and by the time they are willing to sell them, they are obsolete. But lets look at the pricing for a random tech book Beginning Python:
$26.23 for the Kindle eBook, $27.61 for the eBook, and $27.60 used including shipping.
The eBook is priced $1.48 lower than the paper book, but since I don't have a $300 Kindle DX with a large screen (so I can see diagrams, code samples, etc), the eBook is much less useful to me than the paper book.
Does it really cost only $1.48 to print a 700 page paperback book, warehouse it, and ship it?
So you're not only saying ebooks shouldn't cost more than paperback editions, but that they shouldn't cost more than used paperbacks? That's a bit extreme, no?
Well, not exactly, I'm saying that if publishers want me to use my expensive eReader to purchase books that have virtually no distribution cost to them, then they'll need to match the pricing of my other options to buy books -- including used.
Otherwise, they'll lose out on my money, they get very little money when I purchase a used book (it's not zero since my used book purchase helps subsidize someone else's full-price purchase of the new book), but if they sell the eBook for what I consider to be a reasonable price, they'll get much more of my money.
It could be that publishers just don't care, maybe they get so much revenue from people willing to pay high eBook prices that they don't care if they are losing money on the used market.
On many highways with 65 or 70mph speed limit, I've seen a separate 55mph limit for trucks and cars towing trailers.
If this is the same on this highway, then cars will be driving at 90mph (drivers always seem to add 5mph), and closing in on 55mph trucks at a 35mph speed differential.
On highways, I always thought that speed doesn't kill as much as speed differential does. If everyone drove at the same speed, there'd be fewer opportunities for accidents.
What are you willing to pay? I personally buy books from Amazon all the time for Kindle, even though I have a Nexus 7 now. Amazon offers the best prices out of everyone I've checked.
Ideally, I'd pay around $6 or so, which is what I typically pay for a used book to be delivered to my door. (and I usually pay $4 - $6 on Smashwords or Baen)
Here's an example of pricing that makes no sense (assuming free Amazon Prime shipping)
The Amateur - $16.99 hardcover, $9.99 eBook, $6.99 paperback, $6.88 used
Even moving off the bestseller list and going to an older book doesn't help
Fahrenheit 451 - $13.78 hardcover, $9.99 eBook, $7.19 paperback, $6.88 used
Why is the paperback priced lower than the Kindle? I paid $100 for an eReader and publishers want me to pay more for the privilege of reducing their distribution costs?
It does go the other way sometimes too -- usually (but not always), the eBook is cheaper than the hardcover, but more often than not, the eBook seems to be priced more than the paperback, and is almost always more than a used book.
I, for one, hope this results in lower eBook prices.
I have a Kindle (and Nook tablet) that are underutilized because I refuse to pay more for an eBook than I do to have a paper book delivered to my house. About the only eBooks I read are from Smashwords or Baen. Almost every book I've bought from Amazon has been a used paper book because they are typically about half the price of an eBook.
After 2 years with the Kindle, I've bought exactly 3 Amazon eBooks - all purchased before traveling since I didn't want to carry around heavy paper books. I've never gotten around to reselling my used books (which would net me another dollar or two of savings), so my local thrift shop has been getting them.
how do you sell an ebook copy at "below cost"? that implies that amazon paid authors out of their own pocket? is this right?
(because, in the sw world.. amazon actually makes the author accept zero payment for the privilidge of amazon giving the sw away as promotion)
The same way a grocery store can sell milk for $2/gallon when it really costs them $2.50/gallon.
They pay the distributor the full $2.50, then eat the extra 50 cents themselves as a cost of getting more people in the door.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
Amazon can make up the difference on other products that the user may purchase from Amazon when they stop in to buy a book. Other retailers (like B&N and Apple) have a less diverse product catalog so if they take a loss on eBooks it's harder to make up the difference somewhere else.
"But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"
Red flag. Badly designed system.
Well, it's a made-up scenario, so it's not a poorly designed system, it's an imaginary system.
Not everyone is able to design a system such that it can accommodate all possible future enhancements without some of them requiring a major rewrite. And, this might come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of poorly designed systems out there, many of them maintained by people that didn't design it in the first place.
A word to the wise when trying to get people excited about fundmental science: the number "1" followed by a lot of zeroes is meaningless to most people (even scientists). Please give us something to relate that number to and put it in scientific notation!
They did give a unit that scientists can relate to when they said "67 attoseconds". The 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000 notation is just there for the layman for whom scientific notation means nothing, 1 x 10^-18 means little to most people, but lots of zeros make it clear that it's a very small number.
67 attoseconds = 6.7 x 10^–18 seconds
You're off by 10 -- 67 attoseconds = 67 x 10^-18, or 6.7 x 10^-17