Svein Olav Nyberg @19:

"You don't need a system. Just a user login. As for companies going out of business, we're talking mainly major players like DG, Amazon, etc here."
The biggest issue is the one you didn't respond to: the short lifetimes of these digital music programs. I'm also not convinced that big record labels are good bets for survival 20, or even 10, years into the future, and I don't want to restrict all my music buying to big labels.

"But maybe an overhaul of (C) law is needed: To own the copyright means to be able to provide such back-ups. Once you are unable to provide a back-up, the work shall be considered Public Domain."
Copyright law already provides for backups and resale. The problem is that the license trumps the general provisions of copyright law.

"Anyway, the potential loss of my ability to resell is a minor, minor price to pay for freeing up culture."
I think you've got it backwards. We used to have a freer culture with LPs and CDs; there was no drm, no licensing to restrict backups, and no licensing to restrict resale. If you're talking about "free culture" in the sense of the free culture movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_movement) , then that's a million miles away from anything that any major record label has ever contemplated.

@16: "When you buy an album (or single tune) from a music seller, you also buy the right to re-download that same album or tune as many times as you like, thus saving you worries about back-up."

One problem with a scheme like that is that music companies go out of business, and even if the company you bought from stays in business, the whole digital download thing is in a state of flux. Any program they're offering in 2007 will almost certainly no longer exist in 2010, and your re-download rights would be totally useless.

Another problem is that nobody wants to have eleven different systems for storing, playing, and backing up their music. I don't want to have a different system for every record label I buy from.

And finally, it's not just about backups, it's also about resale. If I get tired of a particular CD, I can sell it to someone else. I don't see the motivation to buy music in a format that takes away my ability to do the things I could do if I bought it on CD.

There's the objection that if you were allowed to resell digital music, without DRM, then people would just sell hundreds of copies of their original, without deleting their original. Well, you can already do essentially the same thing with CDs. For instance, you can copy the CD onto your hard disk, then sell the CD.

I would love to find a survey of the various places that you can buy digital music these days. I've tried amazon (bought an old out of print classical recording that I remembered from my childhood). One problem with amazon for me is that they require you to download a special program to buy full albums, and they don't have a linux version out yet. It seems like there are a ton of small labels doing this. It's not a trivial task to check out all these different companies and figure out the relevant facts: DRM, license, price, linux support ...

So far, the most practical method in most cases still seems to be buying a physical CD. It's DRM-free, and you have a physical object, so you don't need to worry about backing it up. I am, however, thinking about copying all my CDs onto a hard disk and then storing the originals on spindles or something, because they take up a lot of space. To me, the killer app for digital downloads is the long tails of the distribution, like that old classical record I bought for nostalgia's sake.

The other thing that's a total hassle is my big long shelf full of old LPs. My turntable died, then I bought another one on ebay, and then that one died. I've tried transferring them to digital, and it's extremely time-consuming.

I'm not sure how useful this is. For instance, CH2M Hill is ranked #11 by total contract value, and it caught my eye because I drive past their office building in Orange County fairly often, and didn't know anything about them. Well, if you read the information Windfalls of War provides, all CH2M Hill seems to be doing in Iraq is building water projects. Doesn't seem particularly evil to me. You could even argue that since we destroyed the country's infrastructure, it's our moral duty to rebuild it. I guess there's some line here between positive rebuilding work and the kind of war profiteering that Halliburton does, but the information at Windfalls of War doesn't help me to find where that line can be drawn.

Geesh -- $133 for the first season?? Are they nuts?? When I was a kid we used to turn on the TV set, and it would display Star Trek shows for free. IMO you also have to take into consideration that roughly 2/3 of the episodes were just absolutely awful. I think I'd be willing to pay $20 for a greatest-hits collection of the 10 best Star Trek episodes ever.

I'm convinced that global warming is happening, that it's caused by humans, and that its overall effect will be harmful. What I'm less sure about is the optimal amount of economic pain to inflict in order to slow it down. Suppose we say that the economic cost of implementing the Kyoto protocols would be $x for the U.S., $y for China, and so on. Are x and y the right amounts of money to spend? Maybe they're too small, and maybe they're too big. You get into the problem that economics isn't an exact science. Economists have something called a utility function, and every rational human is supposed to act in such a way as to maximize his/her utility function. The problem is that it's very hard to define a utility function in a meaningful way. Personally, it would maximize my utility function if the planet was a lot less crowded with hairless bipedal primates, but maybe other people think the Yosemite Valley would look nicer with condos in it. How important is it to keep polar bears from going extinct? How do you put a dollar amount on that?

What's much more clear to me is that the cost to the U.S. of dependence on oil from the Middle East is ruinous. We're getting ourselves into war after war, and it's hurting us as well as the countries where the wars are happening.

One thing I don't think the article explains very clearly is the reason that side 2 is so good. The reason is that when people go to jail and then get out, they exit onto side 2. Therefore people don't spend 25% of their time on each side of the board. They spend more than 25% on side 2.

The classic reason I've seen given for not buying hotels is that it creates a housing shortage. I think the article's analysis is weak on this point, because it treats the flow of money as continuous, when really it comes in random chunks at random times. As in real investing, you don't just want to maximize the expected return on your investment, you also want to minimize your variability. The great thing about building a hotel on boardwalk or park place is that it vastly increases the variability of your opponents' situation. That variability increases the chances that they'll go broke at some point, because thir net worth is undergoing big fluctuations up and down.

The article's analysis also ignores trading and negotiation. He depends on the listed prices of the properties, but in reality it often happens that people land on a property but don't buy, which opens it up to an auction, and then it becomes more like a poker game. You can, e.g., try to bid up the price of the property, and then back out of the bidding and let your opponent pay more for it than you think it's worth.

I mailed off my requests back when this story first appeared on boingboing. The one to the Virginia office bounced back today. They said that it couldn't be processed, because it didn't have the following information on it... and then proceeded to list spaces for filling in that information ... which was all information that had been on the original request. Oh well, I sent it back again, filling in all the information on in the spaces they provided. I would be happy to believe that they're actually so clueless that they can't find data when it's listed for them in a letter -- if my country has to have a secret police force, I'm much happier if they're an inefficient, bumbling secret police force.

@sabik:

Interesting -- thanks for the info. Maybe the whole first half of the article should say nothing but this: "Windows users, switch to Firefox."

"...written in user-friendly non-geek-speak..."

Well, I don't understand the article very well, which may mean that I need it translated back into geek-speak :-)

The unspoken assumption behind the whole article seems to be that there are dangerous web sites -- web sites so dangerous that simply visiting them can compromise your computer. I don't quite understand the assumption. If your browser will allow malware to be installed on your machine without your permission, simply because you visit a particular web site, then your browser is broken, and you're screwed. It's been 10 years since I last used Windows, and 5 since I last used Internet Explorer, so maybe I'm just underestimating how insecure Win+IE still is, but I find it hard to believe that this is possible unless you've gone out of your way to horribly misconfigure your browser.

"Days before the big game, attackers infected the Dolphins's site with a trojan that installed keylogging software onto visitors' computers, allowing the attackers to spy on keystrokes and steal passwords."

Huh?? Does this depend on users having some ancient, unpatched Win+IE setup? If there's some gaping security hole in the browser, then the solution is to patch the hole, not to sit around reading articles about how to change your websurfing behavior.

@14: Look again. They don't have to find the cube root of 4, they have to find the cube root of 8. (But if you did need to find the cube root of 4 by hand, a good approach would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_method ; outside an exam situation, people in 1869 would probably have used a table of logarithms.)

The Euclidean geometry proofs would, I suspect, be a real challenge for many MIT students today. In any case, the value of such a thing is probably that it shows that they can reason within an axiomatic system; any other axiomatic system would do just as well. I wonder what the expectations were for these proofs re what you were allowed to assume. In Euclid, each proof typically makes use of many preceding results, but if that was allowed, then many of the proofs on this exam might become trivial -- at least one of them *is* a theorem from Euclid. If they're only allowed to use the 5 axioms, I wonder if they're restricted to a certain formulation. There's more than one way to formulate the parallel postulate, for example.

Some of the arithmetic questions seem like modern grade school material (e.g., adding fractions), but if you ask a calculus professor today for the reason that some students fail calculus, the usual answer is that they have a weak foundation in arithmetic and algebra.

I had a student a few years back who wanted to transfer as a physics major to Cal Tech from the community college where I teach. They mailed me an entrance exam, and I had to proctor it. Oh. My. Gawd. There were a lot of problems that I would have been able to do 20 years ago, when certain things were fresher in my mind, but can't do now because I'm rusty. E.g., there were a lot of contour integrals, and various integrals of real functions that required tricky substitutions.

Cory's text seems a little overwrought to me. This is akin to Barnes and Noble deciding not to sell Hustler in their magazine racks. It's not government censorship, it's a private business deciding what to sell and what not to sell.

To me, the sleaziest thing about this type of net censorship is that the same technology can so easily be used -- and often is used -- by governments like China's to censor political speech. You could also argue that it's a bad thing to get USians psychologically habituated to the idea that their net access can be censored, because then it would be easier to slide down the slippery slope to government censorship of individuals' private net access.

@10, Cpt. Tim:
for the people who don't want to see it themselves... its called discretion. For the people who don't want their kids to see, it's called parenting.

That makes plenty of sense if you're talking about families paying for internet access in their own homes. An airport terminal is a completely different environment. You've got a gazillion hairless primates packed together like one of those experiments where they drove the lab rats to cannibalism by overcrowding them. All I want in an airport terminal is peace and quiet. I hate having TV's blaring at me all over the place so that I can't read a book in peace and quiet. In that cramped environment, if someone is pornsurfing, it's a severe annoyance to everyone around them. Similar deal with some of the violent movies they show on board airplanes -- if you're traveling with a 2-year-old, it really becomes an issue.

And yes, people will pornsurf when other people are around. I used to think nobody would be that idiotic, and then it happened in my college physics lab. Okay, all I had to do was have an Earnest Talk with the student, and point out to him that it was a very rude thing to do to his female lab partner. He apologized to her. But, uh ... I shouldn't have to spend my time doing that. On a college network, I think the need for free access to information outweighs this type of concern, so I don't think censorware is appropriate, but this example really does show that this is more than a strawman issue for, e.g., elementary schools, libraries, and, yes, airports.

Clusty is a search engine that has a much better privacy policy than Google. I use it for all routine searches, only switching to Google when there's a particular feature that it doesn't have. The quality of the results on an ordinary keyword search seems to be essentially the same as with Google.

dainel@17: Re your argument that the price approaches zero when the marginal cost of production and distribution is zero: One obvious caveat to add is that "approaches" doesn't mean "becomes in a certain amount of time." Another big difference between open-source software and a novel is that there are tons of people out there who think open-source coding is fun, and are competent to do it, but there are very few people out there who are capable of writing a novel that a lot of people will want to read.

Publishers clearly blew it the first time around with overpriced, proprietary, DRM-ridden ebooks -- but so what? They didn't lose anything with the experiment. They're like Microsoft in 1990, when Linux didn't exist yet, and BSD was mired in legal problems.

Things are starting to change, but book publishing has been a mature industry for hundreds of years, and is actually pretty efficient. The best example I know of where the traditional paper publishing approach is really feeling marketplace pressure is science fiction magazines. The big three print magazines have circulations that have gotten so small that they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. Meanwhile, Jim Baen's Universe has fired a shot across their bows by putting out an electronic-only magazine, and paying authors two to five times as much. However, they're certainly not offering the magazine for free -- you have to pay for a subscription.

I think it's important to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction here. When it comes to nonfiction, there is much more potential for readers to find useful material via google searches. My own nonfiction physics textbooks are free online under a CC license, and plenty of people find them. But when it comes to nonfiction, I really don't see any alternative to having someone read slush.

Of course, having slush readers and other gatekeepers also has nothing to do with the issue of whether a particular work is free online in digital form. People like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross routinely make some or all of their work available simultaneously via traditional print publishing and free digital downloads.

@Neon - As a college professor who's concerned about exploitative practices in textbook publishing (high prices, shrinkwrap, unnecessarily frequent new editions), I love what you're doing at crimsonreading.org. Have you thought at all about the possibility of doing it nationwide? I would think that you could just scale up the database, and it would probably pay for itself with ad and referral revenue. Right now you're having to hound professors and argue with cops, but I think if something like this got to be more of an accepted and widely known part of the college landscape, it could work fine with just casual participation by students and professors. Today, for example, a student who wants to know the required book for my course a few weeks before the semester starts has to email me and ask. If there was a nationwide website that was widely known, that student could ask the same question, but could also suggest to me that I post the information on the website, or do it himself.
The typical email might be something like this:

Dear Professor Smith,

I see that crimsonreading.org has the 8th edition of Halliday, vol. 1, listed as the required text for Physics 221 last semester. Will that also be the required text for this coming semester? If so, then you might want to enter that information at http: //crimsonreading.org?school=ucla&prof=smith&class=phys221.

Thanks in advance,

John Doe

@18: If the goal is to buy the books online rather than at the campus bookstore, then you need the information weeks in advance. You typically can't get the syllabus until the first day of class, and to get it you'd have to attend every class; that would be a lot more work that what they're actually doing. The issue isn't finding out the isbn given the author, title, and edition; it's making sure what book is even being used in the course. Often books are available in a variety of forms: various editions, one volume or "splits," possibly shrinkwrapped with various goodies (which may be mandatory, optional, or useless, depending on the prof). Also, they're trying to comparison-shop, and they can't do that without seeing what price is actually being charged in the store.

Eenie meenie (#30) wrote:

And all that writing, editing etc. is labor that ought to be fairly compensated. The Wikipedia model is all well and good, but I'm not sure it's reasonable--or a particularly good idea--to expect our major educational resources to be the work of amateur volunteers.

You want to compare with wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page), not wikipedia. Also, there are several separate things, which shouldn't be confounded: (1) the wiki model versus the single-author model,(2) amateur versus professional, (3) books that cost money verus books that don't ("free as in beer"), (4) proprietary books versus books that are under a permissive license such as Creative Commons ("free as in speech"), and (5) economic rewards to the author versus no economic rewards.

I've argued in this article that the wikibooks model is basically a failure when it comes to college textbooks; and of course you don't want a college textbook written by amateurs -- that would be silly. (Citizendium is an example of a wiki-based encyclopedia that doesn't allow amateurs to contribute.) However, that doesn't mean that free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech are also failures. Check out theassayer.org, and you'll find quite a large number of free-as-in-something college textbooks.

Finally, it's incorrect to assume that just because something is free, it can't also produce rewards for the author. Boingboing.net is a good example of that. You and I aren't paying one red cent to use it, but it produces a ton of revenue for Cory Doctorow. Red Hat lets you download their Linux distribution without paying any money, but they make money from it (by charging for support). I've made money from my own physics textbooks, which can be downloaded for free. One very common model in the world of free books is to make the book available for free in digital form, but make a profit from printed copies. In the world of traditional textbook publishing, very few authors make any significant amount of money. If they were just looking to make a buck, they would have been better off just moonlighting at McDonald's.

Re #25 posted by BookGuy:

I've worked for several textbook publishers, most of them not-for-profit organizations and university presses, and the picture of wild makrups run amok that BCrowell prsents in #13 just isn't accurate. Does it cost $50 to buy the raw materials and put a book on press? Sure, that's pretty accurate. But it's like arguing that a car should only cost $75 because that's all that the raw materials cost. Books and cars aren't put together by magic--a lot of work goes into them. Just one example: A hard science book can have 100s or 1000s of illustrations--the publishers have to pay somebody to create those from what the authors submit. Even scanning in the author's hand drawn art would cost a ton of money.

Here
is an interesting study that really does back up the notion that publishers are profiteering, at least in some cases. He shows that the prices of upper-division and graduate physics textbooks have gone up much faster than inflation in recent years. That isn't because ppb costs have gone up that money (they have, a little, but not, as he documents, anywhere near that much). It also isn't because the publishers are paying editors, illsutrators, etc.: most of these books are old standards like Goldstein's mechanics and Jackson's E&M. The rapid increase in prices is simply profit-taking by the publishers. I also don't see how you can put an innocent face on exploitative practices such as new editions every 2 years for a subject like calculus (to kill off the used book market), or books shrinkwrapped with useless trinkets (to prevent returns).

Thanks for the informative post (#22), Tomh.

An analysis of our spring 2007 data shows The Coop's prices are on average 23% higher than the cheapest online prices.

Wow! In that case, it sounds like the Harvard Coop's markups are simply way out of line with the national average of college bookstores. That GAO report I linked to says that the average college bookstore markup is 30%. Since amazon's markup isn't zero, I can't see how the Coop could be 23% above amazon unless the coop was charging a markup much, much higher than the national average. The price gap of $5-10 (on books in the $100-130 range) is what I found just by doing a quick, informal survey of some physics textbooks in my school's bookstore, and comparing with amazon.

Another possibility is that the "cheapest online prices" are prices that in reality can't be found online. Just because someone managed to get a particular book on ebay or half.com for a particular price, that doesn't mean that everyone can get it at that price. It would be much more relevant to compare the Coop's prices with standard, everyday prices on amazon.com or bn.com. It would also be good to know what the Coop's standard markup is. (If you ask them, they'll probably tell you their margin rather than their markup. The margin is computed as a percentage of the retail price, the markup as a percentage of the wholesale price. Bookstores prefer to talk about margins, because it makes the numbers sound smaller.) This
link says that the Harvard Coop's markup was 25 to 28 percent, in 1998. Is their markup way bigger in 2007 than it was in 1998? If not, then I don't see how your 23% figure can possibly be right, unless the online prices you're comparing with are unrealistically low ones. A markup of 25-28% is wonderful -- significantly lower than the national average.

Some links with good information:

http://www.calpirgstudents.org/textbooks

http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=12121

http://media.www.ncatregister.com/media/storage/paper277/news/2005/04/09/News/Student.Groups.Tackling.HighPriced.Textbooks-2649068.shtml

In the meantime, we're appealing for students to engage in civil disobedience by emailing us the ISBN numbers for the books they've already bought from The Coop... crowd-sourcing at its very best.

That's not illegal, so it's not civil disobedience.

Re #15 posted by Bill Adams,

In liberal arts courses particularly, you don't even need earlier editions by the same publisher; all "classic" texts in literature, history, psychology, etc. can be picked up dirt cheap.

Yeah, but unfortunately this doesn't work as well in the sciences. I teach physics. The publishers bring out a new edition of the standard freshman physics doorstop roughly every two years, even though Newton's laws haven't exactly changed much in the last few centuries. With each new edition, the numbers of the homework problems are changed around. It's theoretically possible to get by with an old edition, and work out the permutation of the homework problems, but in reality my experience is that very few students do it.

Re #15 posted by Bill Adams,

In liberal arts courses particularly, you don't even need earlier editions by the same publisher; all "classic" texts in literature, history, psychology, etc. can be picked up dirt cheap.

Yeah, but unfortunately this doesn't work as well in the sciences. I teach physics. The publishers bring out a new edition of the standard freshman physics doorstop roughly every two years, even though Newton's laws haven't exactly changed much in the last few centuries. With each new edition, the numbers of the homework problems are changed around. It's theoretically possible to get by with an old edition, and work out the permutation of the homework problems, but in reality my experience is that very few students do it.

And as far as getting older, cheaper editions, I say go for it. The publishers actually strike deals with professors, encouraging the professors to always use the newest edition in order to garner better profit. It's a great game of You Scratch My Back that even made bookstore employees upset.

Like jccalhoun, I'm a college professor, and I've never had any such money offered to me. Vonpokemon, do you have any facts to back this up? It sounds extremely unlikely to me. There is absolutely no reason for the publisher to pay professors money in order to get them to adopt a new edition. In my experience, all the publisher does is to announce that the 7th edition is going out of print, and from now on, the only edition that will be available from them is the 8th. Nobody has a choice: not the students, not the store, not the prof.

Some folks here seem to be directing their ire at the wrong target. It's the publishers who are to blame for high textbook prices, and for other abuses like frequent new editions used to kill off the used book market, and shrinkwrapping books along with other junk so that they can't be returned. Although this particular policy of this particular bookstore sounds idiotic, in general college bookstores simply are not the main reason for high textbook prices. This GAO report says that the average markup for college bookstores is about 30%. For example, if you buy one of those ridiculously overpriced physics or ochem books for $140, then the wholesale price the store paid was about $108, and the bookstore marked it up by 30% of $108. That $32 markup may sound like a lot, but the bookstore has to pay the rent, meet payroll, etc., and part of what you're paying for is convenience. In the past when I've compared amazon.com prices to prices at the bookstore at the college where I teach, usually the difference has been fairly small -- maybe $5 or $10 on one of those $140 books. (This is after taking shipping costs into account.)

So sure, if the college bookstore's convenience isn't worth $5-10 to you, then by all means buy it from amazon or bn.com, but both the college bookstore and the online retailers are paying the same insane $108 wholesale price, and it's the publisher who's making out like a bandit. The paper, printing, and binding price of that lavishly illustrated, 1000-page color textbook is probably something like $50 (depending on the length of the print run), which is a lot less than $108. What you're getting for the extra $5-10 at the bookstore is convenience. You can walk into a single store and get all your books, and find out easily what books are required for all your courses. You might be able to find used copies of some of them. If you drop a course after the first meeting, you can return the book. If you drop the course later in the semester, or want to sell the book back after the semester is over, you can do that, too, albeit for less money. You don't have to wait for the book to be shipped to you. All of those conveniences cost the store money to offer.

The really cool solution is free textbooks, which are starting to gain more and more traction. See theassayer.org for some examples.

Re #3, you can buy a printed copy on amazon or bn.com. He also has a link for donations at http://www.kschroeder.com/ , but I think virtually everybody who's made writing available for free online has found that you get virtually zero revenue by asking for donations. Buying a copy will also help to convince bookstores and his publisher that people like his work; sending him money via paypal won't do that.

Re #4, thanks for the information. I've also noticed after poking around some more that in quite a few cases, manybooks does host the text as well, and that they also accept reviews.

ManyBooks looks like a cool site. I run site with a similar, but not identical mission, theassayer.org. Project Gutenberg also does something similar. As far as I can tell, here's how the three are different:

• project gutenberg - Only does old public-domain books. Hosts the books themselves. They only do books, not shorter works.
• theassayer.org - I focus on modern books whose authors have intentionally made them available on the web for free. I don't host the books myself. I only do books, not shorter works. Users can post reviews, and can add books to the catalog on their own.
• manybooks - They seem to do both old public-domain works and modern ones, and their catalog seems to include not just books but shorter works as well. They don't host the books themselves.