Like most of the other economists, for the last couple of days I have been at the annual Allied Social Sciences Association conference in San Diego. This is a gathering of mostly economists with hundreds of papers being presented, strewn across multiple hotels. A staple of the meetings was the 'book.' This was a 500 …
Subscription models for eBooks
One of the things that I propose in Information Wants to be Shared is a move away from a 'book ownership' model and towards a 'book access' model. Basically, that the library model is the natural state for books as opposed to what we have had in book publishing for the last couple of centuries. …
History of the VCR
Video cassette recorders may be a couple of generations behind the times but the history of their adoption turns out to be quite fascinating. Written by Josh Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video is a very accessible and easy to read history of two decades or so …
Curated educational content
There is much discussion about online education but, for the most part, the incursions online have been seen as providing bundled, self-generated content in much the same way as University content is provided now. An exception is Marginal Revolution University that is allowing contributions from many academics. This week two other endeavours were brought to …
Barnes and Noble tries a sharing approach
News today: Between December 20 and 24, customers who go to a Barnes & Noble physical store and buy an ebook from a list of 20 qualifying ebooks — including The Hobbit, Life of Pi and the entire Hunger Games trilogy – can “instant-gift” another ebook on that list for free. Notably, the list includes new and bestselling titles from big-six publishers …
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A speculative post about information technology and mass shootings
Disclaimer: this post is very, very speculative and may raise lots of potentially poor ideas. I am writing it because I think that there may be a role for information technology in certain specific instances and wanted to raise for open discussion. I am no expert in pretty much anything here so feel free to …
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Disruption can be managed if you are your own lead user
This post was originally published at HBR.org and it is co-authored with Eric von Hippel. Recent corporate history is littered with successful established firms who failed to manage disruptive innovation even with full knowledge that it was coming. Kodak is a poster-child. They knew digital photography was the future and invested heavily in hybrid technology in …
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What I want: better email/task management
Email management is the same as managing as task management. I became convinced by this when I first saw the Kickstarter vision from Mailpilot. This basically described what I was doing, so when MailPilot launched into Public Beta, I paid $60 to subscribe for a year. It is in Beta so doesn't quite look like …
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Europe's eBook Settlement
The European Commission has reached a settlement with most major publishers and Apple over eBooks. The upshot of it is that existing agency contracts with Apple will be removed and new ones written in their place. However, the new ones will not have in them the "Most Favoured Nation" (MFNs) clauses that prevented eBook retailers …
Google Maps and competition on the platform
Google Maps for iOS arrived today and it is clearly the best maps app for the iPhone and perhaps, according to some reports, over all mobile devices (including Android). It is beautifully and sensibly designed as Google's latest iPhone app offerings are. More significantly, it is a considerable advance for the Google maps that was …
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Digitopoly 