Trae Blain

What a great candid. Bigelow deserved it, Cameron just released...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:26:47 -0600

What a great candid. Bigelow deserved it, Cameron just released his comeback in a tough year.

drew:

lostdogs20:

James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow after the #oscars

Shameless self promotion I know, but this dude’s face it...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:42 -0600

Shameless self promotion I know, but this dude’s face it funny!

breakingthebike:

Ah the joys of cycling… I’ve been chuckling at this guys face for a good part of my morning.

(via cycling)

"When I was five my grandfather came up to me and said, “When I was your age, I was six,”..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:58:16 -0600

“When I was five my grandfather came up to me and said, “When I was your age, I was six,” and then he cackled madly and threw a spoon against the window. He was a strange man.”

- Steven Wright

Making the Case for E-Book Prices

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:37:21 -0600

Making the Case for E-Book Prices:

I posted this over at NookTalk but wanted to make a few comments here.

This article emphasizes that a structured pricing plan is good all around when it come to eBooks. (My plan says eBooks should cost around 75% of the cheapest retail price available for the print copy. So if B&N sells a Hardcover for $20, then the eBook should be <=$15. If the Mass Market Paperback is available for $7, then the eBook should be <=$5.25.) Here’s the way it breaks down:

Hardcover - $26 (consumer’s cost)
Publisher’s Paid: $13
Author Royalty: $3.90
Printing, Storage, Shipping: $3.25
Design, Typesetting, Editing: $0.80
Marketing: $1
Publisher’s Profit: $4.05 (before overhead operational costs: offices, warehouses, electricity, etc.)

eBook - $12.99 (consumer’s cost)
Publisher’s Paid: $9.09
Author’s Royalty: $2.27-$3.25
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0.50
Marketing: $0.78
Publisher’s Profit: $4.56-$5.54

eBook - $9.99 (consumer’s cost - Amazon model)
Publisher’s Paid: $6.99
Author’s Royalty: $1.75-$2.50
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0.38
Marketing: $0.60
Publisher’s Profit: $3.51-$4.26

All this shows that the Publishers make more money from the eBook market (although Authors are getting reduced royalties). And what the NYTimes doesn’t employ is the change based on when the book goes to paperback. Where Design, typesetting, editing are once again needed for the paperback, the eBook is still ok in it’s current form. Also assuming that the paperback needs little to no marketing as well, prices fall dramatically.

Mass Market Paperback - $8
Publisher’s Paid: $4 (per 50% model illustrated in NYT’s article)
Author’s Royalty: $1.40-$2
Printing, Storage, Shipping: $.8-$1 (assumed % from NYT model, dropped 20% for reduced shipping [arbitrary])
Design, Typesetting, editing: $0.75 (assumed similar, but slightly cheaper since design is reworked for MM Paperbacks)
Marketing: $0 (no marketing done for paperbacks)
Publisher’s Profit: $0.25-$1.05

eBook - $5.99 (consumer’s cost for a $7.99 mass market paperback)
Publisher’s Paid: $4.19 (based on NYT’s 70% price point)
Author’s Royalty: $1.05-$1.50 (based on NYT’s 17.5%-25% numbers)
Digitizing, Typesetting, editing: $0 (done during hardcover release, no changes necessary)
Marketing: $0 (assumed none for paperbacks)
Publisher’s Profit: $2.69-$3.14 (Much higher profit margin!!!)

I think most people here don’t mind the higher prices up front (ie $12-$14 for brand new books) that’s only expected. But sticking to the $9.99 as a blanket need is a joke. And if publishers looked at things in the big picture I can’t believe they wouldn’t see this too. Right now they’d be making more off the eBook than their print books. The only people that get screwed regardless are the authors, which is a shame and I’d assume that they’d renegotiate their royalty structure in eBooks became the dominate form of delivery. Which would put the profits to the publishers once again around what they are getting for print books. The only paragraph in the article I have an issue with is that publishers claim they make up much of any losses from the Hardcover edition in the paperback edition. It’s difficult if they only make ~$4 off of a Hardcover, and expect to make more from a $8 retail paperback…assuming they only receive a wholesale price for those books as well. I can’t see B&N paying $6, $7, or $8 for a book that they will sell at $8-ish.

BUT, again what’s not thought about in any article talking about publishers and eBooks is the market for used books and the ability for eBooks to take market share away from the used book market. I want cheap books. Let me give you a for instance. B&N had Shutter Island for cheap (~$4) the other day. I bought it for my wife to read (and for me later). My wife is a huge library fan so, if it wouldn’t have been so cheap, she’d have found it at the library and read it. But now, B&N, William Morrow (pub), and Dennis Lehane (auth) got a little scratch from me instead of the nothing they’d receive from her library visit. Or if I wanted purchase the book, a trip to Half Price Books or an Amazon Marketplace purchase second hand would have been what I did, instead I bought the book in the way that put money in their hands. I might be a little in the dark, but with the data I’ve seen this is a win-win-win-draw for publishers, retailers, consumers, then authors (meaning authors will need to renegotiate so it’s not a total loss for them). Am I wrong?

Old Jews Telling Jokes is back! oldjewstellingjokes: Lou...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:23:04 -0600

Old Jews Telling Jokes is back!

oldjewstellingjokes:

Lou Charloff, “Herschel the Magnificent Jew”

Lou Charloff was born in Romania and moved to New York (specifically, the Bronx) when he was two years old. He speaks five languages and served as an interpreter for the military government of occupied Germany after World War II. Four years ago, he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, making him, simultaneously, one of the oldest and one of the newest comics in the business.

Coco

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:32:48 -0600

sweetshwiga:

I’m thinking that I want to join twitter just so I can follow Conan O’Brien. Yes, I am that obsessed. F U Leno.

Re-sparked my Twitter usage.

"Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge..."

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:36:35 -0600

“Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.”

- Unknown (but awesome)

Jay Leno’s new Promo ad has been corrected

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:37:01 -0600

Jay Leno’s new Promo ad has been corrected

Best Single Ever… I’m glad to see that home taping...

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:52:53 -0600

Best Single Ever…

I’m glad to see that home taping killed the record industry’s profits…I’m glad to see that CD burning killed the record industry’s profits…I’m glad to see that mp3s killed the record industry’s profits…

via Gizmodo

Video

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 07:35:40 -0600

Surprising Facts About the Super Bowl’s Locations I was...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:52:40 -0600

Surprising Facts About the Super Bowl’s Locations

I was wondering the other day about the Super Bowl and how you always hear about it being in New Orleans, LA, or Miami. So I was wondering what this would look like. I made this map and used circles to highlight the “effective market area”. What I mean by “effective market area” is that one Super Bowl heavily effects ~100 mile radius. The assumption I made is that each successive year pushed the radius by 40 miles. Sort of like saying that the more you host the Super Bowl, the less your city and the extending surrounding areas deserve to host the Super Bowl.

This kind of map should help the NFL see what markets are Super Bowl starved and what markets are over saturated.

What I found:

The south-east should sit out when it comes to hosting the Super Bowl for a while. (Even though New Orleans is hosting again in 2013, which is weird due to the age of the SuperDome…I guess our tax dollars repaired the stadium well.)
The south-west comes in second in saturation. Which means, the NFL likes southern, warmer climates to host the Super Bowl. This makes sense for open stadiums but in domes the NFL should tap other markets.
The New York, Pennsylvania, and Boston markets are severely starved for Super Bowl hosting duties. This was the most surprising as the NFL stands to make quite a bit from these markets. The assumption is that NFL doesn’t want to take the “snow risk” upon having a Super Bowl in this area in February. But you’d think one or two would be hosted there.
The map reveals areas that don’t necessarily have a huge Super Bowl market, but are more deserving of hosting a Super Bowl over places like LA, Miami, or New Orleans…again. Seattle, St. Louis or Kansas City, or the Carolinas all could bring new people to football. But money talks and until those markets improve (I’m looking at you Seattle Supersonics…or OKC Thunder) don’t hold your breath for a Super Bowl there.

Let me know what you think about the findings, or if there’s items of interest that I haven’t seen or you disagree with. I was going to do a whole blog write-up about this, but relevance has died. So I’ll post it here. Check out the interactive map here: ScribbleMaps. I combined suburb cities (ie Pasadena and Los Angeles, Tempe and Glendale, Pontiac and Detroit) into a single location. Green dots indicate future Super Bowl locations. Location data found here.

This dog loves the snow… Snowblower fun « Bits &...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:14:51 -0600

This dog loves the snow…

Snowblower fun « Bits & Pieces

makingofmovies: MadAtoms breaks down the Avatar/Dances With...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:14:00 -0600

makingofmovies:

MadAtoms breaks down the Avatar/Dances With Wolves/Pocahontas/Dune/Fern Gully similarities.

[via popculturebrain]

If The Wizard of Oz didn’t scare you before, this...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:05:57 -0600

If The Wizard of Oz didn’t scare you before, this might…

imgur

Stop Buzz from Clogging Up you Blackberry

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:21:32 -0600

So Buzz has been interesting and fun to use, but I’ve had a huge problem with the way it ties into Gmail. It sends an email (automatically) when someone replies to a post you commented on or posted. This is all well and good, but getting notifications on my Blackberry have been painful. So I figured out how to funnel them out.

Go to your Blackberry BIS login page. (In my case it was http://sprint.blackberry.com/ )
Select the Filters button on the right in the row that has your Gmail address.
Add a new filter, and name it what you wish.
In the drop-down box select “From”
In the Contains text box type “updates.google.com” (w/o “”)
Then save the filter.

That’s it. It filters all Buzz updates. Hopefully Google will make this a part of Buzz where I can choose what content to get email update for and which ones not get updates on. But for now, this makes the Blackberry experience a little nicer.

If you want to clear out the Buzz updates from your inbox, Create a filter and in the Has Words: block, type label:buzz and you can push them to a selected label and out of the inbox automatically. It gives a warning that it won’t match anything, but don’t worry…it’s wrong…it will match. Later!

Lego Rubik’s Cube solver. Solves any 3x3x3 Rubik’s...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:17:13 -0600

Lego Rubik’s Cube solver.

Solves any 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube in under 12 seconds….WOW

CubeStormer (via RoboticSolutions)

Happy Valentines Day!!! Valentine’s Day

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:17:30 -0600

Happy Valentines Day!!!

Valentine’s Day

Best Text Message Thread Ever...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:08:55 -0600

(214): probably shouldnt have written that paper while wasted, its starts with once upon a time
(972): i tried to stop you but you kept shouting "two birds with one stone!"

http://tfl.nu/dprb

New Look

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:48:22 -0600

New Look:

I updated my Tumblr to look more like my main website. There’s still a few kinks (like getting the flash stuff to abide by my z-index rules!) but I’ll work them out as I go along. I also normally have share links…cause they’re fun…so I’ll see about getting them up as well. What do you think?

GPOYSOWSYCPTPUT (Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Sick On...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:15:01 -0600

GPOYSOWSYCPTPUT

(Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Sick On Wednesday So You Can Post The Picture Until Thursday)