Monthly Archives: February 2010

During November, I did a series of posts examining some of the systematic weaknesses of top-down social structures. This month I’ll be returning to that theme, and I thought I’d start by summarizing the key points I made in my … Continue reading →

George Packer laments the fact that Twitter is replacing books. I suspect he’s overstating his case—there are still lots of books being written and read, but Matt Yglesias gets to the more fundamental point: Despite his protestations to the contrary, … Continue reading →

The Economist has a good write-up of the sorry state of the patent system and the Supreme Court’s impending Bilski decision: Another field where patenting is pursued aggressively is semiconductors. But it is done there not so much to make … Continue reading →

A brilliant meditation by Julian Sanchez on the evolution of bottom-up remix culture:

I’ve beaten the “economics of e-books” horse to within an inch of its life, so I’ll make one more point and then leave the poor horse alone. One point that tends to be missed when people worry about how writers … Continue reading →

When you predict that the price of a particular kind of content will go to zero, a lot of people assume that means that the producers of that content will be unable to feed their families. Yet the world is … Continue reading →

Virginia Postrel makes the case for cheap e-books: The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren’t physical–no printing, no shipping. Ah, say contrarians, printing and shipping make up only a tiny fraction of a book’s costs. … Continue reading →

Over at the America’s Future Foundation website, Sonny Bunch responds with indignation to Matt Yglesias’s argument about the inevitability of free music. He starts by quoting the following excerpt from Matt’s post: It is, of course, possible that at some … Continue reading →

Yesterday I sketched a model of pricing in the traditional book industry. The question I’d like to address now is what this model implies for the future of the eBook industry. My argument leans heavily on the proposition that the … Continue reading →

I’ve been having a long Twitter discussion with Will Wilkinson about the economics of the book industry. Will wanted to know how authors could make money without “digital rights management” technology, and I replied by saying that writing a book … Continue reading →