Interesting Links for 28-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• NHS waiting times now up by a quarter (since government abandoned the targets)
  (tags: nhs uk government)
• Booker prize judges sent e-readers to save them carrying around 138 books.
  (tags: books ereader technology)
• Some figures on Amazon's market share for books 98-2009. Anyone know what the current figures look like?
  (tags: statistics books publishing amazon sales)
• The physical book is dead. Amazon sold more ebooks than paperbacks in Q4 2010
  (tags: ebook amazon ereader)
• Warming North Atlantic water tied to heating Arctic - water temperature is warmer than during the medieval warm period
  (tags: globalwarming atlantic ocean arctic)
• Egypt Leaves the Internet
  (tags: egypt internet censorship news freedom communications)
• Birds can hold quantum entanglement in their eyes for dramatically longer than we can in the lab.
  (tags: quantum birds physics)
• An episode of UK Kids cartoon "Arthur" with a guest appearance by Neil Gaiman.
  (tags: comics writing cartoon NeilGaiman tv video bbc)
• A real live hawk takes up residence in the Library of Congress. Bad puns ensue.
  (tags: birds library animals libraries)
• Waterproof cover for a Kindle. Now you can read it in the bath!
  (tags: kindle amazon ereader technology awesome)
• Utah Bioweapon Defense Facility Locked Down Over 'Serious Concern'
  (tags: weaponry usa military bioweaponry wtf)
• US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed.
  (tags: israel usa military war weapons)
• Your Chocolate Is Made By Enslaved Kids. No, seriously.
  (tags: Chocolate slavery Child_abuse children)
• What are the long-believed left-wing myths? Anyone care to help out?
  (tags: politics beliefs)
• Judge bans D&D in prison, rules it 'could lead to gang behavior'
  (tags: dungeonsanddragons roleplaying law crime usa)
• Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men
  (tags: relationships sexism)
• Denmark, Finland and Belgium have best democracies, USA in 10th, UK in 26th
  (tags: democracy politics,)
• Officer filmed hitting protester at EMA demonstration. At some point, the police are going to realise this happens a lot...
  (tags: police uk video)
• "Happy New Year" Text message blows up suicide bomber by accident. I shouldn't laugh. But I did.
  (tags: terrorism mobile_phones EpicFail funny)
• Facebook to let advertisers republish user posts
  (tags: facebook advertising)

Comments

[matgb]

Amazon "stressed that sales of paperback books were also growing". Evidence of my death are greatly exaggerated.

[andrewducker]

As mentioned over on LJ, that's Amazon's sales of paperbacks. Which has gone up since B&N died...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wrt. Amazon and ebooks, I don't believe a word they say.

Amazon include free ebooks in their "sales" figures, and have most of Project Gutenberg online for Kindle. (When was the last time you went into a branch of Waterstones and they were giving away free books?)

The actual word I'm getting from my publishers are that sales of real for-money ebooks are up to around 8-9% by sales volume. Revenue lags slightly. But Amazon has 80% of the ebook market and around 10-20% of the physical book market, so of course Amazon has got a disproportionately high level of ebook sales, even before you take into account their desire to push the Kindle (because it cuts their fulfilment cost per purchase to near-zero while retaining the traditional high margin they get by extorting huge discounts off SRP from the publishers).

[andrewducker]

From the article:
"Amazon announced that in the US since the start of the year it had sold 115 e-book downloads for every 100 paperback books, even excluding its downloads of free books."

I'm surprised Amazon only has 20% of the physical book market. I'd have thought it was higher than that, especially now B&N have collapsed.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

What can also be found in that article is that, whilst e-books are outselling paperbacks, paperback sales are also up. So, the increase in e-book sales is clearly not at the expense of physical book sales, and pronouncing the death of the physical book seems very premature.

[andrewducker]

That's Amazon's share of paperback sales. The other link today about market share has some figures on book sales over the last decade, which look pretty static.

With B&N dying it's not surprising that Amazon are growing larger.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I still see no grounds for pronouncing the death of the physical book. That requires figures showing that sales of paperbacks overall have declined significantly.

[andrewducker]

That, I'll give you, was attention-grabbing hyperbole.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Another thing included according to someone's post I saw: daily newspapers.

[andrewducker]

As in, are vanishing?

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Sorry, bit unclear there.

No, as in 'are included in Amazon's sale statistics for eBooks allegedly'.

[andrewducker]

Aaaaah, gotcha. Interesting. I wonder how many that is.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

In terms of book sales, Amazon are rather smaller than everyone seems to think. They punch above their weight in mindshare, but books aren't Amazon's real focus or profit centre -- they make much more money through sales of white goods -- and the real deal is their combined sales database (with third party online suppliers often forced to go through Amazon just because of said customer mind-share) and to a lesser extent their fulfilment system for those items they actually stock.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I guess it's because the vast majority of the people I know order the vast majority of the books from Amazon that it seems like they're the centre of the world for books. Easy to mistake that for the way the general public actually uses them. Thanks!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Actually, they were giving away free books in the street outside waterstones the other weekend.

But it was from an author who makes more money than anyone else, so rather an exception.

Amazon, in their advertising, are very much positioning themselves as an everything-you-want store rather than as a bookseller. I vaguely remember ads for amazon as a bookseller, but those days are long gone.

•Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

In other breaking news: bears more likely to shit in woods, Pope more likely to wear silly hat and enable child molestors.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[andrewducker]

Many things that are "common knowledge" turn out to be untrue. It's worth checking these things to see what people really do.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

True, but if you simply follow the evolutionary logic of it, given that males of the species have a higher risk of ending up not having their genes passed on if their partner does things that results in pregnancy by someone else, then cheating with someone that can get them pregnant is a far worse crime than cheating with someone that can't.

Given that the main battle for the female of the species is finding a partner that will stick around and use resources to raise their children, I guess having someone that might not even fancy your gender is possibly a higher risk proposition than someone that merely goes and impregnates someone else. That's an interesting statistic for me (presuming that the percentages vaguely relate to the benefits of keeping the cheating partner from an evolutionary perspective, which I suspect they will, even if only very vaguely).

I guess it's the fact that the article headline could be re-written to "men less jealous of cheating that doesn't result in raising someone else's kids" is what got me :)
(I'm not saying it's not worth doing, just in case the results are not in line with expectation)

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[andrewducker]

Yes, but you are aware that you can find an evolutionary explanation for just about anything, right?

You could equally well argue (if it had turned out the other way) that men were more willing to put up with partners who were likely to stay with them as they were sexually interested in their gender, but not with a woman who might leave with another one.

A lot of "evolutionary explanations" turn out to be incredibly culturally biased, because they assume that whatever behaviour is true in the researcher's culture is natural.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Even better if they leave once you've got them pregnant. Two women raising your children for you? EVOLUTIONARY WIN!

But a man that might get you pregnant then leave you for another man so you have to bring up the child yourself: EVOLUTIONARY LOSE!

Given the gender roles in terms of who can and can't get pregnant there's no way I would have thought it could go the other way (not to say that's not worth testing, but I'd have bet the house on it)

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

that's not evolution, it's sociology.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

You could talk about it in terms of sociology or psychology or whatever you like. I'm merely thinking about it in terms of the benefits it passes onto your genes to have that strategy when dealing with those sorts of situations (and obviously humans can rise above that, as evolution is far from everything there is, especially when you know about it).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I think some guys just get off seeing their women with other women. Then joining in.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

+1

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that when you consider the other finding in the article (women dump men who sleep with men more often than men who sleep with women), the evolutionary argument starts to gain strength here.

Still not saying it's a slam-dunk or anything like, though.

Re: •Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men

[andrewducker]

Yeah, my main problem with evolutionary explanations is that they're presented as Science, when they're not really backed up by anything solid. It's all "this seems likely to me", when it's basically stories told after the fact.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

Death of Books: Utter bollocks.
Amazon is not the only book retailer on earth, even if they are the easiest [arguably] to track. When there are no bookshops or libraries left, I will agree the paperback is dead.

Does the US actually train their troops? Do they get *any* target practice? That figure - while believable - is utterly absurd. But hey, that's what happens when you have all the money in China and zero sense of accountability.

it is little surprise that our system of Democracy is not considered the best. I *am* surprised that US is ranked higher.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

Does the US actually train their troops? Do they get *any* target practice? That figure - while believable - is utterly absurd. But hey, that's what happens when you have all the money in China and zero sense of accountability.

Or you could try actually reading the article (from 2005, which changes the context a lot) that is linked to, so you can make intelligent comments.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

That would be the sensible thing to do, but sometimes I prefer to just react in near total ignorance.

Your criticism is no doubt completely valid.

[skington.livejournal.com]

It's really annoying to just see an overall ranking of democracies, rather than the actual breakdown of individual countries' ranks on each subject. In particular, I'm surprised at Belgium's high ranking, given what a basket-case that country is.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really wanted to see what the criteria actually were... did Imiss a link or something. It's really not much of an article without that list. The UK may score down. e.g. because we are subjects not citizens (despite that that makes approximately zero practical difference).

I mean look at the 'best country to live' one I saw the other day (I forget the link) like the that ranked countries on various factors and where the US No. 1 for health!! (spending was part of the equation, I think it must have go WAY too much weight....)

[andrewducker]

A quick google finds this:
http://www.democracybarometer.org/baroapp/public/static/index?lang=en

[andrewducker]

A quick google finds this:
http://www.democracybarometer.org/baroapp/public/static/index?lang=en

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Waterproof cover for a Kindle. Now you can read it in the bath!
I want.

US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed.
*headesk* *embarrassment* *headdesk*

Your Chocolate Is Made By Enslaved Kids. No, seriously.
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men
Oh good grief. Talk about cultural hysteria.

I love your posts. :)

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

"Waterproof cover for a Kindle. Now you can read it in the bath!"

20 quid for a ziplock bag? (Which is what Bezos uses.)

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

"Men more likely to stick with girlfriends who sleep with other women than other men"

I KNOW and it's really annoying

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Chiquita, you know, the banana company, gave money to paramilitary groups in Colombia. A lot of money.

Hell, look at what can happen to poor migrant workers in Britain!

The world is not all made of magic fairy dust. The cheap electronics, exotic ingredients in your food, the functional yet stylish clothes you like - people probably bled and worked to death or damn near it for those.

If you look closely enough at almost anything that's part of a western lifestyle, you're not going to like what you see. Go to a nice farmers' market on the weekend, and you're still running the risk of buying products that might have been picked by migrant workers who don't get anything like the minimum wage and sometimes things are worse but it's okay because it's organic and local.

Sadly, it comes down to a question of what you can choose to ignore, and what you can choose to live with. For many, buying fair trade "when you can" is enough to allay that guilty fear that someone pays for your lifestyle. It's like original sin, but for western capitalism.