Category: Blogging

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Seth Godin is a National Treasure For His Amazon Kindle Idea

From his most recent blog post:

What happens to reading habits when you can buy all the books you want for $40 a month? What happens to book consumption when books become social objects, commented upon by you and your participating friends or network? The conversations surrounding books are often a prime driver behind book sales (“You haven’t read it yet?) and the conversation-enabled Kindle takes that to a whole new level.

Imagine what our nation – our WORLD – could be like if you had all you could read for 40/month? Imagine what would happen to literacy if books became as cheap and as prevalent as every other form of media?

Answer: hard to say, but having a world swamped with good reading is a problem I’d like to have.

We’re seeing this happen with eBooks to a degree already. eBooks have a near zero manufacturing and distribution cost, which means you can make a lot more of them for the same money as a regular book. Imagine if a forward-thinking college professor simply aggregated all the eBooks from a particular industry as a course’s textbooks – no books to buy, no trees to kill, just knowledge.

Food for thought: a recent study in Britain (whose URL eludes me) showed that placing things in a buying position in a cafeteria increased sales of whatever it was that was in the buying position. Junk food sold as well as healthy food, so a cafeteria manager swapped out fried whatever one day for fresh fruits and vegetables, and saw the fresh, healthy food sell as fast as the fried stuff had in the days before.

Imagine if we could get free or low cost eBooks to be as widely available and as convenient as a song on iTunes. Put books in the buying position, and consumers might just buy ’em because they are there and priced right. The societal benefit of increased literacy and increased consumption of knowledge would be vast and far-reaching.

Seth Godin, I hope Amazon reconsiders your offer, and I hope someday to read every book you publish for40/month.

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Last night the main sewer line at the house backed up around 10:30 PM, which necessitated a call to Roto Rooter. 4 1/2 hours and $354.73 later, the sewer line was clear (plumber: “Don’t use Charmin. It clogs up everything. I know people like soft toilet paper for their ass, but that’s an expensive habit.”) and the clock struck three – which meant that it was literally 124 minutes before the alarm was scheduled to go off.

So this morning I sit very carefully at my desk, ensuring that I don’t work on any systems vital to the company, because two hours of sleep makes you exceptionally prone to critical mistakes – you know, the “hey, did I just format the hard drive of our web server?” kind. Making sure that on my docket for the day is nothing mission critical.

However, extreme fatigue does have its merits. I tend to think a lot more creatively and non-linearly when I’m over-tired, because my brain just operates differently in a low-sleep state. Sometimes really neat ideas that I’d never create fully rested come out, and I jot those down. When I’m rested, they can be refined and tuned up, but the raw materials are still good.

That’s the other important thing – overly fatigued essentially brings with it a variant of attention deficit and short term memory loss, so if you have good ideas, it’s super important to be near an input device – phone, keyboard, notepad, etc. – because those ideas will vanish FAST.

Some thoughts on a Wednesday morning.

… be sure to check out the Quotes page. It’s a slowly growing compilation of things I learn, hear, read, etc. that resonate, little pieces of profound knowledge that help me.

Profound knowledge, as defined by Anthony Robbins, is knowledge that is quickly and easily transmitted, but life-altering. Once you get it, you can never go back to being the person you used to be. One of my favorite examples of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography.

Look at your viewfinder on your digital camera. Imagine a tic-tac-toe grid on it. Line up your pictures to put the subjects at the intersections of the lines.

Instantly, your photography changes – once you understand the concept, you can’t ever go back to the person you were just moments ago. That’s profound knowledge.

The quotes page is a place where I store the pieces as I find them.

This week’s Marketing Over Coffee marketing podcast is available – the topic? Among other things, dealing with email blacklists, a subject I am all too familiar with.

Also check out today’s Financial Aid Podcast 6 page easy guide (trust me, it’s mostly white space) to all the new legislation that President Bush signed into law today. More loopholes than you can shake a stick at, but at least it’ll keep the lights on and the coffee brewing for student lending.