Loud

I wasn’t going to comment on it but Tom’s post kind of got me started.

The Belle/Brooke story touches on several issues, most of which are, of course, either completely misrepresented or idiotically covered by the media but deserve a thought or two.

None of them address the issue with the blog/book itself, namely that it still reads like fiction. The outing of Brooke should give the story that added veritas but it just gives you the feeling that she was using it as a form of self-justification/cheap psychotherapy because it dovetails too nicely with the romanticised hooker with a heart of gold stereotype that dominates media.

Tom points out another issue that is missing from the media’s discussion of the Belle/Brooke fandango and that is the fact that she needed to find some way to fund her education. As he said:

But if you want to pursue that further, if you want a doctorate, even in the sciences (where a model of funded research is far more established than in the arts), then maybe the question we should be asking is not whether what Dr. Magnanti did was morally right, but why she had to do it at all.

It also show that even in these ‘enlightened’ times the Dr. Brooke Magnanti story shows us that no matter how educated, intelligent, eloquent, witty or distinguished a woman is, she’s still worth more as a casual fuck for businessmen¹ than as a productive member of society or a contributor to scientific progress.

What’s also missing from the discussions is just how bloody messed up most western education systems are. It’s not just the expense but the incentives and structure of the very thing itself. The only benefit of a lot of university degrees is that it keeps kids off the streets for three years. They tend to learn more about the craft of their chosen profession in the first six months at the job. That’s assuming they get a job in their chosen profession, which is far from a certainty given the UK’s growing emphasis on deskilled service industry jobs. The education industry in the UK has greater economic value as job creation for the administrators, teachers and service people than it does in terms of enabling productivity, training or innovation.

Most of the pressure on people in the UK to go to university doesn’t come from increasing levels of education or easier access to education (which are in all probability going down, people are learning less, more slowly) but from degree inflation: industries which before only required a diploma (as a lot of the required skills can only be learned on the job) now have been turned into degrees with an additional year of ‘padding’ and no real added teaching, learning or training.

Overall, beyond a few select degrees, UK education costs more, is worth less and takes longer than it did a few decades ago.

This is a massive betrayal of the entire idea of social mobility, the working class and lower middle class are facing greater and greater financial pressures to ‘educate’ but the system has been devalued to such an extent that they are getting very little for their added time and investment.

This is not unique to the UK, Iceland has followed almost exactly the same playbook with largely the same results.

I’ve gone as far through the education gauntlet as can be reasonably expected and, even with my PhD, I still doubt the value of the entire process. I’m convinced that if I hadn’t done my PhD or Masters I’d still be roughly where I am in terms of intellectual development and I’d be more experienced at my job.

I also wouldn’t have wasted as much time on the ridiculous nonsense that is most of what passes as critical analysis in the humanities and narrative theory.

I finished junior college when I was twenty (with a heavy emphasis on science, physics and math) and that was the end of my schooling. The rest is largely autodidactic. I have about as much time now to study and read and broaden my mind as I did when I was in academia.

As an industry, the academia that I witnessed was more obsessed with bureaucracy, infighting and dogma than honest intellectual development and scholastic curiosity. Most of the time sincere curiosity seemed to be more of a handicap than an asset.

If the value of university education isn’t self-evident to somebody with a PhD and several years worth of teaching experience, then the industry has more than just a PR or finance problem.

Me and my sister were playful kids. We had to be, the stakes were high: The loser of our games had to sit in the front during granddad’s drives and listen to the history of indoor plumbing in Reykjavík.

His knowledge of the subject was encyclopaedic, he’d memorised all of the relevant entries in the Icelandic encyclopaedia, with a complementary helping of hearsay, gossip, persistent misconceptions and embellishments that rivalled Andy Warhol’s Empire State movie in pace, length and narrative detail. It’s not that he didn’t have any good stories to tell, we’d listen gladly to the story of when he owned a seal, or of the tragic death of his mother, or of the tragic death of his brother, or of the tragic death of his other brother, or of the death of yet another brother and or of his uncle. Dickensian stuff right there. It’s just that whenever he drove he saw something in Reykjavík that reminded him of the city council, which in turn always reminded him of that historical political event in Iceland: indoor plumbing in Reykjavík. The minds that our family suffer from have never made any consistent sense, but they’ve always been insensible in consistent ways. Makes you almost glad that granddad is too old to drive.

I’ve just spent the last three weeks being idle, wasteful, stupid (more so than usual), lazy and spitefully antisocial. Vacation really is bliss. I’ve been writing a lot, all of it in a nice, posh, middle-class bohemian poseur moleskine that makes me look like the pretentious slow-witted but well read prat that I am, and I was vaguely writing with intent, with the idea of writing for somebody, delivering knowledge, edumacation!. Most of it was intended, pretended for the Humane Economics blog. I felt really productive, which in turn made me feel really happy in that sort of smug, “I’m so smart” kind of way you always hate seeing in others.

The problem didn’t become clear until I sat down to type the damned things up: It was all really, really boring. No, really. It was boring in a way that only somebody who has been forced to sit and listen to my grandfather’s extensive retelling of the marathon city council meeting that decided the form and charter of the Reykjavík waterworks can even hope to understand.¹ Tedious, in a word. Preachy, even. Definitely grouchy as well. And, of course, the clincher: BORING.

Those Humane Economics entries are going to stay, grow old, wither and die in those journals and, with any luck, no human will ever come to harm from them. Unless I decide to use the journal as a impromptu cudgel in a fight with a violent intruder, but since my copy of Anna Karenina is more likely to be at hand and be more effective in a violent fist-fighty brawl thing, that risk remains slim².

The question I don’t know the answer to (and am asking myself, so the lack of an answer is due to the dullard piece of mechanical gobby thingy that is my brain, not because I feel no pressure to answer it, which I don’t, but that’s a different matter entirely) is what to do about the Humane Economics blog, or this one.³ I don’t really know what to do.

Well, I do know what to do: write stuff that is not boring, but I’m now not so sure that can be done with a subject like economics and I’m not smart enough to have the kind of self-awareness that gives you that magical, wonderful, fancy-smancy knowledge of what it is that I can tell you that you would find interesting.

You wouldn’t fancy telling me, would you? (By the way: How do you like the new weblog design?)

When I was young(er) I wanted to be a screenwriter, a cliché, I know. In my teenage head the equation was a very simple one: I loved writing and I loved movies. What I didn’t understand was that there is a basic distinction between that of creating written works and that of a teenager’s joy of consuming movies as entertainment. Nonetheless, naïve as this was, I pursued that path with somewhat more dedication than was the norm for the teenage Baldur, and I became a part of the second batch of students to enrol in Iceland’s first film school.

The school was designed to be a short term affair, located in the MÍR building whose claim to fame was holding talks on and doing screenings of obscure, indecipherable Russian films, and the organisers crammed all they could into three months of talks, followed by a group-production of two short movies.

My film maker/screenwriter aspirations faded with my enthusiasm for film, while my appreciation of the written word, Icelandic or English, only grew, but one aspect of my short education in the arts of screenwriting stuck with me and continues to inform all of my writing for any form.

If you look past the proliferation of nonsense derivations of Joseph Campbell’s drivel¹ the structure of a screenplay has simple components. The larger narrative superstructure is based on acts; the acts are built up of scenes which are tied together by a single something, an emotional event or theme; while the scenes themselves are made up of beats, each beat being a single subject.

The beats melt a bit into each other and aren’t as divisible as their description might imply, but I’ve found the concept to serve as a useful building block for most of my writing projects, personal, work or academic.

All of the blog posts on Humane Economics last week, were two-beat posts, set-up and punch, if you will. This was a pre-meditated tactic as I tried to approach Humane Economics as a writing project in a more organised manner than I had with any of my previous blog projects. Short two-beat posts work very well for the kinds of issues that can be broken apart and boiled down to a series of ‘facts’ or probable-guesses, but not all issues lend themselves to that.

Issues and problem domains tend to be either convergent or divergent.² Convergent problems lend themselves to the essentialist, platonic thinking that dominates modern society, where the goal of arriving at a single truth or essential quality through a logical, rational process is an attainable one. Solving convergent problems are the cornerstone of modern science and thinking as they lend themselves to being described, written down and passed along.

Divergent issues tend to all those that involve humans and rely on human behaviour. Every approach or analysis leads to a spiral of related but irreconcilable issues and problems that you have to either accept and transcend or simply leave out. Divergent problems are generative, systems with often simple rules which nonetheless manage to create unimaginable complexity. Solutions to divergent issues cannot be written down and passed along but have to be led towards and lived through. Writing about divergent issues isn’t as much writing about what they are as much as it is about what they feel like, so that you can recognise them when you encounter them in life.

But divergent issues can be described and one such description is through mathematics: fractals and multifractals. Where convergent fields tend to be dominated by gaussian-randomness with manageable or measureable risk, fields dominated by divergent issues are leaves on the winds of fractal randomness, unpredictable and full of irreducible risk.³

Economics, like art, literature, psychology and social sciences is a field full of divergent issues. These fields have enough convergent issues to tempt practitioners into treating the whole kit and kaboodle as a convergent science, and in the process they push the art of the field further and further into the unapproachable distance. Markets are dominated by fractal randomness and mathematicians have known this for decades.

Economists have, on the other hand, been willfully ignoring this for just as long.⁴

A short two-beat blog post can’t tackle a divergent issue. Some issues are irreducible, you need space to move, room to manoeuvre around the problems, and to do that the posts simply have to be longer.

I’ve spent some of the last four days trying to manoeuvre around the subject of the economics of social media as marketing, trying to find a point that could be broken off and cast into a blog post without committing undue harm to the divergent and holistic nature of the problem. The post I’ve posted today is just a first attempt, an initial foray into the subject.

I plan to try to post on Humane Economics a mixture of longer posts on divergent issues and shorter posts on convergent issues. What the exact, eventual blend will be like, I don’t know. Sometimes the process of putting one’s own understanding into words just has to be a little bit complicated.

After waffling on about the subject for ages, I’ve started a new blog, Humane Economics, where I plan to make up for some of the deficiencies of this blog and all of my earlier efforts of writing for the web.

I’ve been using computers as writing tools ever since I was ten years old, when I taught myself how to use WordPerfect for DOS on my mother’s archaic behemoth of a computer.

Since then I’ve been an intellectual child of the digital creative process. I’ve written, thought and created almost exclusively on the computer since then.

That began to change about five years ago, slowly at first, just a few experiments in black and white film development, but three years ago when I began the process of recovering from the depression I’d dug myself into while finishing my PhD, I discovered that I had developed with myself a slight distaste of all things digital.¹

So, one of the most helpful things in recovering from my academia-induced funk was rediscovering the joy of reading real books (as opposed to web pages and on-screen PDF papers and essays) and discovering, for the first time, the emotional clarity of writing longhand.

For about three years, almost all of the writing I do for myself, to help myself think, clarify my ideas or just for the joy of it, has been done with pen and paper and never typed up into the computer.

Most of it is rubbish, of course, but it’s rubbish I enjoyed writing more than the posts on this blog or on my twitter account which are ‘original’ digital writing.

Humane Economics is a twofold experiment. It is an attempt to explore a more humane side of the economics of online publishing, development and activity, but it’s also an attempt on my part to write in the way I prefer, enjoy and love.

All the posts are written first with pen and paper and then typed up, edited and corrected for online publishing. I’ve done this with several posts now, which I’ve queued up for publishing over the next few days, and I have to say that it’s the most fun I’ve ever had blogging.

I had planned to launch the site last week (hence the week old date on the introductory post) but with my laptop out of commission for a few days, postponing the launch was unavoidable.

Please do let me know what you think. I’d really appreciate feedback on the writing style, web design (both here and on Humane Economics) and the subject matter. Is the design readable? Is the writing clear? Is the writing boring? Do you think the subject matter and angle are interesting enough to warrant a blog?

Curious minds want to know and would be glad to find out. So please leave a comment or send me a tweet on twitter or an e-mail.

P.S. This here blog post was also drafted first in longhand.

This is a collection and rewrite of some of my tweets on the issues of free in an economic sense as well as the lacklustre debate surrounding Free (the book).

Apologies for the incoherent nature of the post. Twitter isn’t an ideal writing platform.

One of the most frequently cited argument in the favour of everything digital being free is an abstract economic theory that states that the prices of products in a competitive market will stabilise at the marginal cost.

Without getting into a discussion on the validity of said theory there is a lot to be said on how that theory applies to media.

What’s missing is that in this context a product is thought to be a fungible commodity, that it can be replaced with another good that serves the same function to the buyer. The theory does not apply to all economic goods.

Using digital for the direct sales of content is actually a way to make it completely non-fungible.

In DVD sales there is a good which has its price driven down by retail competition (DVD copies between stores are identical = fungible).

If you can create demand for specific digital content and sell it yourself, that demand cannot satiated by any other good, digital or not.

The problem of course is in the initial stage of finding content that you can create demand for.

Another problem is in customer backlash against higher prices, but in Harlequin’s case they solve that by offering something print can’t, i.e. short works that are more expensive per word – roughly 7 cents per thousand words versus 30 cents per thousand – than anything else they publish but is reasonable if not desirable as a differentiated offering.

And this is in an industry that is (mis)reported to be as close to being commodified as any content industry can.

(Aside: I’ve been reading Georgette Heyer’s fantastic regency romances recently and can’t recommend them enough.)

Most of the people taking sides in the Gladwell/Chris Anderson spat do so based on personal feelings not arguments.

NB: Free (the book) will be available for free on the day of the launch and for a while after. Chris Anderson may be a dishonest debater but he’s not a hypocrite.

Gladwell’s argument, although it uses media as an example, isn’t that media’s too important to be free but that Free (the book) ignores capital expenses and undervalues operational expenses.

Chris Anderson’s counter-argument is to accuse Gladwell of being frightened and point out a guy working for Wired for free, the tactics of a naïf. He does not address any of the substantial points of Gladwell’s review let alone other general flaws in his thesis.

Gladwell isn’t arguing that Free won’t and isn’t an important part of the economy, just that it won’t be the be all and end all.

It’s an ignorant guru trifecta with Godin in the mix saying that Chris Anderson is right because the internet is really, really cool.

He forgets that the brunt of the costs of the internet revolution are borne by each household’s connection costs.

He also forgets that almost any non-trivial use of the web as a publishing platform requires a handover of cash to somebody somewhere.

“There is no poetry shortage” according to Godin, because poets work for free.

I disagree, one of the things I learnt during my comp. lit. degree was that historically, poetry has been dead since the early 20th century.

So there is a distinct and marked shortage of good poetry.

Free labour/products can actually drive out quality in a dynamic that is similar to the akerlofian market for “lemons”.

Also, free is only an advantage for promotion and attention for first movers. It disappears quickly when everybody’s using it.

Godin’s point about attention deserves some special attention. By offering a product for free when everybody else does not is a remarkably effective way of getting and holding attention that can then be leveraged for love or money.

When everybody’s offering stuff for free, like in the blogosphere, the lack of a price ceases to become an attentional advantage and merely becomes the price the producer pays to participate – a marketplace entrance-fee, if you will.

Market dynamics are a complex and unpredictable thing, governed by several factors. By offering products for free you have to offset that cost somewhere because otherwise you’re just shrinking the overall market.

Another factor is average quality. According to Akerlof’s theory of a “Market for Lemons” uncertainty and asymmetrical information on quality can lead to a market where no goods are sold for any price.

The media industry is being crushed between these two forces. On one hand the market is shrinking as they are forced to offer their products for free to keep the attention playing field level. On the other hand uncertainty, asymmetrical information and often blatant dishonesty means that advertising inventory can’t be sold at any price. You can’t even give it away.

I work in web marketing and so a large part of my job is to analyse and study advertising opportunities on the web and I, like most of my colleagues, have ended with the only advertising venue that has even a shred of trust remaining (and not much at that), namely search engine advertising with name-brand search engines.

The analytics and statistical methods used to measure traffic across media sites are meaningless and have absolutely no value to an advertiser. The only thing you can do is buy ad impressions and measure yourself, you can’t rely on any stats other than those generated on your site and measured using your tools.

What many companies in this situation have found out is that it is cheaper to start publications/blogs/video series of their own. You spend less money at the outset on content production than you would on advertising with an external publication and there is absolutely no information asymmetry.

Free isn’t a solution. Free isn’t a business model. It isn’t a force of nature. It’s a symptom of human psychology that can sometimes be (ab)used for the benefit of corporations. When the problems of an industry are endemic and implicit in its structure, free does little but escalate the decline.

Last minute Addendum. For further reading on free in new media my best recommendation is to start of with Alan Patrick’s three part series on Freeconomics:

• Freeconomics Part I – or who is paying for your Free lunch?

• FreeConomics Part II - or why your data is free but everywhere in chains

• FreeConomics Part III - or why is everything crap?

There’s a lot more on the subject out there, of course, but that’s a start.

I’ve been annoying people on twitter with incessant verbiage. I thought I might as well turn them into blog posts to annoy you as well.

• It’s hard to know what to make of the delusion that you can’t charge money online, it’s wrong on so many levels.

• It’s wrong even if we accept the idea that they’re specifically talking about digital wares and disregard the entire ecommerce sector.

• I work for a software company. Not the best in our niche but we do all right.

• The entire software industry, outside of Adobe and Microsoft, is online and digital only.

• The claim, rephrased, is really that it’s really hard to charge money for content and web apps online. Which is true and still deluded.

• Most web apps and content online are leisure time products, they don’t address pain points or solve problems.

• It’s really hard, online or off, to charge money for leisure products. The clientele tend to be teenagers, who don’t have credit cards.

• The rest will use it if it’s free but balk at paying. Those who would pay—teenagers—can’t.

• News doesn’t solve a pain point and is about as relevant to the modern day-to-day life as gossip and American Idol. In most cases you’re not going to suddenly become worse at your job if you don’t follow the news.

• As far as I can tell the content companies or publishers are assuming that they can just transfer their usual modus operandi online. The inherent assumption is that people want the same thing online as offline, just with more ‘digital’ sprinkled on top.

• None of them is going through the essential customer discovery process to find out what, if anything, people will pay for online.

• Except for Harlequin publishing and O’Reilly, which are exceptional in how in touch they are with their community of customers, and Harlequin has very avidly been experimenting with online and digital specific publications.

• If my hypothesis is right, that in most cases it’s teenagers who are willing to pay for content online but can’t … then that is something that can be addressed through innovation (e.g. SMS short codes, iTunes store, etc. etc.)

• But it would need to be confirmed through research first, because otherwise you’re wasting time solving a non-existent problem.

• Which reminds me … you could do a lot of analysis on the roles of publishers, artists and Amazon/Apple in terms of John Hagel III and John Seely Brown’s sustainable edge theory, i.e. publishers mistakenly think that their should be involved in the creation of the product.

• But the role they play, that the other participants can’t do, is in customer discovery, validation and community/relationship building.

• Harlequin and O’Reilly are a start, but they are leveraging their existing communities and relationships. Publishers need to do much more.

I figure I should post the comment I made over at zo’s on ebooks for all of you to see.

You can find zo’s post here:

humorlessbitch - Sense and My Sensibility

(Scroll down for the discussion.)

This reminds me of something that happened to me and my sister a while back. One of the peculiarities of Icelandic culture is that we publish an enormous number of original Icelandic books per capita, biographies, novels, political polemics, poetry, etc.. The flip side of that is that books go extremely quickly and easily out o print¹. With a community of that size and the economics of print being the way they are, only exceptional circumstances warrant the effort to keep books in print. Even some of the books by our late Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxnes, occasionally go out of print.

Which is the reason why, when me and my sister wanted to give our mother some boks by one of our maternal great-grandfathers (Séra Sigurður Einarsson from Holt, a poet, playwright, priest and academic, the Séra is one of those priestly honorifics like ‘father’), we had to go looking among the used book stores of Reykjavík.

My sister found a copy of one of Séra Sigurður’s books in a used book store on Hverfisgata². It was an odd copy, bound in a non-descript paper cover and most of its leafs/pages were uncut. My sister wondered whether it was a flawed copy or some such, but the dealer said that that was the way it had been made and sold.

Books in Iceland, at least, were sold with simple covers and uncut. The readers read it with a paperknife in hand and cut their way through the book. If they liked it, they brought it to their local binder and had it bound to their liking.

So instead of having a dud copy, what she had was the nearest thing to a mint, as new, copy of that era she could get.

A little bit of research confirmed what the dealer said, it was news to me and my sister, perhaps not to you, and to my surprise we found out that this had been, and still is in some areas, standard practice in the publishing industry. That the industry had been rife with all sorts of customisations and local work. That books had been customised, bound, re-bound and cut or made to fit.

To wit, the print market that ebooks are competing with today is not a medium at the peak of its variety and innovation but a particularly dreary incarnation of the form.

There are few things I would like more than to see both ebooks and print thrive, because I see them as the two legs of longform writing, a beast that is weakened already by an onslaught of the insectoid micromedia.

The sleazy marketdroid in me (yay for the dayjob!) sees nothing but rich potential in using ebooks for customer development and print for profit and revenue.

The writer in me sees nothing but potential for freedom and flexibility in having a variety of forms and venues for publishing.

But, the pessimist in me worries that ebooks will be used to cannibalise print, because it’s easier than addressing the systemic problems of the publishing industry infrastructure.

That I, as a interactive media dude and designer, should have to lose capabilities and options going from the web to epub is nothing short of a fantastic victory for the worst, suicidal tendencies of an already beleaguered industry.

We did, in the end, find several books by our great-grandfather, all of them found by the proprietor of the Hverfisgata bookstore. Two books of poetry and one of his plays, which were well received.

All my sister’s idea, of course, she’s got a knack for coming up with clever things.

How long till I do to the books what I’m now doing to the music? I have issues with the Kindle’s business model and control structure, but clearly it’s a signpost. As I wrote recently in On Paper, books, as we know them, are toast. Their future is as objets d’art and antiques, and this is a good thing.

ongoing · Empty Walls – Tim Bray

¶

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com – Steven Johnson

¶

But there’s a deep, perhaps tragic, flaw in Bray’s thinking, at least when it comes to those books. He’s assuming that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn’t. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Clutter – Nicholas Carr

The ongoing evolution of reading seems to have hit a spurt of some kind with the release of the second Kindle and Stanza on the iPhone and other developments. This has prompted a lot of commentary, including my own, and most of them fall along predictable lines.

My thoughts have focused on two issues:

• On the collapse of two modes of text, reading versus communicative text, and how that results in a inferior hybrid form of reading. (Love is but a twitter away)

• On the total disregard by the technological faction of the interface, design, experience and cognitive qualities of reading printed books. (An ode to Readability, The problem with publishing, Ebooks and the senses)

I own a Sony PRS-505 and I love it. I use it to bring back the joy into reading online articles. Long essays, posts or articles are shuffled off to a virtual printer which saves them all in PDF form, sized for the ereader, all in a folder which I then throw onto the PRS and read while drinking a good cup of coffee. This has injected a tiny little extra pleasure into reading these online articles and I love the device for it.

I also use it to sample books, and since I’m mostly interested in the classics these days¹, the lack of Amazon’s Kindle store here in the UK hasn’t been much of an issue for me.

My worries concern the attitudes of the technical caste. Writers, both optimists and pessimists, rarely fail to mention the specific issues that trouble the current and near future generations of devices. Steven Johnson mentions the changing modes of reading and Nicholas Carr mentions the same qualities I highlight in Ebooks and the senses, although he fails to mention that it’s a stance with more scientific weight behind it than the printed book’s detractors allow.

The technological caste seem intent on dooming us to walk down the path we’ve already suffered through with the web: A complete disregard for design, typography, aesthetics and general readability; and a wilful ignorance of the user experience qualities of the form’s ‘predecessors’.

I wonder if Joe Wikert really understands the damage that would be done by injected animated ads into longform books (mentioned in The problem with publishing)? I wonder if Tim Bray and Steven Johnson really believe that the user interface and experience design of ereaders will surpass that of books in the near future, when the modern desktop interface is little more than a glossed up version of a flawed thirty year old paradigm? The technological history of human-computer interface design is a history of devices just good enough not to get thrown out of the window in an uncontrollable, frothy rage of fury and frustration.

HTML5 poses to make web development less secure, more complicated and more expensive² and publishers are poised to ignore what little progress the web has made as they develop the epub format and compatible devices. That they should consider accepting even less typographic control and design capabilities than what you even get in IE 6 would blow my mind were it not so predictable and consistent.

I certainly think that ebooks and printed books are economically complementary. Ebooks are an excellent way to cheaply read the rubbish most publishers call books today³ if you have to because of your work or hobbies and are a usable way of doing a first, initial read of the few good books that are released.

Which you then buy in print, of course.