Tonight I logged on to Amazon.com to order Chris Guillebeau’s awesome book “The Art of Non-Conformity”, since 3 separate people recommended it to me in the past week. The first choice I was confronted with – Kindle or Paperback?

What is wrong with this picture???

It costs $10.17 to print a new copy of Chris’s book on dead trees, bind it with glue, put it in a box, and drive it across the country to my door in a gas burning mail truck driven by a real human being.

The Kindle Edition delivered instantly over the internet costs $12.99. WHY?!

Because Penguin Publishing says so, that’s why. In fact, if you click on the Kindle price, you’ll see the following note:

This price was set by the publisher. Amazon actually goes out of the way to tell us that Penguin has specifically mandated higher Kindle prices for many of its books. It’s called “agency pricing”, which means the publisher (Penguin) sets the prices for Kindle Editions, not Amazon.com. Paperbacks are not subject to agency pricing, which means their prices are set by the retailer (Amazon) and fluctuate with market supply and demand. We can see the same situation with lots of other popular Penguin books, for example (not affiliate links):

• Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” – $9.00 in paperback, $9.99 on Kindle
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” – $10.17 in paperback, $12.99 on Kindle
• Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” – $9.38 in paperback, $13.99 on Kindle

There are plenty more examples you can dig up yourselves. The bottom line is this – the content licensing industry is broken. Consumers want cheap, clean, instantly delivered digital content, and publishers are holding prices artificially high. The days of paper, vinyl, and cellulose are coming to an end. What practical reason is there to make the far less environmentally impactful digital version artificially expensive? Oh right, it’s to protect classical business models and supply chains that don’t work in a digital world.

This is a telling microcosm of how broken the content licensing industry is as a whole (books, music, movies), as well as how much work still has to be done to adapt content creators’ business models to the digital age. I hope it happens quickly.

I had a great conversation today with my friend Will Nathan about investing for the long term. And I don’t mean the long term like retirement, I mean the very long term in the sense of hundreds of years. Enough time for countries to rise and fall, and entirely novel technologies to take over the world. At the risk of sounding Kurzwelian, I want to discuss the potential for radical change in our future that might warrant such an extended investment horizon.

Over the past 25 years, nobody will argue that we have seen an incredible explosion in information and communications technology. Consider the iPhone that so many of us have in our pockets – more storage, more processing power, and exponentially faster connectivity than almost any computer that existed in 1985. Consider that the internet hardly existed outside the government in 1985, yet now the answer to any conceivable question is available within 0.27 seconds on Google. Consider all the ways that cheap, widely available microprocessors and wireless connectivity has changed business, our inter-personal lives, and even politics (witness Twitter-fueled revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt in just the past year). The rate of change and progress is mind boggling. Today’s world was inconceivable just 25 years ago.

It is my belief that over the next 25 years, we will see that same type of transformative change in medicine, genetics, and biology. Synthetic organs, genetically tailored therapies, cognitive enhancement through drugs or implanted technology, and more may be as widespread and seemingly “normal” as that iPhone in your pocket. Diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and more may be cured. Life expectancy could increase by 25% or more. In 50 years, it’s not totally inconceivable that some type of immortality or near-immortality may be within the grasp of the rich.

On Immortality

On the surface, it sounds like a bright future. However, I think the concept of “immortality” or greatly increased life expectancy has the potential to radically restructure our society and break down a lot of things we take for granted. Consider how much about society is predicated on the fact that humans live approximately 80 years. When people stop dying, the world population will explode overnight. The birthrate will increase as people remain fertile longer. Where will we put all the people? Will our food supply be able to handle it? Our water? Our cities? Our hospitals? What happens to the traditional concept of retirement at 65 if you suddenly have to support yourself for another 65 years after that? Consider the implications for our social programs and our economy.

Cognitive Enhancement

Let’s take another example and consider the extrapolation of cognitive enhancers like Adderall and modafinil. Consider that one day, it’s very likely that humans might never forget anything, or anything that we do forget could be instantly accessible through some sort of neural internet link. Sounds great right? Take a few more seconds and consider the societal implications. What would it be like if “time heals all wounds” didn’t hold true anymore – if you could remember every word of that vicious fight with your wife like it was yesterday? If the pain of a family member’s death never faded? If every participant in every business deal could remember everything that was ever promised? If consumers remembered all the different ways they’d been advertised to? The implications are far broader than just having an encyclopedic knowledge of art history at cocktail parties. Perfect human memories would remake society dramatically.

It’s coming sooner than you think

This isn’t speculation. The timeframe may be a guess, but I don’t think anyone will deny that one day the science will arrive. It’s not just about remaking your own body – as our race begins to transcend biology, it’s going to radically alter our interpersonal relationships, our governments and institutions, and society as we know it.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the changing way in which our society consumes information. In the past, most of us absorbed information in primarily text based formats. Newspapers are a perfect example of this phenomenon – front pages were far more text heavy than they are today, and authors tended to write longer form articles with in depth arguments. People would sit down and read the newspaper for long stretches of time to get their news for the day. However, with the rise of the internet, full color photography, and brilliant LED screens, we have all become a far more visually oriented. Today, we all prefer to consume our news in vivid technicolor, with accompanying visuals and photographs. To see this transition in action, let’s compare the front page of the New York Times after two similar landmark events – the Pearl Harbor bombing (Dec. 7, 1941) and the World Trade Center attacks (Sept. 11, 2001). Both major tragedies, both on American soil with American casualties. Compare the New York Times front page presentation of both events – click for the full front page image:

The contrast is clear – the front page from 1941 is extremely text heavy, with only a single graphic and no photographs. The newspaper from 2001 is dominated by dramatic full color photographs, and text occupies less than 50% of the page. The photographs draw the reader in and convey much more emotion than the text alone. An interesting contrast, and a testament to both improved printing technology and our increasingly visual nature.

But the trend doesn’t stop with newspapers. I’m writing this post in the midst of “iPad mania” – Apple’s much anticipated tablet computer will be released in just 48 hours. I think that much of the hype around the iPad is due to the fact that so much of the experience Apple has designed is centered around consuming rich media – movies, comics, photos, and video. Even the vanilla e-book as been re-imagined – one of the launch titles is an illustrated guide to the periodic table, aptly titled The Elements. Instead of simply text and pictures, The Elements contains three dimensional samples and photos of each element: a nugget of gold (Au), an ingot of coal (C), a manganese crystal (Mn). You can touch and rotate them with your fingers. Tap to stream related videos from the internet or pull up the current market price of silver. What was once words on a page is now alive with information and rich media.

This kind of rich, visual media is definitely going to revolutionize not only textbooks, but literature of all types. Imagine a medical journal with anatomy models that rotate and zoom, or engineering manuals with diagrams that explode to show each and every part inside a car engine. As we discover ways to communicate more and more information visually instead of simply through text, I think the future is going to be a very exciting place to be.

I need a hobby. Badly. As senior year comes to a close, I find myself with only three classes, none of which meet Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. That means 4-day weekends, and a lot of free time (for now). Not wanting to spend my entire semester in front of an Xbox, I’ve decided to attempt something I’ve wanted to for a long time, and learn to play the guitar.

I borrowed my brother’s acoustic, a long forgotten Christmas present stored away in the attic and sat down in front of the computer. I hadn’t the first idea how to start. Serendipitously, that moment, my RSS reader led me to this post on TechCrunch, profiling a new website called iVideoSongs. The site offers a high definition videos from world-class instructors teaching you how to play acoustic or electric guitar. There are 25 free guitar basics tutorials, and currently 50 video tutorials for specific songs (with plans to expand to over 1000). I’ve downloaded all the tutorials, as well as purchased one of the song tutorials ($5 or $10, depending on the song). The quality of videos and instruction is excellent – I feel like I’ve made real progress in only an hour.

I’m normally extremely cheap when it comes to spending money on digital files, but when you compare with the cost of guitar lessons ($40/hour), iVideoSongs looks pretty good. It’s also really handy to be able to stop and rewind the videos – something you can’t do with in person lessons.

I’m also currently looking for a few good tablature websites, as well as a guitar basics DVD. Any recommendations?

I came across a very interesting post today on the Freakonomics Blog titled “If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?” It’s an interesting question in today’s age of the RIAA, MPAA, and seemingly ubiquitous DRM. In a world where sending my friend a song by a new band he may like is illegal, is borrowing a favorite book that different? From the article:

If there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the U.S. (much like Andrew Carnegie once did), what would happen?

I am guessing there would be a huge pushback from book publishers. Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it?

I don’t think so. Perhaps they’d come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements. And I am just as sure that, like a lot of systems that evolve over time, the library system is one that, if it were being built from scratch today, would have a very different set of dynamics and economics.