Continuations

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Hacking Textbooks - We Need It” where I pointed out that college textbooks are a $7B annual market in the US alone. I was therefore thrilled to see that California last week passed a law to attempt to create free creative commons-licensed textbooks. Now one might argue that the government should not be spending money to interfere with a private market and I am sure existing publishers of college textbooks will be fighting this legislation. But...

Yesterday, Google announced something stunning: free turn-by-turn directions for Android 2.0 to be first available shortly on the Droid phones. It is stunning because the previously cheapest software only alternatives were apps such as Navigon ($89.99) and TomTom ($99.99) for the iPhone (as an aside, stand alone GPS devices with turn-by-turn directions can now be found on Amazon for as little as $139 for a Garmin nuvi 260 and that’s after 2 seconds of looking). So here we have a case of Googl...

Last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” followed by Chris Andersons’s response on his blog. I have not yet read the book, so my initial reaction is based on and to Gladwell’s review: there seems to be profound and ongoing confusion about critical economic concepts including marginal and total cost, marginal and total benefit, and price. I tried to clarify these in my posts on the Economics of Abundance an...