The idea of rent is quite old, going back thousands of years to the ancient world. It originally applied primarily to land, and meant that some people had ownership rights to the land and could demand payment (rent) from anyone who … Continue reading
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My wife and I are both born in Massachusetts and met and got married there, but in 1981 an offer from the University of Michigan to fund my doctoral studies proved to be irresistible and we moved to Michigan. So … Continue reading
Save as PDFThere is a venerable saying with much truth to it that the golden age of science fiction is 14. And it was certainly golden for me at that age. I could imagine myself as Kimball Kinnison, fighting the Boskonian menace … Continue reading
Save as PDFAs someone who first got politically active in the 1960s as an anti-war activist, I have learned a few things about how to do this. And it starts with the observation that some amount of effort is required to have … Continue reading
Save as PDFOne of the big stories of 2016 has been the two outsider candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They aren’t all that much alike, as it turns out, except in that they diagnose a problem of elite politicians who are … Continue reading
Save as PDFIn a blog post by Julie Crisp of Tor Books UK, we get a progress report on the decision to drop DRM from their e-books. The big take-aways are: There was no increase in piracy of their books from removing … Continue reading
Save as PDFRecently a Norwegian Kindle owner named Linn suddenly found her Kindle had been wiped clean of all the books she had purchased from Amazon. Whether this was a simple mistake or yet another act of evilness is not the main … Continue reading
Save as PDFI recently finished reading Clayton Christensen’s classic work The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail, which I read on my Android phone using the Amazon Kindle app. I will probably post a review separately, but this … Continue reading
Save as PDFWhen you are looking at the issues around publishers, media companies, copyright, and DRM, you are looking at economics. As a former economics professor that is something I like to think about, and I believe there are some interesting implications … Continue reading
Save as PDFI genuinely love eBooks, to the point that I will rarely even think of buying anything else. Some people may regard that as heresy, and I understand the lure of physical books. When I was a boy I used to … Continue reading
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