Indeed. I am very happy with switching to electronic books for novels & c., but it is exceedingly clear to me that _somebody_ is profiting here, even at $0.99, and it is not the authors, but rather the intermediaries who act as centralized controls over the flow, and make sure that their monopoly status is hard to challenge.
(Or: Amazon self-publishing as the Elsevier of electronic books; discuss.)

Well, actually, _some_ of us were telling you to worry more about the Nanny Bank than the Nanny State, thank you very much.

" if some policy increases consumption of something with zero marginal cost (an idea, an academic paper, a song, an e-book, etc.), a minimum, necessary condition to restrict that policy is that the variety of affected new goods must decrease. So if music piracy increases the number of songs consumed (and the number of songs illegally downloaded in any period of time is currently much higher than worldwide sales during that period), a minimum economic justification for a government crackdown on piracy is that the number of new songs created has decreased (in this case, they have not). Applying The First Law to open access mandates, a minimum economic justification for opposing such mandates is that either open access has no benefits, or that open access will make peer reviewed journals economically infeasible."

Stolen from CSR.

Very nice

"Steven Pinker has read the reports on civilian deaths in the Afghan war, mass rapes in the Congo, “going postal” shootings in the United States, and our youths’ seeming addiction to Call of Duty video games. Yet the Harvard cognitive scientist and wildly effective popularizer of evolutionary psychology brings you the Good News: humans are now far less violent than they have ever been. In roughly 700 pages of text and many dozens of graphs, Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature takes us on a long trip through millennia of brutality and sadism to arrive at a time, our time, when we ain’t going to study war—nor, for that matter, wife-beating, animal torture, or burning at the stake—no more.
Professional historians have known this news for decades; in their field, it is conventional wisdom that violence has declined over the centuries in both rate and savagery. Now Pinker brings his considerable analytical powers and rhetorical skills to tell this story to the wider public. He can be heard on NPR, seen on The Colbert Report, and read about in New York Times features. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof is ready to award The Better Angels of Our Nature a Pulitzer. Unlike the historians, many lay readers and listeners are surprised. “Really?!” Stephen Colbert asked in one of his less parodic moments. Really.
Pinker also means to deliver on the book’s subtitle, “Why Violence Has Declined.” But while his chronicle is powerfully and convincingly straightforward—rates of violence have indeed decreased—his explanations are less so. They may even undermine his campaign for a biological view of the human condition."