The Business Insider

The Age of Outrageous Ideas

By Jack B. Rochester, Managing Editor

A remark attributed to the great French philosopher Voltaire goes something like this: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." It seems a fitting phrase for the plethora of views of our modern world, economic systems, ways of life, etcetera: think of a problem or issue and somebody's written an article, blog, or book on how to correct it.

The latest entry is Joshua Cooper Ramo, weighing in with his first book, The Age of the Unthinkable. Ramo, a former editor at Time [a magazine - remember?] and currently employed by Kissinger Associates [yes, that Kissinger], gives us a great read and much to think about regarding aspects of the world and its systems that we can do next to nothing about.

Books of this seem to be proliferating. They're reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and at the book's Amazon Web page. Who reads them? Or even parts of them? Why do publishers think we'll buy them?

How about you - what book of outrageous ideas are you reading, and why? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,
Jack

Kindle: The Final Chapter

By The Business Insider Editors

Two previous posts here have discussed the business potential for the Kindle. For the last post on this phenomenal new device, we discuss what's happened to its core technology.

But before we do so, we thought it worth a yuk-yuk to mention that the future of electronic publishing was discussed last week in New York at a bookseller's fair, where The New York Times reported that author Sherman Alexie saw a woman on an airplane reading on a Kindle and said, "I wanted to hit her." ( Alexie subsequently said he'd meet with Amazon folks to learn more about the "machine" and promised not to hit anyone.

In a previous post, the commenter Mike had mentioned that the Kindle didn't have color capabilities. Well, needless to say the need for it was not lost on the E Ink people, who created this amazing display technology and have licensed it to a number of companies, including Sony for its e-book reader and Samsung for its smartphones. But E Ink needed a capital infusion, and it went wanting from U.S. investors.

 

Thinking Big in Taiwan: The 101 Tower in Taipei

But Prime View International, a Taiwanese company, saw the potential value of E Ink and has acquired the Cambridge, Massachusetts company for $215 million. We think that's a steal. "We commercialize advanced technologies," is PVI's motto.

Hey, Prime View, you rock.

We may be seeing the renaissance of Taiwan as a prime-time player in high tech. Two Taiwan PC manufacturers, Asusus and Acer, have a commanding share of the netbook market, and Taiwan is still a leader in semiconductor manufacturing. 

Here's the takeaway for those of you in business or technical writing: e-books will surely become the most efficient and economical way of "publishing" in the future. Forrester Research is leading the way in explaining this. Yesterday is a good time to begin exploring and understanding the benefits of this technology.

The Business Insider Editors

The Kindle DX, Part 2

By The Business Insider Editors

Last week's post concerned the introduction of the Kindle DX, intended for the college textbook market. We've had a number of responses, including one from a publisher's sales manager who informed us that Pearson Education has jumped on the bandwagon with the Kindle. More on this next week.

Today, we are publishing the reply from "Mike," a 30+ year veteran of college textbook publishing, whom we briefly quoted last week. He read our post and made the following comments:

Interesting that you have a Kindle; so does the bright sunlight of a Jamaica beach totally wash out the screen display like it would do on a laptop or video camera LCD view screen?
I like gadgets as much as anyone, but I still think they have this new Kindle wrong –- at least for now.

First of all, it appears the displays of the Kindles are monochrome.  Give me a break; it’s a color world, color displays are ubiquitous, and intro textbooks are all in color. $500 for a super-size-me Kindle is a game-breaker price.  Jeeze, one can now buy a netbook mini laptop at Costco for $350-$400 where one can read a digital textbook in color AND still do all kinds of research and goof-off things on the internet.  The netbook gives more bang for buck than a Kindle. If I was a student today, that’s what I would bring to school -– not a larger, pricey laptop, nor a Kindle.

I agree, students like gadgets, too – but gadgets that fit in their pockets like iPods and cell phones, and not clunky and apparently fragile-looking things (without a cover?) like large Kindles. From what I observed, most students don’t lug ANY textbooks around unless they plan to study one of them while on campus on a particular day.  With a netbook (or even a Kindle) they could bring all their books in a lighter-weight pkg, so that would be good.
For the Kindle to be truly viable as a textbook delivery system, it has to: cost much less, be in color, be more than a reading machine (i.e. be a flat “laptop” with capabilities to at least use a built-in browser on the internet and for email (oh, then don’t forget to add a usable QWERTY keyboard).

It I had a chance to develop an e-textbook this is what it would be/do: 

• be in color
• have oodles of hyperlinks to flash videos, etc. to bring the graphs, illustrations and people to life
• have built-in pop quizzes to mention a few. Basically, the e-book would incorporate the book’s “student website” material along with the text. 

In other words, be just like a website with all the bells and whistles such as any of the big media company websites have (WSJ, CNN, yada, yada.)

If and when the Kindle can do all this at an affordable price, then I will be “impressed.”

Comments, readers? Do you agree with Mike? Oh, to answer his question about reading on the beach: No, the screen is perfectly viewable because it's not an LCD, but a new technology from E-Ink.

Until next week,
The Business Insider Editors

Kindle: Lighting a Fire Under Textbook Publishers

By Jack B. Rochester, Managing Editor, The Business Insider

I just returned from a week's vacation in Jamaica, yah mon. I planned to spend lots of time catching rays on the beach, so I took fourteen books along with me. Conveniently, they were all on my Kindle. I was an early adopter, last year, and recall a colleague asking if I didn't miss the smell of ink and the feel of holding a book in my hands.

Well, no, not really. The only down side I've found is I have to switch off when the airplane I'm on is taking off and landing.

With the advent of the second-generation reader, the Kindle 2, we have a handheld electronic reader that's been improved by reader feedback. Amazon's technical people actively solicited comments, and it looks like they took our comments and suggestions for improvement to heart. Stephen Windwalker is to be commended for both his evangelism and his technical documentation, a book pre-installed on the Kindle. Then in March, Amazon announced a Kindle application for the iPhone. No moss growing under these people's feet.

Yesterday, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Amazon announced a large-screen Kindle intended for use as a college textbook reader. The device goes in the opposite direction of the iPhone application, for obvious reasons: It has to display many illustrations, graphs, artwork, and photos that enhance the textual explanations. No way to squeeze all that content into a 2x3" screen.

A friend of mine from the college textbook business, whom we shall refer to here as Mike, wrote me an email about this new innovation, from which I excerpt:

"Do any of you really think [the Kindle will replace a printed textbook]; at least in your lifetime?  I don’t; no more so than today’s digital textbooks for the PC have. I’d bet that the sales of current digital textbooks are dismal relative to the quantities of books printed, and likely will remain that way for this good reason: traditional textbooks = no batteries required.  Printed textbooks are just way more practical and convenient and a whole lot easier to really study from. Bottom line for me: printed textbooks can be greatly enhanced by digital media, but not replaced by it."

How do you feel? Me, I think Jeff Bezos and his Amazon people are genius-grade. I never was, nor have I ever met, a college student who enjoys lugging heavy textbooks around. Nor do they want to pay the high prices textbooks command [hence sharing, hence buying used copies]. But what they do like is electronic gadgets, and this one makes a lot of sense - even to helping cross the final hurdle of getting a student to read the book. And they can still do all the traditional highlighting, markup and bookmarks - electronically.

Batteries? Schmatteries. There's always a place to plug in, and besides, this thing will go for weeks without a recharge. Colleges can buy the Kindles, like they did computers, for  students as part of tuition or make the price low and attractive. If textbook pricing follows trade book pricing - e.g. $24.95 in paper, $9.99 as a Kindle download - everybody wins.

Business and technical writers ought to be thinking of the Kindle as an emerging publishing platform, because it's good for many other formats and types of documents - PDFs, Word files, newspapers, magazines, etc. Indeed, companies that must provide business or tech docs to accompany expensive, complex products would do well to explore putting the docs on a Kindle instead of the traditional, far more expensive, PPB paper-based manuals.

That's what I thought about as I sat in my beach chair, facing the beautiful waters of Montego Bay: yah mon, this Kindle has so many uses that are just beginning to be explored....

Cheers,
Jack

Sharpening Your Writing Skills While Having Fun

Amid all the dire economics and cutbacks, both real and inflicted, I think we still need to take a time-out for humor or a smile, so here goes. This is, verbatim, an email I received March 15, 1984, from my brother who worked at a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. I was probably on MCI Mail [anybody remember MCI Mail? - flat monthly fee, plus a per-character charge for both incoming and outgoing messages, PLUS connect time charges. Look at the progresss we've made!] But I digress, and as well all know, digressions should be examined as they may deviate from the main point....

HOW TO WRITE GOOD
by Sally Bulford
(reprinted without permission from somewhere)

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
17. Analogies in writing are like the feathers on a snake.
18. The passive voice is to be avoided.
19. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
20. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
21. Who needs rhetorical questions?
22. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

By the way, I don't think there was a real Sally Bulford, so feel free to share this with others without fear of copyright infringement.

Cheers,
Jack

Jack B. Rochester is a professional writer and editor who has worked in nearly every aspect of publishing since 1974. He heads Joshua Tree Interactive, and is Managing Editor of The Business Insider blog.

Omit Needless Words!

By The Business Insider Editors

In these days of Twitter, one need hardly be reminded that the shorter the message the better. Or so it seems, at least. Who has time to write anything "long" any more? As one famous writer once said, "Forgive me for writing you a long letter, but I didn't have the time to write a short one." Nobody writes letters, just quickie emails, often filled with a plethora of errors.

And it's that last point that's important: no matter whether your emailing, Twittering, or writing a memo or report, you need to sound literate. You lack credibility if your writing contains errors in usage or spelling (no one can be excused for spelling errors when using a computer, for spelling checkers are not only found in word processing but in email programs as well).

And so it comes as no surprise that The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, the little book that launched the famous phrase, "Omit needless words!" has just been republished in a 50th anniversary edition. You don't need to buy this new edition, avariciously published by Pearson/Longman for $19.95; it's the same as the 2000, edition, the 1979 edition, the 1972 edition, and even the primary 1959 edition (Strunk first self-published it for use in his classes at Cornell in 1919). In fact, if you don't own a copy, I recommend you buy one from Amazon's 264 used from $1.93 plus $3.99 shipping. It's even less if you download a copy to your Kindle  (you'll love the cover art). Click here to read the New York Times review of the 1959 edition.

But have one you should, and you should use it frequently. In a New York Times article yesterday, the writer Roger Rosenblatt expressed it quite well: "You really ought to know the rules before you break them."

"Strunk & White," as the book is commonly referred to, also states, "Make every word tell." Good advice, regardless of your art or profession.

Information Governance Makes for Well Written, Technically Accurate Documents

Editor's note: This is Part Three, and the final installment, in our series looking at information governance from several business perspectives, which began on Monday, continued on Wednesday, and concludes today.

By The Business Insider Editors

Yesterday, April 15, the day our income taxes are due, President Obama said, "It will take time to undo the damage of years of carve-outs and loopholes, but I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interest."

Now, there's a promise we've heard before, but given Obama's short yet definitive track record, he may be serious about pulling it off. What was interesting was the fact that a number of tax protests sprang up around the country, marking a significant departure from citizen apathy. Maybe there's some spunk left in this country after all - at least when it comes to the pocketbook.

If Paul Volcker and the President carry through, we're going to need a raft of technical writers well versed in the Tax Code and capable of rewriting it in plain English (and in Spanish, for starters). This is not a job for lawyers who, while capable of writing intriguing novels, are best known for their command of the obfuscatory.

My colleague Tim Rosa wrote here a few weeks ago about new opportunities for technical documentation specialists; well, this is another one of them. Volcker has until December to prepare his report, so now's the time to get your resume in play.

Tim mentioned that Word and Adobe Acrobat are the two applications tech writers use most often. It would be fair to assume they are commonly used across many business and political writing venues. But what if the spelling checker misses something, or creates an error? A recent interview on NPR with Mike Calcagno, who heads the team that works on the Microsoft dictionary, reveals that the Word spelling checker often has a mind of its own - such as correcting "Obama" to "Osama."

The takeaway is that information governance has many manifestations. Approaching work situations from an information governance perspective is to take the highest road, and one that can provide a distinct competitive advantage. The Obama Administration, in revising the Tax Code and in many other ways, is doing just that. Let's follow their lead.

By the way, can you catch the typo in this Wall Street Journal article? Send us a comment if you can.

Free Webinar on the Massachusetts Economic Stimulus Plan

By Tim Rosa, Publisher

Want to learn how to get a piece of the economic stimulus pie in Massachusetts? I've been trying to find this out for months with little success. So, I'm excited to tell you about a free webinar on April 9, 10-11am ET: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/427332122. The title of the session is "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Understanding Opportunities for Massachusetts", co-sponsored by Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

This is the only public forum in Massachusetts I've seen on this subject. So, if you want to get in the know, this is the best way to find out.

—Tim Rosa

BREAKING NEWS: Senator Leahy Hosts Economic Recovery Workshop in Vermont

Editor's Note: We were fortunate this morning to get a breaking news story from Mark Anderson, a journalist and colleague who covered the ground-breaking Economic Recovery Workshop sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) last week. Expecting a hundred or so attendees, nearly 500 Vermonters attended to learn how the economic stimulus package could benefit themselves and their state.

Everyone needs to have a better understanding of the stimulus package and its benefits for our people. We believe other states should follow Vermont's lead, and we encourage you to forward this link to Mark's blogpost to your Congressional representatives, as well as to your friends and business associates. 

By Mark Anderson, Editor-at-Large

BRATTLEBORO, Vermont, March 30, 2009 -- Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy and the state's governor, James Douglas, welcomed 450 state residents to an American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Workshop workshop to help people and businesses understand how to benefit from the Obama Administration's recent economic stimulus bill. It was the second such event Leahy had hosted in the state and, the senator added, only the second that he knew of in the country.

"We have to take advantage of what's being done in this legislation," Sen. Leahy said of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. "I want our president and our country and our state to succeed. We have to. There's no other choice."

  

The daylong event consisted primarily of breakout sessions on topics such as

• The stimulus and your family
• Doing business with government
• Broadband and energy provisions.

In the broadband and energy session, Chris Campbell, the state's Director of Network Infrastructure, said that the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture will be distributing $7.2 billion in grants and loans toward increasing broadband Internet access across the country. But, he added, applicants should study exactly what they're vying for: Commerce, for instance, will be parceling out its $4.7 billion in grants through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. And, importantly, Campbell said, Congress mandated that NTIA award at least one broadband stimulus grant per state.

In Vermont, Campbell's office will be doing the bundling. "We're trying to make a comprehensive application for Vermont that maximizes the benefit we get out of at least that one grant to Vermont," he said. Entrepreneurs and companies elsewhere should consider bundling their NTIA broadband grant applications together to minimize the number of applications NTIA receives from their respective states.

On the other hand, the USDA's broadband funding will be distributed as both grants and loans. And, said Thomas Jensen of the department's Rural Utilities Service, his office is still in the midst of a public comment period (which closes April 13) soliciting feedback on how they'll distribute their $2.5 billion.

Jay Paterson, director of the Technology Extension Division at Vermont Technical College in Randolph attended the energy and broadband session and said he thought individuals and garage-based entrepreneurs will have a tough time competing for stimulus funding with already established companies.

"I think the bulk of the money will probably go to entities that already exist," he said. "It's going to be easier to (distribute the funding) to fewer big players than a lot of smaller players."

Bob Rusten, town manager for Wilmington, Vt., said he was attending the workshop to find out how he could apply for some of the stimulus bill's funds for weatherizing buildings and increasing energy efficiency. (The stimulus bill sets aside $5 billion and $6.3 billion for each, respectively.) Rusten estimates that his town's six buildings now spend $50,000 for heat and between $15,000 and $20,000 for electricity each year.

"We're hoping to reduce those costs by 20 or 30 per cent," he said.

Scott Johnstone, executive director of the energy consulting company Efficiency Vermont, said that he expects some of the stimulus bill's funds to be abused like any other government program. "You all probably remember the 'Fleecing of America' series on NBC news years ago with Tom Brokaw," Johnstone said. "I will predict for you that in two or three years we're going to have a series like that. You want to make sure not only that your stories don't turn up on that (kind of TV show), but that Vermont is held up as a place that acted quickly with these (stimulus) dollars -- and did it well."

Mark Anderson is a science and technology journalist who has contributed to Wired, Discover, Science, Rolling Stone, New Scientist, Harper's, NationalGeographic.com and ScientificAmerican.com. Follow his latest project, "Life, The Equation," on Twitter.

IDC Says Content is King

Editor's Note: Each day this week we are commenting on presentations from IDC's Directions conference, held in Boston last Tuesday, March 17.

By Jack B. Rochester and The Business Insider Editors

Writers have been saying this for years: Content is King. Now, through the evolution of social media and networking, IDC analysts are telling the world that it's oh so true. Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message." But maybe not. Perhaps, over the past twenty years, with the rise of email and then IM and now Twitter, we've forgotten that you need to say something of interest or importance, regardless of the medium you choose to transmit it.

Or, as Harold Evans said, "Vagueness comes from the failure to marry word to idea."

Several IDC analysts, coming from their unique perspectives in their presentations, highlighted the idea that content in king. Herewith a few examples for both writers and managers:

Scott Ellison, Vice President, Mobile Consumer Service, asked, Who owns the consumer experience? Hands down, the Apple iPhone has differentiated itself as a mobile device that facilitates communication of every type: email, text, voice, Google, and with its 15,000 applets. There are huge opportunities in handheld mobile devices (he characterized five platforms: BlackBerry/RIM, Google Android, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile. Over the next decade, said Ellison, vast amounts of consumer and business/enterprise content will be developed, pointing out the importance of demographics, content, integration and efficiencies. For an exploration of what these emerging forms of content are, and how they are many things to the mobile device user, read Stephen Baker's Businessweek article, "The Next Net."

Danielle Levitas, Group Vice President, Consumer, Broadband and Digital Media Marketplace (in San Jose, CA) spoke about the trend toward being hyperconnected. This is a result of technology creating the democratization of information. We not only consume content, but we create it as well. Social networks connect people in relevant ways, helping business get the job done better while reducing costs at the same time. For example, inefficiencies in the most common information-access tasks - search, access tools, recreating, reformatting or versioning content, and multipublishing or multiformatting - can cost an additional $3,300 per employee, per year. Everyone is getting connected, and 15% of users are now hyperconnected - using more applications, more Web 2.0 media, and multiple access devices (e.g. desktop, mobile, etc.). Hence the need for ever greater efficiencies of hyperconnectedness.

Karsten Weide, Program Director, Digital Media & Entertainment, said that anything that can be online will be online. He sees the big new opportunities in online video, mobile Internet, targeted advertising, and social media - all of which are, of course, content. To prove the point:

• In two years, online video use has grown to 54% from 33%
• Mobile Internet users will triple, to 1.3 billion, by 2012
• Nokia has plans to integrate television, Internet and computer applications in a new device called Ovi
• Behavioral ad targeting will increase tenfold, to nearly $7 billion, by 2012
• Social networking has grown to 54% in June, 2008 from 43% in September, 2007 - just nine months.

Weide sees these as lucrative new media opportunities in advertising, content, and data development. He also works with some other smart and interesting people: Mark Levitt recently wrote about social media users behaving badly - seated jurors using Twitter in the courtroom; and Susan Feldman, whose studies of search technologies are producing interesting new insights into how people find and use content. 

All this translates into ever-increasing demand for professionals who can create the content of the future - and the higher the quality, the better.

Cheers,

Jack

Jack B. Rochester is a professional writer and editor who has worked in nearly every aspect of publishing since 1974. He heads Joshua Tree Interactive, and is Managing Editor of The Business Insider blog.

Editor's Note: Each day this week we are commenting on presentations from IDC's Directions conference, held in Boston last Tuesday, March 17.