Excel expert gives away free copies of his books online. (Earlier) Mayor Bloomberg targeted by identity thieves. (Earlier) The Rubik’s Cube World Championships — the next Rock, Paper Scissors? Steve Pinker calls the modern age “the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.” (Earlier)
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 3), at about 8:30 a.m. E.D.T., to talk about my new kids’ book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. I have no delusions about my chances of success as a children’s author. (They are slim.) Nor do I have any delusions about why I, a first-time kids’-book author, . . .
Anyone who’s ever written a book — and these days, who hasn’t? — can tell you that watching your sales rank on Amazon.com can be a pretty fun sport. But something happened recently that made it a lot more fun for some people, and a lot less fun for others. I noticed the change the other day when I checked . . .
Alan Greenspan has a new book out. I haven’t seen it yet, since I am in London for a few days and it isn’t available here. Economist Brad DeLong talks about the book (among other things) in this podcast. Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen offers a set of links as well. So here is my economic forecast for the book: . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Once in a while, someone writes to ask if we would autograph his or her copy of Freakonomics. And we say: sure, thanks for asking. But the logistics aren’t very smooth. A person would have to mail the book to one of us, and include a . . .
Starbucks to take Russia by storm. Now in Travelodge rooms: the Bible and Alastair Campbell’s memoir. (Hat tip: MR.) Clothes beat computers in online sales. Medical Hypotheses journal trapped in the Dark Ages?
See? Even bacteria cheat. (Earlier) Dissed by Oprah: one author’s tale. Global warming hits the fashion industry. (Earlier) Can railroad track layouts show the causal effects of segregation?
Organ donation is heading from a bogus reality show to the big screen: An A.P. article reports that Paris Hilton has landed a role in the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, a so-called “horror rock” musical that’s “set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco.” Hilton will play . . .
A little more than a year ago I blogged about how every third book had the word “bullshit” in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with “bullshit” in the title. Now, it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the . . .
Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .
Most of our blog readers couldn’t care less about refereeing in academic publishing. And they should be thankful. For a tenure-track economist, getting published is a brutal process. You spend a year or two coming up with an idea, try to think over every aspect of the problem, collect and analyze data, and finally produce a 30-page paper summarizing all . . .
From a Q&A with John McCain in today’s N.Y. Times Magazine: Q. Well, maybe you will strike it rich with your coming book, “Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them.” How did you have time to write a 450-page look at history? A. Mark Salter, my co-writer, did it. What we usually do is use a . . .
Tomorrow morning — at 12:01 AM, to be precise — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will go on sale. While coverage of the event has been crammed with reports of lawsuits over early shipments, outrage over Internet spoilers, and protests over potential Sabbath desecration, there’s also been plenty of Freakonomic-ish news in the Potter realm. Here’s a summary: A . . .
I’m reading a pretty interesting book called Blue Blood. It’s a memoir written a few years back by a Harvard-educated New York City cop Edward Conlon (who also wrote the New Yorker’s “Cop’s Diary” column under the name Marcus Laffey). I have the paperback edition, which means that the first three or four pages are devoted to positive reviews and . . .
Raise your hand if you hate libraries. Even though this blog doesn’t enable me to peer through the screen into your living room (yet), I am guessing there aren’t a lot of raised hands out there. Who could possibly hate libraries? Here’s one guess: book publishers. I am probably wrong on this, but if you care about books, hear me . . .
Our British publisher, Penguin U.K., continues to delight and astound us with their marketing cojones. How would you like to come across this new poster in the Tube? It is perhaps not surprising that Penguin won a big marketing award this year for their work on Freakonomics. It should be noted that the “3 million copies sold” refers to worldwide . . .
Given that the publishing industry has a tendency to flail when it comes to marketing research, here’s a heartening consumer trend: The Wall Street Journal has reported that book clubs targeting African-American readers have exploded in popularity, even while traditional book clubs are foundering. As of December, the Black Expressions book club had 460,000 members, a substantial rise over the . . .
The economics of book publishing are usually not sensible, predictable, or even explicable. This New York Times article by Shira Boss is a good beginner’s guide to the subject. Not all real-estate agents are fond of the National Association of Realtors. This one calls the organization “routinely, habitually, congenitally anti-free market” as well as “a protection racket — vicious, awful, . . .
On April 12, 2005, Freakonomics was published. We had high hopes and low expectations. From what I recall, nothing magical happened on that day. But at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of April 13, this Wall Street Journal review appeared. It was the kind of review that, in the theater, is known as a “money review”: it doesn’t just say . . .
Here’s an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Carl Bialik (“The Numbers Guy”) on how authors (and their public-relations firms) try to push a book to No. 1 on Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com: For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author. New York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown titles to the top of rankings . . .
This morning’s quiz was almost aggressively simple: name the new non-fiction book that was so mesmerizing that I nearly missed my lunch date. Your answers were, as always, pretty sensible: The Audacity of Hope, Infidel, Wikinomics, Survival of the Sickest, Blind Side, Pistol, The Race Beat, US Guys, Oil on the Brain, Size Matters, Stumbling on Happiness. What really surprised . . .
A friend spotted this book in a store the other day, and thought it bore a certain resemblance to another book he’d seen. I have to say, I don’t get what a dollar bill has to do with an apple. But I was particularly tickled by the title: This is not the first book cover that’s a bit familiar. There . . .
Robert Dodge has written a biography of Thomas Schelling, which is available now. I just found out about it and ordered it, so I have not read it yet. I have read the delightful preface written by Richard Zeckhauser, a long-time colleague of Schelling at Harvard, which exactly captures my interactions with Schelling. Schelling is a Nobel prize winner in . . .
Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here’s a recent one: I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I’d like to pay you something. This is also an experiment in how accessible famous people are. . . .
The latest runaway best-seller in Brazil is the autobiography of a young prostitute, Raquel Pacheco, a.k.a. Bruna the Surfer Girl. The book is called The Sweet Venom of the Scorpion: The Diary of a Call Girl and here’s what Reuters has to say: “In just over a month, it has sold some 30,000 copies and is already in its third . . .
Amazon.com asked us to compile of list of good economics books (well, books that are at least loosely concerned with economics), and since we’re often asked that same question by our readers, I’ll go ahead and post the Amazon link here.
We launched this website back in March, just before Freakonomics was published. It was meant as little more than a place to summarize the book, provide some contact information, and maybe a little feedback. But we became more fond of it — and of you — than we planned, and now here we are, still blogging away seven months later, . . .
… to come hear me (Dubner) give a non-Freakonomics reading, on Mon., Sept. 26, 7:00 p.m., at the Half King. It’s an event to celebrate the publication of The Best American Crime Writing 2005, an anthology that includes a New Yorker article I wrote about a cunning silver thief. (Oops: I just showed you the free version of the article . . .
Books on CD and cassette have quietly become a nice little profit center for book publishers. (So too have audio downloads, but that’s a subject for another day.) Even though audio versions sell, at best, perhaps 1 copy to every 10 copies of a hardcover book, their high price and low royalty rate enable publishers to make money. Most people . . .
Although it may sometimes seem that Dubner and I are attached at the hip, indeed we do have separate lives. And, in his non-Freakonomics existence, Dubner was recently honored by having a piece he wrote for the New Yorker reprinted in a book entitled “The Best American Crime Writing 2005.” The book comes out next week. Just by chance, it . . .