Since Arnab or Great Bong (as he is more popularly known) usually writes humor and satire, a horror novel written by him seemed like a huge deviation from the usual fare. Besides this the general plot of the book – “Experts/ Team sent in to a remote expedition to find out what went/ is going wrong” is pretty much my favorite kind of plot. Variations of the plot have given us such superb pieces like Jurassic Park, Sphere, Deep Storm and movies like Alien. So with somewhat tempered expectations I started reading the book.

The book follows a group of experts that are assembled in a highly secret mining facility under the Thar desert. The mine has uncovered an ancient structure with some disturbing carvings, deep underground. The experts are called in to make sense of this and the many maladies afflicting the miners. As usual things go wrong shortly after and that’s when the fun starts.

The book is fairly well written and the pace picks up after the initial slow start. It builds quite nicely on the claustrophobia of being trapped several kilometers under the surface of the earth. While there are number of gory scenes in the book, regular horror fans might find them a bit pedestrian. In addition to this while there are a number of innovative twists and turns in the book, most of them seem a bit derivative (Either that or I’ve seen / read way too much in that genre). Fans of other horror series like Saw, Hostel etc may be left with a sense of deja vu. In spite of these (imagined ??) shortcomings though, the author manages to keep the plot fairly taut and interesting.

While personally I was a tad disappointed (mainly cause it had a “been there done that” kind of feel to it), I would think its an excellent stab at the horror genre. If nothing else, its a welcome relief from the legions of “Chetan Bhagat” clones that have popped up all over. Definitely worth a try.

A few things about the data used in the Infographic:

• The average cost of an e-book today, was determined using the average cost of the Kindle editions of the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list.
• The 10 year average e-book price was computed by looking at the price of e-books on the bestsellers list at ebooks.com over the last 10 years
• The “payback” period was determined by using the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list. The average price of a hardcover on that list was $27.68
• The average price of both e-readers and tablets was based on the average cost of devices announced this year
• The graph shows the average cost of e-ink based e-readers only and does not take into account other devices like tablets.

Here is a couple of things I discovered while researching data for this Infographic:

• The average cost of e-books has been pretty much steady. As such $10.00 and below seems to be a sustainable market clearing price for e-books
• Selling e-books and digital content is highly profitable for publishers. Their profit share is much higher for e-books. Some publishers such as Simon & Schuster have posted record earnings in 2011 on the back of blistering growth in the digital segment. They reported almost double the revenue over the previous quarter. Part of this growth was attributed to  “lower shipping, production and returns costs”. Print sales fell across the board. All this leads me to believe that:
  • the benefits publishers gain by not having to print physical books is far more than they would like us to believe
  • there is still enormous scope for further reduction in prices of e-books or even scope for a new business model
• The sharp fall in e-reader prices over the last three odd years has resulted in sharp increases in overall sales. The data further lends credence to the theory that once e-reader price levels fall to below $100, the mass-adoption that will follow will give a huge boost to online e-book sales.

I had no tracking number to track the shipment. The email didn’t give any link to a website to find out more about this “Self Delivery”. Flipkart itself didn’t mention this anywhere in its FAQ’s or its website. To top that, the link to the “Self Delivery” website in my order summary was broken. I was a bit perplexed. What was this “Self Delivery”? Did it mean that I needed to go and pick the books up from somewhere?

At my wits end, I posted a quick tweet to the official twitter account, @flipkart, saying:

@flipkart what is “flipkart self delivery” ? How do I Track my order ?

Within a few minutes I got a short reply from Flipkart saying:

@enygmatic_in One of our people. We’ll buzz you in a bit.

And a few seconds after that, like a scene from the Matrix, my phone rang!!

A helpful customer representative from Flipkart quickly explained what “Self Delivery” was all about and assured me that my books would be delivered by Tuesday. With that one simple action, Flipkart raised my expectations of customer service to a whole new level.

I think going forward brands will need to take customer service to new heights, tying real time conversations (queries, complaints etc) on social media to faces (real customers) and delivering through both online and offline channels (like the telephone, snail mail, shop interactions etc). If done right, it has the potential to turn every customer interaction into one of more respect and admiration for the brand. With the online and offline worlds merging, like in my little tale above, I think we are about to enter a brave new world.

Oh and by the way, “Self Delivery” is Flipkart’s attempt at logistics (something I wasn’t aware of, since I hadn’t ordered anything from them since July). And if you are curious, I ordered: Birds of the Indian Subcontinent, The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene, The man who died laughing by Taraquin Hall, Blowback by Mukul Deva.

Both Brogan and Smith are established bloggers. This shows in the light, almost conversational style that the book is written in. It makes reading the book a breeze and you almost never find the text becoming drab or boring.

While I don’t think the concept of “Trust Agents” is particularly new, with Malcolm Gladwell doing a good job explaining the power of trust agents or “Mavens” in his 2000 book Tipping Point, Chris and Julien do a fantastic job in explaining and fleshing out the concept in the context of the web.

I think anyone who wants to know more about how trust in the digital tribe functions and how it may impact their business, should give this book a read.

With great expectations, I wrote to Sony, hoping that the Japanese corporation might deem it fit to sell me one. But no, Sony India was in no hurry do me any favors. And so the wait continued, and in the meantime I read books on Microsoft Reader, painfully sitting on a chair, chained to my computer, and wondering whether there was a better way of doing this.

Then one fine day Amazon announced their cute little Kindle (of course, its anything but little), and suddenly reading e-books turned fashionable. The always on wireless made getting E-books as simple as dialing for Pizza. Along with the Kindle, there was an explosion of E-book readers, from new offerings from Sony and iRex to newcomers like Foxit, InterRead etc. Suddenly, Readers were the new “IT” gadget of the season and the E-Book had arrived.

But, for some strange inexplicable reason, no company sold these in India. You could find one of these devices in the US, Canada, Europe, South-East Asia, Japan, China, even Australia. But when it came to India, the land of Nobel Laureates, Booker prize winners, and a few hundred million readers, not one company even tried to hawk their wares in India. So, for a short period I gave up the very idea of ever buying one of these.

Then Sony announced its new line for 2009.Readers starting at $199? Sounded too good to be true. So, I tried to find a way to get one for myself. I hit a vein of good luck, when I learnt that one of my friends would be coming to India in October. He graciously agreed to pick up one for me, and after a long wait finally it arrived – my very own Sony Reader Pocket Edition or Sony PRS-300.It came in a large book-like case. I pulled it out of its outer packaging only to find another box inside. Sliding this box out of its cover, I opened it half-expecting to find another box inside. Instead, there it lay, snuggled its plastic packaging, fitting neatly in the box.

The box also had a quick start manual, a USB cable, guarantee card and a neoprene sleeve for the reader. I quickly turned it on and after setting the language and time; I was all set to begin reading. The 5’’ reader was actually bigger than I imagined it to be. In fact, my ideal reader is one that would hold at least as much text as a standard Microsoft Reader (LIT) page and this seemed to fit the bill. The text looked crisp against the whitish grey background, almost like paper and very unreal in its paper like quality. The reader felt quite solid, with its sleek design and metal body. Sony, I thought, has done an excellent job with the design of the device.

I spent the next few days converting a few books to formats compatible with the Reader. My main problem was that thanks to my MS Reader reading days, LIT grew to be my favorite e-book format and quite a few of the books I had were in that format. However, thanks to Calibre I was able to convert these to LRF quite easily. I also created a few in the ePub format (the new open format hailed as the next big thing by everyone but Amazon) using both Sigil and Calibre. I then connected the reader to my PC. And poof!! There went my Reader dreams. Microsoft Windows XP for some reason refused to recognize the device. So, I connected it to my laptop (MS Vista Home Basic) and  my books moved smoothly onto my Reader.

Since then it’s been a wild ride through the jungles of Hender’s Island, with all sorts of creatures springing from the imagination of Warren Fahy. I actually read for Fragment over two hours without feeling any eye strain. The page turn flash, which I initially thought would detract from the experience, was almost invisible as I descended deeper and deeper into Hender’s Island. The page turn buttons were a bit awkward to use, but I got used to them pretty soon. The thing I liked the most about my reader was the fact that it remembered where I left off. It also had a nifty bookmark feature as well as page numbers (unlike the Kindle). The page numbers though do tend to get a bit weird. The thing is that in ePub, if the ePub “page” does not fit on the screen completely (as is often the case), it is split across several pages, leading to odd numbers like “Page 3-4″ (meaning end of page 3 and begin of page 4).

So far I haven’t had any trouble with TXT, LRF and RTF files.  The ePub files also display well, but the ones I created using Sigil refused to display on the Reader. PDF is a dicey issue. If the PDF is text only and has been created keeping in mind PDF re-flow, then the PDF file displays brilliantly well on the Reader. In other cases, though results may vary. I used Open Office to convert my DOC files to PDF to test on the reader, and they worked quite well.

The OS and interface of the device were also quite smooth and the device hasn’t hung on me so far. The OS though in my opinion needs some tweaking to make it more user friendly. Sometimes the status messages when formatting text from RTF or when the OS is busy, aren’t immediately obvious.

Lastly, about two weeks and 3 books later, the battery is still to die on me. This is quite spectacular given the fact that I am still running on a battery charged at the factory. Given my experience so far, I think I can reasonably expect the battery to able to give me the reading experience of several books on a single charge.

Initially, I also had an issue with the font. Basically, I didn’t like the narrowness of the font and how small it looked at the small font setting. However, after about two weeks of reading, the font has kind of grown on me. The narrowness doesn’t matter much now, after getting through a few books at that font. Also, I realized that the font looks small only in the sample books provided. It’s actually quite readable at the small setting otherwise, the small size being equivalent to the font size found in most paperback books.

I also haven’t had any issue with the “lack of features”. The storage provided on the device is more than adequate. For instance, I transferred about 36 books on to the device, and they occupy just under 30 MB. 36 books are gonna last me a long time, so I doubt I’ll need more storage in the form of a SD card slot anytime soon . Ditto for MP3 support (prefer my cellphone to play MP3′s) and wireless downloads (doesn’t work well in India anyway). My only grouse is that the battery is sealed in the device. I would have loved it if the battery could be replaced by the user with minimum effort.

To conclude, I found the Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-300) to be a solid e-book reader at a very affordable price. It supports just the right amount of formats and with the conversion tools available on the net converting to any one of the formats supported is very simple. So, if you are looking to get into the E-book world with an E-reader, the Sony Reader is highly recommended. I’m quite happy with mine

I think that the most important lesson the publishing industry can learn from the experience of the music industry with piracy is this – the single most important tool to combat piracy is making available a legitimate, fairly priced source of content to the public. Personally, I think piracy exists mainly because the current pricing regime does not address a section of the consumers that would like to buy the product or because there exist no legitimate channels to acquire the product digitally (for eg. Comics, especially back issue archives) or because the existing channels are cumbersome to deal with or lack proper quality (think restrictive, crippling DRM, poorly designed e-retailing etc.).

So rather than worry about piracy, the publishing industry should concentrate on how quickly it can reach “iTune” like ease of use as well as pricing. Amazon has of course, made the entire process of buying and reading books hassle free. With the introduction of new E-book reader models with wireless capabilities by vendors like iRex, I think we can expect this feature to work with stores other than Amazon in the near future. What continues to remain a concern is pricing. While pricing has come down to about $10 for existing titles (driven in a small part by consumer backlash and boycott campaigns), I still don’t think it’s at the level that would cause an “iTune” like growth spurt in online e-book retailing.

The publisher’s argument against having pricing more than a few dollars below the dead tree versions is centered on the idea that publishing costs amount to a small fraction of the total price of the dead tree book. Other costs involved in sourcing manuscripts, assessing their quality, commissioning cover art, layout and design of the book, marketing and promotion account for a larger portion of the price of a book.  While I agree with the idea of cost allocation, I don’t think that this argument holds water in all cases.  I think that while it may be right to allocate costs, as the publishers seem to indicate, for new releases, I see no reason why the same logic should apply for older releases. My reasoning is that a majority of books were published before digitization of books hit mainstream. In their case, their sales to date (in most cases) ought to have recovered the initial costs and turned a profit for the publisher. Now for a digital copy of the same book, only real costs that ought to apply are the author’s royalty, onetime cost of digitization and cost of delivery per copy (and of course a modest profit margin for the seller). These I’m sure would amount to be significantly lower than the cover price of a  new paperback.

Therefore, I think that if the publishers are serious about e-books getting prices down to “iTune” (Pogue’s one dollar pricing that rocks, figuratively speaking) like levels is very much possible. This alone will serve as an effective deterrent against piracy. In the end, publishers need to ask themselves whether it is worth their while, to go after pirates or is their time better spent in drawing back readers to their titles in the digital age. I think Stephen King quite rightly summed this up :

The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys. And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

So will books be Napsterized or iTuneized ? I guess time will tell.

India is a functioning anarchy.

- J.K. Galbraith

This one line pretty much sums up what Games Indians Play: Why we are the way we are is about. The book by V. Raghunathan tries to explain our “Indianess” through behavioral economics and game theory. It’s delightful look at the various facets of the Indian pyche like our obsession with bending rules, public apathy etc. It’s quite an interesting read and an delightful exercise in seeing the practical applications of game theory.

While I fully agree with most of the problems that the author points out, I don’t really agree with all the answers that he alludes to. To a large extent his assessment of the situation is largely to western lenses, and as such I don’t really think that applying the western definition of “being civilized” to every culture and civilization is really correct. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.

In spite of this though the book’s a great read. Do pick up a copy when you next head to a bookstore.

Technorati Tags:Books, Games Indians Play, V. Raghunathan

The book offers a rare peek into the mind of this notoriously media shy entrepreneur of modern day India. Through the book we learn of his humble beginnings, his paranoia of losing touch with the common man, his little idiosyncrasies and most importantly a X-Ray look at his firm and business model.

To me the story of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar was very fascinating. This is largely because these are success stories I can relate to, since Pantaloons has come up literally before my eyes. That apart the manner KB has grown his organization and gradually moved into areas other than retail is awe inspiring. The kind of foresight he showed in helping set up Idiom, getting real estate for setting up retail way before the competition could, design of the stores definitely needs some really good business acumen. He is a true ‘maverick’ who has constantly defied convention. This is even reflected in the book, in the non-linear fashion in which the tale is told with commentary from his friends and colleagues. If you get a chance, this book is definitely worth reading.

To end this post, here is quote from the man himself, one that I agree with completely:

I believe that we all come to this world to kill time. Therefore, we pick up some activity that we like doing and call it our profession. I call this the Time Pass theory.

Technorati Tags: Kishore Biyani, It happened in India, Pantaloons, Big Bazaar