Men Who Shave Their Legs

Stephen Regenold e-interviewed me yesterday as part of a story he's preparing about men who shave for sports. I thought I'd share this hairy little memoir.

your name: Dave
age: 32
job/title: Marketing and Publicity Manager
city of residence: Boulder, CO
sports you play: cycling, triathlon, hiking/backpacking, skiing

1. When did you first shave your legs? What age? 21
2. What prompted the first shave? NCAA Div. III Capitol Area Conference swimming championships. We collegiate swimmers get crazy with a razor before big meets. And I didn’t just shave the legs. Everything you can see while wearing a Speedo went. I reshaved the next day and then repeated it all the next year.
3. Was it an odd feeling to shave your legs? Oh yeah. And painful. Since I didn’t know what I was doing the first time and used cheap razors and shaved too close, I was sporting some ugly razor burn over much of my body. Worse yet, shaving off all that insulating body hair makes you much colder. Then every time I got goose bumps (which was about every 5 minutes since swim champs are in February), my hyper-sensitive legs, arms, and chest were wracked with the intensity of every little touch or brush of clothing. Sweatpants were the only semi-tolerable clothing option. I think I went through an entire bottle of moisturizer that weekend, just trying to not feel like I’d been rubbed down with sandpaper. I was freezing for two weeks until I was rehaired!
4. Why do you do it? (wind resistance, hydrodynamics, narcissism, and road rash??) Swimming while shaved like a seal feels incredibly fast. I’m not sure how much difference the hydrodynamics make at the Division III collegiate level, but there is definitely a psychological advantage; I broke my PR in every event I swam shaved.
5. How often do you do it? Let's see, twice in a lifetime!
6. What is your preferred implement (electronic shaver, Bic straight blade, etc.)? You’ve got to start with an electric shaver. Clean that thing frequently until all the major hair is gone and you’re down to stubble. Then switch to a disposable razor and dispose frequently to avoid razor burn. Unjam the razor with every shave-stroke - you’ll be clogging it with every swipe. Then toss the razor after each limb. A body of average hairiness, from completely unshaved to totally shaved, should use 5 razors. Back in college, we had 4-5 guys to a hotel room - imagine what that bathroom looked like! It’s definitely a good idea to have someone helping out with hard to reach areas.
7. If applicable, what does your wife/girlfriend think? Does she care? She was weirded out at the time!

Everyone Seems Worn Out

Just after noon today at Boulder's Target, everyone seemed worn out. Walking around the store, everyone looked a little haggard, a little rough around the edges. Young to old, middle-aged to twentysomething, everyone was dragging just a little bit.

Why?

Breaking Records in Steamboat?

Steamboat is just 9 inches from breaking it's all-time record for snow
in one year. And it's snowing! It's snowing so hard we can't see the ski
resort from the hot tub anymore. Ah, well. Life is hard.

Wowio: Download Books for Free (with advertising)

Wowio offers free books as pdfs. There's no DRM, yet each pdf is digitally marked with a serial number traceable to your account (no anonymous or untraceable accounts are allowed). If you are caught distributing Wowio books, your account is terminated and you may be prosecuted.

I signed up and downloaded H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. It looks awesome: the illustrations look fantastic, there are explanatory historical footnotes, and the last pages of the book link to digitized audio of the radio broadcast that caused panic and hysteria back in 1938. Wowio has added value to this free book, and I couldn't even find any ads embedded. From a publishing perspective, I'm still skeptical:

1. It's still an ebook. I told my wife I'd signed us up for free ebooks. She wrinkled her nose and said, "But I don't want to read a book on a computer.". I suppose I could print out the book and pay just cost of paper and toner, but I've read books that way and wrestling unbound pages is no fun, not to mention the papercuts.
2. Depending on the ad format, books become long magazines. Will readers accept this? Maybe. Will book publishers? Only if they must, I suspect.
3. Wowio asked for demographic and personal info during registration. Though I found their survey to be amateurish, I'm now theoretically segmentable. But who wants to advertise in a book? I mean the question in two ways: does anyone want to advertise in a book? What companies would advertise in H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds? As a marketer and print ad buyer, I'm interested in segmenting, and I'm not sure companies like Ovaltine and Lifebuoy Soap are advertising much these days. Let's say your book is about training for bike racing. Does Wowio know how to sell ads in a bike racing training book to Trek or Pearl Izumi? What if Wowio simply sells ad runs across its entire product offering: say any book downloaded in March 2008 has a Ford Motor Company ad in it (those same books downloaded in April 2008 might have a new set of ads embedded – a clever concept). Will readers tolerate those ads? Will niche publishers be willing to open their books to non-niche advertisers? I'm skeptical.
4. You still have to get caught. Does Wowio, a web startup founded in 2006, really have the time and funds to catch violators and enforce their TOS by suing the worst violators?
5. I downloaded War of the Worlds about three weeks ago, and I haven’t read a single page yet.

Still, I’m being Chicken Little. Publishers are barely beginning with ebooks. Surely there’s time to figure out how to make money with it. Next up: some thoughts on how to go digital.

What the Ebook Will Look Like Once Free

Let's take Chris Anderson's argument and assume that digital books eventually become free to the consumer. What are some ways that publishing can avoid going out of business? Anderson mentions five categories of revenue models that have worked for other categories of product:

Cross-subsidies: Buy one thing and get something else free. There are about a billion ways to run a cross-subsidy: buy the book, get the free movie ticket; buy the print book, get the ebook free; buy the event ticket, get the ebook. The benefits to the publisher and consumer vary depending on the specific offer, but they all involve having two things of value and giving one of them away free. How many book publishers are in that position?

Labor exchange: You get a free ebook after doing some brief work. Anderson uses this example: "you can get free porn if you solve a few captchas". You can get a free book if you do some editing work? Likelihood for book publishing? Not likely.

Gift economy: You get a free ebook, no strings attached. It's free. You win, the publisher loses. Likelihood? Well, I'd say unlikely except that I'm not sure this isn't what's happened to music recording.

"Freemium": The basic version is free, the premium version costs money. Publishers are now publishing two books per book, dumbing down the real book into a free version. Likelihood? Not likely.

Advertising: Every ebook is free, but there are ads in them. Likelihood? Well, it's already happening. More soon.

After 18 years, Congress acts! Products might get a smidge safer.

The New York Times reported today that Senate passed a bill to toughen consumer product regulation.

The points I find most interesting about the current CPSC:

1. Congress hasn't changed consumer product law in 18 years.
2. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has a staff of 400 people, which is half its size in the '80s, despite a growing flood of imported consumer goods.
3. 15 inspectors are tasked with monitoring all imported consumer products, a market worth $614 billion in 2007.
   

Major changes in the new bill:

1. Increases budget and staff.
2. CPSC gets to issue rules and penalize companies.
3. Reduces lead in toys. (Why is lead allowed at all?!)
4. Creates a public database of consumer complaints.
5. Attorneys general can request court injunctions to prevent sales of unsafe products.
6. Current voluntary toy safety standards become mandatory.
7. Toys must be tested for compliance with the regulations.
8. Maximum penalty rises from $1.25 million to $20 million.
9. Makes it a crime for a company to sell a recalled product.

“If you build it, they will come”, or: why publishing is putting the ebook before the reader

Book publishers are convinced that readers want ebooks. This is because no one is reading books anymore. Make sense?

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study that revealed that Americans are reading less and less well than they have in two decades. Just 56% of Americans read a book of any kind in 2002. The publishing industry contends that Americans are not necessarily reading less, they're just reading fewer books.

A Golden Age

Why are Americans reading fewer books? According to people like Kevin Smokler of BookTour.com, we're in the midst of a Golden Age of the Book. Books are better now than they ever have been and there's a huge range of variety; there are more books being published now than at any time in human history. Books are cheaper than they've ever been, thanks to digital production, large print runs, and discounters like Amazon and Costco. Books are also more accessible than ever, with the proliferation of chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, free shipping from Amazon, and continued operation and overhaul of our national library system. And yet, 43% of America has spoken-reading books is less fun and useful than the alternatives.

So what exactly are people reading?

Some in publishing, like all the presenters at last month's O'Reilly TOC Conference, seem to believe that Americans are reading fewer books because they're busy reading on the Internet. Publishing might have some numbers on its side. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2003 study, "Computer and Internet Use in the United States" (pdf) found that 62 percent of America's 70 million households had a computer. 88% of households with a computer also have internet access, meaning that 62 million households, or 55 percent of American households, had internet access. 64% of American adults use a computer either at home or work compared with 86% of children and overall 60% of Americans of any age use the internet. Of course, they're not reading books online-they're reading news sites, checking email, browsing social networking sites, and lord knows what else. But let's not forget that the average American spends 2-3 hours a day watching TV and that online advertisers have long known that most website users spend under two minutes on any given website.

A major theme of the TOC Conference was that Americans are becoming "format agnostic", willing to sift through multiple forms of information and screen out irrelevant material. Others in publishing, like the Boulder Book Store's Arsen Kashkashian, have argued that reading has always been a pasttime of the American few. Regardless, less book reading can't be a good thing for those who make and sell books.

If they're not reading books offline, maybe they'll read them online!

So publishers have arrived at the theory that Americans are reading fewer books because they're reading online and therefore, they must want to read electronic books. Uhh... what? Let's pick this apart. Americans already have over 100,000 free books available to them for download. And there are millions of PDAs, cell phones, tablet PCs, laptops, desktops, and other digital devices that are capable of acting as ebook readers. The truth, as noted above, is that Americans don't particularly want to read books, much less on a screen. Or perhaps we're merely in need of a killer app, an iPod for ebooks.

Amazon's Kindle ebook reader has sparked all this recent interest in ebooks. Amazon launched the device during last holiday season, selling it for an (undiscounted) $400. Obviously, the Kindle is designed for serious book readers, not the average American. In fact, no ebook reader is priced for the average Joe. Ebooks are doomed (for now) because not a single one of the handful of ebook readers that has been on the market for years sells for under $250. Only the most dedicated reader would consider giving up the time-tested form factor of the printed book for a screen. And have you met a serious reader lately? Is she into consumer electronics and USB-enabled devices and web apps?

Someday, because they are mostly digital, ebook reader prices will fall enough that they will become affordable. With smart design-and maybe the Kindle is it-ebook readers might even become widespread. But putting books into digital format is pretty unlikely to convince non-reading Americans to read, because they're busy watching TV. And assuming that ebooks will capture the imagination of a public that now does all it's "reading" online seems pretty irrational.

In the meantime, publishing will be amassing a digital library. The industry's top publishers have already begun offering digital books.

For now, free digital books are a publicity stunt designed to draw print sales (an example of a cross-subsidy). What happens when digital books become free, as they must under Anderson's Law? More later.

Anderson's Law: Everything that Becomes Digital Becomes Free

Chris Anderson, best known in publishing for his "long tail" concept, wrote the feature article in the March issue of WIRED magazine. Anderson's prophecy in "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business" is that "everything that becomes digital becomes free". Anderson cites examples like free email, free news websites, and free music, but the article only hypothetically addresses free as a viable business model. While Anderson's article offers a "taxonomy" of revenue models for digital content, he fails to address the tricky prospect of making money on content that has become digital but which was once paid, non-digital content. In other words, how should a producer of a good, not a service, make its product digital, free, and profitable?

Anderson's Law
Anderson's prophecy seems as undeniable as Moore's Law. Cheaper computing power and storage space combined with fast, affordable internet connectivity places an inexorable downward pressure on the price of all things digital. Why?

Supply Side
1. Once you've made the original digital file, making copies takes just split seconds, a little electricity, and some platter space to store it. There's no need for manufacturing equipment or a warehouse. The marginal cost of production is nearly zero.
2. Distribution costs as much as an email or file download. No more containers on ships or crates on trucks.

Demand Side
1. Peer-to-peer networks, email, content hosting websites, and easy self-publishing tools make global distribution inevitable.
2. Hackers (and even the merely tech savvy) will eventually crack DRM systems.
3. Web 2.0 content licensers like Hulu.com create a sense of urgency for content providers not to be left behind.

Once digital, content is on an inevitable price decline to free. It's easy to pick out digital content that's approaching free to the end-user: online TV, streaming movies on Netflix are now bundled free with the mail-order movie rental service, downloadable albums on iTunes are $5 cheaper than on disc, music streaming sites like Pandora or Epitonic charge nothing. Clearly, the music recording industry is a case study in Anderson's Law. Also obvious is that the recording industry, once in the business of printing physical CDs, is still losing huge amounts of money even though pay-per-download and subscription sites have provided a revenue model.

So Why Go Digital?
If everything digital is marching toward freedom, why should a content producer even consider going digital? The answer that book publishing has created is that readers want digital books. More on this later.