You "felt like a sucker" and from another comment "feel like I've been lied to"?
Do other people's comments and criticisms make you change your mind about something that easily? If you thought it was a good book when you read it, why would anything anyone else says change that? (Short of, say, Gladwell made up the entire thing or has been rampantly plagiarizing without attribution.)
Gladwell's books are very well-written narrative combining summarized research studies, anecdotal stories and histories to support his overall thesis. It is not a scientific study. He "connects the dots" of what he believes to be the central theme of his book. I haven't seen anywhere that he "lied".
There will always be detractors to any non-fiction author, especially one so popular. (See Nassim Taleb's books as another example.) If you can find a non-fiction book without major detractors, it probably isn't very good.
I felt lied to because he cites facts that aren't true, uses questionable sources, and draws conclusions more based on gut feeling and speculation than hard science. He does all this while presenting it as science. The book is sold as non-fiction after all. I got caught up in the hype and naively assumed he must know what he's talking about, but clearly there are issues with his methods.
Also coming from Salt Lake City -- flying into SJ on Friday, and back Monday morning. Probably planning on renting a car, if anyone is interested in sharing.
~$1000 a month. Designed, edited and published a book of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders (see http://amzn.com/1595910778). An opportunity I stumbled into. But I suppose "get publication rights from Warren Buffett" isn't a repeatable business model :)
Not repeatable in that specific case, but have you thought about doing the same thing for other high-profile figures (either in finance or elsewhere)? You might be able to leverage your experience and success to get them to agree to a similar sort of thing...
I have thought of this but haven't really pursued anything yet. I also have permission from Buffett to publish his early partnership/hedge fund letters from the '60s, so will probably be doing that in the next year.
Interesting! I saw the book a few weeks ago and wondered who put it together. I assume the letters are public? How did you get the extra material? And do you share any income with Buffet? (That would feel strange, but would also make sense)
Most of the letters are freely available on Berkshire's website. The "extra material" includes a few early letters not on the web (got these from Buffett so the collection would be complete), and charts/tables/indexes that I put together myself.
The income is not shared with Buffett, but any income I receive is "return on capital" from me taking inventory risk. So I do have to invest some of my $$$ to buy the book inventory, and as it's sold to Amazon I make (great) return on that money. But the profit per book is actually pretty low compared to other published books -- I could be charging much more for the book, but it was part of our "agreement" that I make the total price of the book as cheap as possible. (Which I think is accomplished with Amazon's price of $19-25 for a 700 page textbook-size book.)
Self-published a book in April, which is now selling in Paperback and Kindle versions (http://www.amazon.com/Berkshire-Hathaway-Letters-Shareholder...). It's been doing pretty well although there was a built-in audience and it's not too difficult to market a book when the author is Warren Buffett.
I did a printing of the book and am selling the physical version on Amazon Advantage. Advantage takes a 55% cut of the List Price, and handles all shipping, ordering, etc. I just have to send them inventory when needed.
The program works, but so far in my experience it's a huge pain in the ass. They send out Purchase Orders when they need more inventory and it's pretty unpredictable (an order could be 4 copies or 900, which means shipping really changes my COGS). They also "lost" a shipment of 800 books that took them a month to find. So I wouldn't recommend Amazon Advantage unless there isn't another option.
Hacker News readers who are interested in how share buybacks work and how they can be a very good idea (even in the tech industry) should read up on Henry Singleton & Teledyne:
Think of it as a way to reinvest in the future of your current business without having to actually expand it (which, in the case of a company at Apple's size/stage, would likely be wasted on low-returning incremental investments). Apple returning capital is a good thing -- it's how businesses should work.
Mistakes have certainly been made, but yes: this is typical Wall Street fare.
When Johnson first started the turnaround over a year ago, he made it clear this was a long-term undertaking, of at least 3 years, but probably 5 years. That should really hold true for any turnaround, but especially one of this size.
The company is only 1 year into the turnaround. It's headlines like this and investor myopia that gives way to great investment opportunities. Maintaining a long-term view can frequently lead to making money off of those who don't.
Fair enough, but it's still a niche market that Apple has near plenary control over. Indeed, Apple essentially dictates what price other retailers may charge by keeping the wholesale price high. [1]
I can think of a lot of scientific "big data" applications that would be very challenging problems. There are many domains that need to create & automate better systems that Collect > Organize > Parse > Visualize data. Weather, climate, ecology/species, traffic systems, etc. To do these right would be very challenging and would have a big impact on the world.
Now some self-promotion: I'm looking for a full-time partner to help me with Atlastory, an app that visualizes all of history on a map. This fits with the idea above. It's a simple concept, but there's huge engineering & design challenges involved: imagine all the geographic data involved in Google Maps, now multiply that by 1,000, and figure out the easiest way to obtain/retrieve/display that data.
The project I'm currently working on is called Atlastory, and would be a Google Maps-like interface throughout history. The idea is to eventually have political maps like those in the OP + specific maps for historic events.
Demo is up at http://atlastory.com (for now only maps are WWII and Civil War). If anyone's interested in helping out please contact me. (Currently looking for another developer to help with the much more complicated back-end)
http://stuff.maxolson.com/On-Startups.pdf
There are other startup-related essays thrown in there too. PG, if you're reading this and want it taken down, please let me know and I'll oblige.