Loudon Wainwright III has released a new album, Songs for the New Depression, that fittingly features “The Krugman Blues,” an homage to the Princeton, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, who has documented America’s economic spiral in The New York Times. You can watch the Krugman Blues above, and get the full album at Wainwright’s web site.

via The New Yorker

Loudon Wainwright III Sings “The Krugman Blues” is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Robert Shiller, who predicted the stock market crash earlier this decade and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, has a unique understanding of the financial markets and behavioral economics. In this free course provided by Yale University, Shiller demystifies the financial markets and explains “the theory of finance and its relation to the history, the strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century.” It’s a course for our shaky financial times. The first lecture appears above, and the full course can be accessed on YouTube, iTunes and Yale’s web site. The course is also listed in our meta collection of Free Courses and our targeted selection of Free Economics Courses.

Understanding Financial Markets is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Peter Singer, an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton, created the animal rights movement back in the 1970s, and, more recently, launched a campaign to end world poverty. One can’t contemplate poverty without also considering greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Interviewed in 2009, Singer suggests that greed drives us biologically (as does social collaboration fortunately). Greed helps us survive and innovate. But there is also a point where it becomes pointless and pathological, and that’s what we have witnessed in the financial world. Greed brought us Bernie Madoff. But it has also brought us (my inferences) bankers who create a catastrophe one year and take record bonuses the next. And it has brought us to the point where  our country has dangerously slipped off of its democratic moorings. Lloyd Blankfein, this clip is for you. Thanks Ted for sending this one along.

Looking for free philosophy courses? Visit the Philosophy section of our Free Course collection.

Peter Singer on Greed & Wall Street Excesses is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

As some of you already know, back on December 27th, I released a sample of my first short story collection A Long Way from Disney on Amazon’s Kindle store and used social media strategies to market it. I did this for various reasons, but mainly because, as I’ve said here on OC before, I believe authors need to take on the role of scientists and experiment with what’s possible in today’s publishing world. (If you’re interested in how I publicized this, see my recent posts at AuthorBootCamp.com.)

From a scientific point of view, the experiment was a great success. I learned a great deal, which I’ll discuss below. I sold a lot of books (at $.99 each)–around 350 in the first week–and I got my name and stories in front of a lot of new people. I also heard from a number of them who read the book right away and really loved it! For you authors out there, I hope you can relate: Getting positive feedback on your work from total strangers is about the best feedback there is.

[For those of you keeping score at home, those sales put $260 into Amazon’s pocket and $140 into mine. Not too shabby, I think, but also not the split an author might hope for.]

Okay, without any further delay: Here are the Results (what I’ve learned) from Experiment 1:

1)   Timing can be essential. I positioned myself to hit the Kindle store just after Xmas, thinking that with many newly gifted Kindles out there, a lot more Kindle ebooks would be selling and that I could cash in on this rush. I was correct in this prediction (Amazon sold more ebooks than paper copies over Christmas), but what I didn’t predict was how much harder this made it to reach the Top 100 Kindle bestseller list, a goal I had set for myself. I wanted to hit the Top 100 because it would give the book additional exposure and stimulate more buying from newbie Kindle owners looking for quick, cheap content.

Ultimately, I think choosing this time right after Xmas might have helped me sell a few more books. But by not hitting the Top 100 list, I missed a critical chance to attract more attention on the Kindle store. As author Rob Kroese posted on an Amazon Kindle discussion board, he was able to hit 300 in books on the Kindle bestseller list prior to the holidays by selling 30 copies a day. During the holidays, he sold 60 copies per day and couldn’t crack the top 500. I should mention that the highest ranking I got on Kindle Bestsellers was #250, which in retrospect was a great achievement, even if it came short of my goal. On that note, I also hit #4 in Short Stories, #16 in Literary Fiction and #40 overall in Fiction.

Would I have been able to reach my goal of the Top 100 at another time? I’m not so sure.

2)   Making the Kindle Top 100 list is actually pretty hard for an independent author. Initially I figured, how many copies of these books can they be selling? Well, I learned that in actuality the answer can be quite high. A lot of the books on the Top 100 list are actually FREE! The Kindle store includes many classics in the public domain—Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, Treasure Island, Little Women, etc. (You can find many of them in OC’s Free eBook collection.) And whenever someone downloads these free texts, Amazon counts it as a sale. It’s hard to compete against FREE.  And, for this reason, the bestselling ebooks list can be harder to climb than the paper version. (Back in March 08, I made #45 overall in books on Amazon when I tried a similar experiment with a print on demand publisher and my first novel, Jack Wakes Up.)

3) Free isn’t for everyone. So why shouldn’t I set the price of my book at FREE—the web’s new magic price, according to Chris Anderson—as I’ve done with audio podcast versions of all my fiction at my site and on iTunes? Well, because Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (how you put your book up on the Kindle) won’t let me. That’s right, as an independent posting content to the Kindle store, the lowest I can go in price is $.99. It’s true. So who’s posting these freebies on the Kindle store? Publishers. Including, you guessed it, “Public Domain Books.”

There are no sour grapes here. I hope no one will misread any of these statements as that. But there are some interesting lessons learned. Would I have made the Top 100 if I had put my book up at a less busy book-selling time? Who knows. But if Rob Kroese can hit #300 by selling 30 books in a day, I probably would’ve had a good shot when I sold close to 200 copies on just the first day. I’ll just have to try another experiment at some point to find out. When I do, I’ll also capitalize on one more thing I learned in this experiment about actual buying on the Kindle platform:

4) Non-Kindle-owners need education if you want them to buy. Not too many people out there have a Kindle, but any Kindle book can be purchased on a PC or an iPhone/iPhone Touch. This means that a great many people can actually buy a Kindle book, but many of them will need to be educated about how they can do this—something that I tried to enable, but could have done far better with in retrospect.

So how did I do? As a writer, the biggest success of this experiment was getting my fiction into more people’s hands and hearing strong feedback from them. As for my writing career and how to proceed with publishing experiments going forward, I learned a great deal. I hope you found it helpful. To talk more about this with me, please comment on either of my writing/publishing websites: sethharwood.com or authorbootcamp.com, or hit me up on Twitter (@sethharwood) or Facebook.

What am I doing next? Going cross-platform with this experiment—taking the Kindle version of A Long Way from Disney and bringing it to Smashwords (Sony reader and others), Mobipocket (Blackberry) and the iTunes store as an App to enable the content to be read on even more devices! I’ll be back to talk about how that all goes soon!

Seth Harwood podcasts his ideas on the publishing industry and his fiction for free at sethharwood.com. His first novel, JACK WAKES UP, is in stores now.

Experiments in Publishing: Kindle Rush Results is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Just for the record: I’m not advocating a position here, and I don’t hold an underwater mortgage…

Behavioral Economics and Underwater Mortgages is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off. They took very complex problems and made them understandable, often demystifying difficult concepts in a reliably engaging way. Now, they’re at it again. This time, they’re breaking down the American healthcare system and getting at the core question. Why can’t we control ever-rising healthcare costs? That’s what the raging healthcare debate is effectively all about. And, if you want to be an informed participant in the debate, it’s worth listening to these two episodes that tease things out. The first episode, called More is Less, looks at doctors, patients, insurance companies and their tangled relationship. (Click here, then scroll down and find the “Full Episode” icon.) The second episode, Someone Else’s Money, gets you inside the world of drug and insurance companies and patients. Have a listen, and thanks to Bob in Brooklyn for the tip here.

This American Life Demystifies the American Healthcare System is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

This comes to us via a tip from Twitter. The Khan Academy has now posted on YouTube over 800 videos (find a complete list here) that will teach students the ins-and-outs of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finance, physics, economics and more. The clips have been recorded by Salman Khan, a Harvard Business School and MIT grad. And to give you a feel for them, we’ve posted above the first in a long sequence of lectures on differential equations. (The remaining lectures can be found here.) This YouTube channel, which now appears on our list, Intelligent YouTube Video Collections, is one of several video sites that provide free online tutoring via video. As mentioned in the past, you can find online good video collections dedicated to chemistry and calculus.

Math & Science Tutoring on YouTube is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Note: I’ve added Anderson’s zip file to our collection of Free Audio Books. There, I’ve also recently added a couple of related works: Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Cory Doctorow’s Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future . You can find them housed under Non-Fiction.

Update: How to Get “Free” Anywhere is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Separately, if  you start a 14 day free trial with Audible, you can download two free audio books. This will give you access to many current bestsellers (Malcolm Gladwell, David Sedaris, Barack Obama, etc.). Whether you stick with the membership (as I did), or cancel, you can keep the free books. Get more details here.

Lastly, if you want many other free audiobooks, check out our big collection of classics.

Now Download Free Audiobook of Chris Anderson’s “Free” is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

How to Read The Wall Street Journal for Free is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com