One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cautious…

To eat bacon sand­wich­es? Or not to eat bacon sand­wich­es? That’s the ques­tion that David Spiegel­hal­ter, “Pro­fes­sor Risk” at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, tack­les in this short video exam­in­ing stats, life, and whether we should err on the side of cau­tion … or risk. This clip is part of Cam­bridge’s YouTube chan­nel, which now appears in our Smart YouTube Col­lec­tion.

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Talking American History with Joseph Ellis

Let me quick­ly call your atten­tion to an inter­view with Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning and best­selling his­to­ri­an, who most recent­ly pub­lished Amer­i­can Cre­ation: Tri­umphs and Tragedies in the Found­ing of the Repub­lic. In this casu­al, wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion (lis­ten below or here) with Russ Roberts, the host of Econ­Talk, Ellis talks through the found­ing years of the Unit­ed States — the break with Eng­land, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War, the draft­ing of the con­sti­tu­tion and the forg­ing of the nation. A good con­ver­sa­tion for his­to­ry buffs, and an infor­ma­tive talk for those less famil­iar with Amer­i­ca’s begin­nings. You can gen­er­al­ly find Econ­Talk (which typ­i­cal­ly focus­es on eco­nom­ics) here: iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site.

Visages d’Art

Anoth­er “eggman913″ mov­ing art spe­cial. (Check out his full col­lec­tion on YouTube.) This time, the images morph in sync with Bach’s Pre­lude And Fugue No. 6 In D Minor BWV 851 — Prae­ludi­um from the Well-Tem­pered Clavier, Book 1 per­formed by Daniel Ben Pien­aar (avail­able at Mag­natune).

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Making Books Free: David Pogue’s Experiment

He’s a tech­nol­o­gy colum­nist for The New York Times, and the author of many pop­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy man­u­als. And today, David Pogue writes about an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed last year, test­ing the hypoth­e­sis that free e‑books can dri­ve sales of print copies (rather than eat into them). How did it work out? He writes:

My pub­lish­er, O’Reil­ly, decid­ed to try an exper­i­ment, offer­ing one of my Win­dows books for sale as an unpro­tect­ed PDF file. After a year, we could com­pare the results with the pre­vi­ous year’s sales. The results? It was true. The thing was pirat­ed to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridicu­lous­ly easy to down­load with­out pay­ing. The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slight­ly dur­ing that year. That’s not a per­fect, all-vari­ables-equal exper­i­ment, of course; any num­ber of fac­tors could explain the results. But for sure, it was­n’t the dis­as­ter I’d feared.

A nice con­clu­sion. But then the next ques­tion. Will free e‑books do any­thing good for e‑books being sold on the Kindle/Nook/Sony Read­er? Still an open ques­tion…

Final­ly, speak­ing of ebooks, we’ve just launched our new col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. It includes over 100 free e‑books, most­ly clas­sics, that you can read on your com­put­er, smart phone (iPhone/Android), or Kin­dle. Please take a look (also read the relat­ed eBook primer) and offer any feed­back you might have.

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, Reenacted With Dog Puppets

Boing­Bo­ing is run­ning a piece this morn­ing on Chad Orzel’s new book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It’s good stuff, and it reminds me that Orzel also recent­ly released a video that re-enacts the famous Bohr-Ein­stein debates, with, yes, dog pup­pets. You can watch above. Or, alter­na­tive­ly, you can get it on YouTube in three parts: here, here and here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Experiments in Publishing (Take 1)

Those who read this blog reg­u­lar­ly may remem­ber my past posts (herehere and here) about the Ama­zon Kin­dle and recall that I have mixed feel­ings about it. You’ll also know that I’ve been inter­est­ed in what authors such as J.A. Kon­rath have accom­plished by releas­ing books on the Kin­dle itself. (Heck, some of you even knew about Konrath’s suc­cess­es before I did.—Thanks Kurt.) And now, since recent­ly becom­ing a hap­py Kin­dle own­er myself, I’ve decid­ed it’s time to make an exper­i­ment in this new fold. So let me tell you about it.

Pub­lish­ing Exper­i­ment 1: If we know any­thing for sure about pub­lish­ing right now, it’s that it is chang­ing. Authors, I believe, must become the sci­en­tists run­ning exper­i­ments with new tech­nol­o­gy, new pub­lic­i­ty strate­gies, mar­ket­ing, you name it. There’s just too much mon­ey involved for the big (and some small) press­es to car­ry out the kind of test­ing and idea-try­ing that needs to be done. That leaves us inde­pen­dent authors to try things out on our own.

In that spir­it, I’m releas­ing a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries in the Kin­dle for­mat just after Christ­mas. A Long Way from Dis­ney is offi­cial­ly out now, but I’m “releas­ing it” on Sun­day Dec. 27th, a day I’m call­ing Dis­ney Com­man­do Sun­day! The think­ing here is that by ask­ing peo­ple to all buy the book on a sin­gle day, I can go after the top of Ama­zon’s Kin­dle best­seller chart and gar­ner more atten­tion (sales) there, espe­cial­ly with the after-Xmas new Kin­dle own­ers.

I’ve priced the col­lec­tion low ($.99) because I’m more inter­est­ed in how many copies of the book I can get out there than in how much mon­ey I can make off of sales. For those who’ll be count­ing, the $.99 price point will give me 35 cents and Ama­zon a hefty 64 cents per book sold. They’ll win out regard­less, but it’s their sand­box and I want to play.

You can buy this Kin­dle book on any com­put­er once you’ve estab­lished a Kin­dle read­er preference/Kindle account. You have three choic­es here. You can do this with:

1) An actu­al Kin­dle. 2) An iPhone run­ning the Kin­dle App (down­load) or 3) Any PC run­ning the new Ama­zon Kin­dle soft­ware for PC (down­load here).

You can­not buy the Kin­dle book for any­one else, and no one can buy more than one copy. It’s cer­tain­ly an inter­est­ing set of rules, isn’t it? Well, this is what Ama­zon has set up. If you’d like to aid this exper­i­ment, please for­ward this blog post to oth­er authors, read­ers, Kin­dle own­ers, and exper­i­menters in the pub­lish­ing field. It should be inter­est­ing to see what this can gen­er­ate with a min­i­mum of pub­lic­i­ty and zero bud­get.

If you’d like to sam­ple any of the short sto­ries from this col­lec­tion, you can hear any/all of them free online at my web­site and find out more about the Kin­dle exper­i­ment here. I hope you’ll choose to come along and help make some waves with this idea. I do think that the more suc­cess­es inde­pen­dent authors have with this new means of get­ting things done, the bet­ter it will be for all of pub­lish­ing. Per­haps that’ll be our next debate.

I’ll be back lat­er this week with a few sto­ries from the col­lec­tion and then again next Sun­day for the big sales kick­off! See you…

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He will be teach­ing an online course (The Essen­tial Art: Mak­ing Movies in Your Read­er’s Mind) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies start­ing in Jan­u­ary. His first nov­el, JACK WAKES UP, is in stores now.

Our Known Universe in Six Minutes

The Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry gives you the whole enchi­la­da in six min­utes. The film, mov­ing from Plan­et Earth to the Big Bang, is part of an exhi­bi­tion, Visions of the Cos­mos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolv­ing Uni­verse, appear­ing at the Rubin Muse­um of Art in Man­hat­tan through May 2010. If you’re in New York, con­sid­er vis­it­ing the Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um and get­ting the full expe­ri­ence. Learn more about how to vis­it here.

Thanks @infoman

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Ravel’s Bolero

Here we have Daniel Baren­boim, the Argen­tin­ian con­duc­tor, lead­ing the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic at Wald­buhne in Berlin, 1998. The clip is already push­ing 1,000,000 views on YouTube. Part 1 is above. And Part 2 (already over 1 mil­lion views) is here. You can find a released record­ing on Ama­zon as well.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.