I teach a course on internet economics and I’ve got a pretty good set of slides for the course (over 600 slides). Ideally I’d write a book and try to sell that, but I’m not sure if I’m up to the task of all that writing and editing etc. So I was wondering, would anyone pay for just the slides? They’ve got all the good bits anyway, in bullet point form, with lots of diagrams and examples. Isn’t that better than having to read a 200+ page book? Yet somehow I think the demand for a slideument would be much less than for a book. Hmm.

Via Joe Wikert’s blog I learned about Amazon’s new TextBuyIt service. Basically, in the US, you can buy stuff from Amazon by sending them a text message from your phone. They search for what you texted and send you back results, then you send another text to choose which item to buy, and finally Amazon gives you a call to confirm the purchase.

The idea seems to be that when you’re in a regular store you can check if Amazon has an item that you want at a cheaper price. It might be handy but the whole process seems a bit clumsy, especially compared to just walking to the checkout counter and buying something. However, in Japan my cellphone has a barcode reader (via the phone’s camera). It only works for special QR codes but I don’t see why it couldn’t work for regular barcodes as well. This could streamline the process quite a lot — just scan the barcode with your phone, enter a PIN number for security, and the ordering from Amazon could possibly be done without the extra two steps in Amazon’s process.

Obviously, retailers wouldn’t like this very much. They could retaliate by deploying cellphone jammers, but that would annoy their customers. More likely, they could drop barcodes and switch to encrypted RFID tags that can only be read by the store’s scanners.

Actually I’m not exactly sure how successful phone-based substitution of online for offline shopping would be. Given that people are already in a store, they’ve already incurred the cost of getting to the store, so that cost is sunk and irrelevant to their decision about whether to buy from the store or buy from Amazon. This nullifies part of the advantage of online shopping (saving you the cost of going to a store). Also given that you are at a store, the store offers truly instant gratification, whereas Amazon involves a delay of at least a day, or more if you don’t want to pay expensive shipping fees. Thus there are some factors stacked in the store’s favour, and Amazon would have to offer a low enough price to offset those. The key question is whether the economics of online versus offline retailing allow it to do that — is Amazon’s technology sufficiently efficient relative to a retail store that it can offer a low enough price that gets consumers who are already in a store to buy from it? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Remember when you were a teenager and your parents embarrassed you by trying to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ in front of your friends? That’s exactly how I feel about Time Magazine right now, with their list of Top 25 Blogs. Nevermind the fact that the list is highly subjective and excludes many great blogs. The problem is that the 25 different blogs are spread out on 25 freakin pages, plus an intro page. That’s 26 clicks to view a boring list of blogs, most of which everybody knows about already. (Yes there is a link to see the entire list in one page, but it’s buried).

As I wrote the other day, every click is a price. Hands up who is willing to pay 26 clicks for Time’s list? I wonder how many people clicked more than one or two times. In the talk by Aza Raskin that I linked the other day, he doesn’t provide any hard data but he mentions that when the NY Times breaks a story into more than one page, the number of people who click through to the second page is dramatically lower than the number of people who view the first page. If the demand for high-quality NY Times stories drops off so much after just one click, I hate to think about the click-elasticity of demand for Top 25 Blogs lists.

Of course all this is driven by the traditional publishers’ revenue model, and Time is not the first website to publish a “Top X of Y” list spread across X different pages. They get revenue from advertisers based on the number of pageviews that they generate. So they have this incentive to split things up across pages. This is understandable, but I wonder if 26 pages really is more valuable than one page, given that not many people will click through, and those who do will be so exhausted from clicking that they won’t even look at the ads.

In doing research I often want to find papers or publications on a particular topic. Usually I try to cheat and find a bibliography that someone else has already created. I was thinking some kind of Wiki model for creating bibliographies could be useful. Basically take the standard idea of a wiki and add a few features relevant to bibliographies, like sorting publications by date, author etc. A rating system would be useful. So would a graphical map to show the network of references between papers. If people would contribute their bibliographies to such a system, it could save a lot of the pain of current methods of literature search, which basically involve random keyword search and then manually ’spidering’ the references that you find.

Felix Salmon argues that all consumer magazines should be free online. I think he’s right in his assessment of magazine readers:

Eventually, magazine publishers will wake up and realise that they have three sets of readers. The first, and largest, is the online-only readers, who would never read the magazine. To maximize their numbers you want to put up as much content as possible in as timely a manner as possible. The second, and smallest, is the people who read the magazine both in print and online. These are your very best and most loyal readers: you want to treat them as well as you can, which once again means maximizing the value of the website and not needlessly crippling it. Finally, in between, there are the old-fashioned readers of the print product, who either subscribe or who buy it at the newsstand, and who then read it in an armchair or on a train or in a waiting room. This is not the kind of activity which can easily be replaced by a website.

I have one more point to add. Before I used the internet a lot, I did subscribe to or regularly buy a few magazines. Now I don’t buy any, but it’s not because I can read the content of those magazines online. It’s because there’s so many interesting blogs to read. Magazine publishers shouldn’t waste their time worrying about their own online content competing with their print magazine. They should worry about competition from other sources.