A new article by Alexander Halavais and Derek Lackaff in the excellent Journal of Computer Mediated Communication examines the breadth of topics covered by Wikipedia. This graph from the paper shows the relative coverage of Wikipedia by topic versus books in print:

It’s interesting to see where the significant differences are. Wikipedia seems to have a lot of coverage of music, geography, history and science. It doesn’t do so well in social science, law and medicine, relative to books. I guess this reflects the underlying incentives to contribute to Wikipedia. People may be knowledgeable about geography or history because it’s their hobby or it interests them. I have not yet met anyone whose hobby is the law. And real lawyers probably have high opportunity costs of writing Wikipedia articles about law.

It seems that having a title and then a sub-title has become in fashion for economic academic papers recently. I don’t remember seeing so many sub-titles a few years ago. Why is this? Who started the trend? Most importantly: Will it increase my chances of publication if I use a sub-title?

A few examples that I’ve recently read:

Royalty stacking in high tech industries: Testing the theory

Licensing of university inventions: The role of a technology transfer office

To join or not to join: Examining patent pool participation and rent sharing rules

It seems that everybody (including me) has an opinion about why the Kindle sucks, why it’s great, or how to improve it. The best suggestion I’ve seen so far comes from interface designer Michael Puhala. His suggestion is that Amazon should get out of the hardware business and make Kindle an open platform that other hardware can use. Personally I think Amazon has Apple envy. Apple makes most of the money in its iPod/iTunes system from the hardware, but Apple is extremely good at designing hardware. From what I’ve read about the Kindle, Amazon is not so good at hardware. Amazon is good at online retailing and logistics. If they stick to that, while letting others who know what they’re doing design the hardware, I think the Kindle platform as a whole is much more likely to be successful.

Note that an ‘open’ platform doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make any money from it. Amazon can still define the standard, and it can charge hardware developers royalties if it wants. It can also continue to sell the e-books and other content through its website and earn revenues that way. The tricky thing, as always in a multi-sided platform like this, is the pricing, and in particular the structure of pricing across the different sides. How much (if anything) should Amazon charge hardware developers and how much to charge end-users? How much of the content revenue gets passed back to publishers? It’s a complicated problem, but if Amazon can get it right, I think they have a much greater chance of success than if they keep trying to make money by peddling poorly designed hardware.

(HT: Kindleville)

If you want to follow the fortunes of Amazon’s Kindle as it attempts to conquer the world, check out Kindleville, a new blog by Joe Wikert, author of the awesome Publishing 2020 Blog. Joe is a vice president and executive publisher at John Wiley & Sons, so he certainly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to publishing. The latest Kindleville post tries to estimate the number of Kindles sold so far. Joe reckons it’s less than 5,000 units. If true, that sounds kind of low, but iPod sales were also quite slow for the first couple of years:

(Source: Wikipedia)

Joe also reckons that the initial US$400 price is a deliberate strategy by Amazon to limit initial sales and effectively make the initial users paying beta testers. I’m not sure if I believe this myself. Say the Kindle costs $200 to manufacture, then Amazon could have given free copies to 5,000 beta testers for only US$1m. On the other hand the $400 price has certainly generated a lot of negative publicity for Amazon.

A new online journal in mathematics, Rejecta Mathematica, only publishes papers that have been rejected from traditional peer-reviewed journals. I’m not 100% sure, but it doesn’t seem to be a joke. I don’t know about mathematics, but in economics getting rejected by a journal is not necessarily a sign that your paper is bad. The refereeing process contains some signal, but also some noise. However, I don’t see how a rejection can be a sign of anything good per se, and surely the expected quality of a rejected paper is less than the expected quality of a not-rejected paper, unless the refereeing process is seriously biased or flawed. I also don’t really see why authors would want to publicise that they’ve been rejected by publishing in a journal that specialises in rejected papers. So it’s hard for me to understand how this journal is valuable and why authors would want to use it. The one possibly good argument the website gives is that by reading this journal you can find out what doesn’t work, so you don’t waste time trying it yourself. Maybe, but I think much better ways to improve traditional journals seem to be (a) speed up the refereeing process, and (b) reduce the time to publication.