Rewriting the Textbook Market? Smashing!

Smashwords CEO Mark Coker is on a crusade to turn the publishing world on its ear, spank it senseless, and then remake it into a force that will change the world...presumably for the better. What I didn't realize until interviewing him was that Coker isn't just trying to make affordable electronic texts for students. He's trying to make them free. For anyone who has ever spent hundreds of dollars they didn't have on 40 pounds of Chemistry and Calculus books -- each term -- the following excerpt from "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" may come as welcome news.

CPU: Textbooks seem like an ideal way to push ebooks into the mainstream. Do you see education a major catalyst for this market?

Coker: Well, I’m involved with a company called Flat World Knowledge. I’m an advisor and an investor in the company, and they’re doing open-source textbooks. They’re making high-quality textbooks available to students for free. The traditional textbook model is completely broken, and Flat World is probably one of the companies that’s going to come up with a better model and turn everything upside down. That’s starting to happen. Textbook publishing is another business where cost structures are out of control, and the business is making decisions to perpetuate practices that run counter to the interests of their customers. You’ve got publishers trying to combat the aftermarket for used textbooks by coming out with new editions of algebra or history texts every year. Come on—how often does algebra change? As a result, they’re diluting their books with all kinds of digital extras and CDs students don’t even want, and it just raises the prices. It’s created a crisis. The government is getting involved. And it’s creating an opportunity for companies to come along and better help students. Digital learning materials are the future, and there are multiple drivers for that. Cost is only one.

CPU: You mention history. In some places, history can be rewritten pretty easily. Now, you’re talking about free, open-source texts, and that makes me a little nervous. If I can change my Smashwords text half a dozen times per day, can’t I do the same with textbooks? What’s to keep us from the alleged chaos of Wikipedia, where it’s great because it’s free and still over 90% accurate?

Coker: Flat World does what is called commercial open source. They’re investing the money to produce professional, peer-reviewed textbooks from experts in their field, so the source content is solid from the beginning. Then they give the instructor the ability to modify the text to suit their needs. If the instructor wants to add five chapters or a bunch of case studies, they can do that. It’s a different use of open source than something like Wikipedia. I think there will always be value in publishers doing what publishers do best. There’s value in curation. You have a professional expert looking over the material and fact-checking it, just like your editor. That’s valuable. Curation needs to happen or else you get instances where the material is only 90% correct.

That Very First Geocaching Discovery

Perhaps my family is a bit late to the geocaching scene. Even though I first interviewed Jeremy Irish, co-founder of Groundspeak (which operates Geocaching.com), in 2005, it took six years for us to catch the wave -- probably so our kids could grow old enough to appreciate the fun of "treasure" hunting in real life. As it turns out, there's been a cache located just outside my home since last December, and I never even knew it! Literally, I can see the cache's hiding spot from my office window. Life is funny.

The three founders of Groundspeak, with Jeremy Irish at center.

Geocaching can be addictive, so perhaps you're curious about the first cache discovered by the man behind Geocaching.com. If so, enjoy this snippet from Jeremy Irish:

CPU: What was in that first cache that you found?

Irish: I found a yellow 3 x 5 card box. Inside was a Sunny Delight drink, which is one of the reasons why we say no food in caches. It wasn’t very appetizing. And it had a disposable camera in it, which I thought was a pretty novel idea. A lot of people still do that today. They go develop it at the end to see who went to the cache. And that was pretty much it, plus a log book and a pencil. It was a really straightforward kind of basic cache.

I had recently moved from Washington State to Virginia, and I didn’t really know the area that well. But I got excited, bought the GPS receiver, and found through general research the location of a place I could park and do the hike. It was probably one of the worst hikes I’ve ever done. It was a hot day, unusually warm for the Pacific Northwest. The bugs were out in droves, and I ran out of water about halfway through. We were pretty unprepared for such a long hike. We had to go down to a lake and filter some water. It was just miserable, but when we got to the location and found the container, we were so excited by it, just the possibility of finding this thing, that it made the whole hike worth it. I thought, you know, if I can have a crappy hike and have a really enthusiastic experience finding a 3 x 5 card box in the woods, then this must be something that may be popular to other people.

Write a Review, Score a Free Ebook...Deal?

All right. With "Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1" now live on Smashwords and Amazon, I'm anxious to get some reader reviews posted on either site (or both!) So for those of you who email me at architectsoftomorrow * at* gmail.com at point out the review you left, I will hook you up with a complimentary download of my prior ebook, "Strange Horizons Retrospective." I'm not fishing for false praise. I want your honest thoughts -- good, bad, or indifferent. And as a token of my appreciation for your time, I'll knock your "Strange Horizons" price down to free-ninety-free. Do we have a deal? Email me!

Let the Tweets Begin (...Please!)

markcoker Mark Coker 

Architects of Tomorrow by @williamvw http://bit.ly/ghOiCr Interviews Ray Kurzweil, Esther Dyson, Max Levchin, Bob Young, Jimmy Wales, me(!)

Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 Now Published on Smashwords!

At last! Only 10 years in the making, Volume 1 is now live on Smashwords. Check out the free preview download, or simply grab the entire book in your choice of format.

I'll be back shortly with the link for Volume 1 on Amazon. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

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Edit: Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Architects-Tomorrow-1-ebook/dp/B004SBP98U

The Creator of the Hyperlink Says the Web's Been Done All Wrong

Imagine if, while in college, you realized how to create solar powered cars that would solve a major part of the world's oil dependency. You took the idea to Detroit, the manufacturers thanked you for your research paper, and all they did with it was use your solar energy implementation to power car stereos. That's how Ted Nelson feels about the Web and hyperlinks. His original proposal was for hyperlinks to be two-way associations, not the one-way affair we have today, and he's been fighting to get the world back on track with his Xanadu project ever since. But Nelson's opinions go way beyond hyperlinks, starting with our common use of the word "technology."

WVW: We have these ad campaigns like “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” telling us that no, really, some things do work. But do they? Has technology improved?

Nelson: My first quarrel is with the use of the word “technology.” The word “technology” is the most misunderstood concept there is. Most of what is called technology is packaging and convention. You talk about “Macintosh technology.” There is no Macintosh technology. It’s all packaging and conventions. There is no Windows technology or World Wide Web technology. The technology is TCP/IP and computer hardware displaying graphics. That all gets packaged into Facebook and email and similar things. There’s a political packaging issue whittled from the technology. Ninety percent of the use of the word “technology” refers to these packages, and because we don’t make this distinction, people are totally confused about what’s happening in the world.

WVW: So we’re paying attention to the names, not what’s underneath them.

Nelson: We’re like babies and puppy dogs. A new box is open, here comes the same thing in a different color with its head upside-down or something, and—“Oh, this is just fantastic!”—but it’s just some minor variation on what we’ve seen before. So the problem is that the public imagination is stifled. 

A Future So Bright It's Electric

Greg Nielson is the lead solar technology researcher at Sandia National Labs. His group recently announced successfully using micro-scale manufacturing to create "glitter" -- solar cells that can measure as little as one-quarter of a millimeter in diameter. The potential of glitter and other breakthroughs like it could revolutionize the solar energy market. Here's a taste of why:

WVW: I recently tested a $50 solar battery charger. It took all day in bright sunlight to charge one pair of AA batteries. That seems absurd. Given that just the charger costs $50, I found myself asking, “What are we doing here? No one is going to pay for this.” Can your technology help improve our daily electronics experience?

Nielson: A couple of things. You can buy a backpack with PV built into it to charge a cell phone or whatever. The cost of those compared to the power output is pretty high. Just for reference, I’ve examined some of those in the past, and you’re looking at about $40 per watt at peak production, under the brightest sunlight. On the other hand, with the solar systems that people put on their houses, the cost is much lower.

For portable electronics, we’re excited about that. The flexible PV [photovoltaics] that people are using on bags are about 4% to 5% efficient, so really poor. Building stuff on a flexible substrate is really hard to do in a way that’s robust, but we think we have a way to do flexible PV at much higher efficiencies. Right now, we could do flexible PV with our cells at even 15% efficiency, and silicon has been demonstrated to be over 25% efficient. If we could get into that range, we could increase the power output of those electronics—charging bags and things—by a factor of five. That’s pretty significant.

Now, on the rooftop solar power side, we also think we can have a big impact. One particular reason is the fact that we’re using much less silicon to produce the same amount of power. Silicon is, for the cells and the modules, definitely the biggest cost driver. So if we can reduce that significantly, then the biggest cost component goes down. In our case, it essentially goes away because we’re reducing the silicon by a factor of like 100. 

Intel's Burns Saw 7 Years Into the Future

One of the factors that has made Intel the undisputed leader of computing processors is its ability to think long-term, see the future it wants, and then make that future happen. Sometimes, things don't go according to plan. (The names "RDRAM" and "Opteron" come to mind.) But overall, the chip titan has done extraordinarily well at charting its own destiny. I was reminded of this by a particularly prescient passage from my 2004 interview with Louis Burns, then Vice President of Intel's Desktop Platform Group, in which he already knew which way the living room computing winds would blow. Keep in mind that there's an Intel processor at the heart of the first-ever Sony smart TV launched late in 2010.

CPU: We’ve argued in CPU’s pages whether the future of PVRs and convergence in general would hinge on multiple PCs in the home or one uber-PC connected to a number of clients, such as set-tops and media players. What do you think?

Burns: You’ll actually have both. On a worldwide basis, I can see a house where there’s an EPC [entertainment PC] in the living room and that’s the only PC. In a dorm room, that would be a good play, or a small apartment in Korea. In a big house, there could be a really nice PC in the office or den, and over back in the family room, there’s a smart TV which sources information from the den box, and then some of the bedrooms have their own PCs. There’s this very cool product out that we call a MyRoom PC. It’s a Gateway 610 [Gateway 610 Media Center PC; MSRP starts at $1,499.99] that we designed from the ground up inside of Intel, including the industrial design aspects of it. It looks like a 17-inch flat screen TV that’s got a great quality sound system built into it. It’s a full media center PC with wireless keyboard and mouse. This is a really cool device because it was designed with a convergence of CE stuff and PC stuff. You can visualize that living in a bedroom. So I can see the one PC and a bunch of devices or I can see lots of PCs and fewer devices, and there’ll be combinations in between.

One of the things that we’re working on really hard is that when you take these devices out of the box at home and plug them into the wall, they should self-identify themselves and say, “Hey, I’m an entertainment PC and I speak this or that standard.” Then it looks for other devices, like that smart Sony TV you bought, which is saying the same kinds of things. They start to identify themselves to each other and the network self-configures. One way of looking at this is if people have to roll a truck to do the installs or if people have to have an IT expert, whether that’s a neighbor or relative, then we’ve failed. It has to be that simple. The 610 from Gateway is a great example of out of the box, up and running, in less than five minutes. And no wires, because wires are just a pain in the ass.

Inventor Woody Norris on 100 New Periodic Tables

With the inclusion of over 4,000 words of fresh interview material this morning from ingenious inventor Woody Norris, Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 is now (I hope!) done and just waiting for final editorial approval before going live.

I'd actually given up hope on reaching Norris in time for the Volume 1 release, but he surprised me by calling my office Friday morning, apologizing for having been away working to promote the latest incarnation of his HyperSonic Sound (HSS) technology, now being developed through his new company, Parametric Sound. If you're not familiar with HSS, check it out here. I can't wait to experience this in person!

Norris and I spent a large part of our interview discussing the inventing process. He's a firm believer in the power of invention to solve humanity's problems, and he feels we've hardly begun to realize the full potential of human invention. The best and by far largest quantity of inventions still lie in our future. This is a piece of what you can look forward to reading from him:

WVW: Toward the end of our last conversation, you said that you’d had a couple of ideas for inventions just while we were talking, which just blew my mind—

Norris: And I always write those down. I’m serious. Nothing of consequence has been invented yet. This whole field of nanotechnology— When I grew up, I came to the point in school where I realized that there was the periodic table of elements, and everything in the entire world that we have done up to pretty much now has been based on combinations of the elements—refining them, making a few artificial elements. With nanotechnology, it’s like you’ve got 100 new periodic tables. Really! Every element, carbon being the most common in the world we live in, changes into about eight different elements just by making it nanoparticle-sized. It changes colors, electrical characteristics, becomes an insulator, practically a perfect conductor, stronger than steel. And this is just one element! So it’s like we have a whole bunch of new periodic tables with which to make new inventions. But if you don’t learn about that and study it, you’re a caveman. You’re looking at earth, wind, and fire being all there is. Knowledge is the key to it all. Einstein made a great comment one time. He said, “The most abundant thing in the universe is hydrogen. The only thing more abundant is stupidity.” 

Music Pioneer BT on the Intersection Between Computing and Ideas

My 2006 interview with Brian "BT" Transeau stemmed from a PR push by AMD, which wanted to position itself as the platform of choice for digital audio workstations. In this vein, I was curious about BT's views on how processing and computing might figure into his artistry now.

WVW: How do you foresee leveraging ongoing improvements in computing in your work?

Transeau: The funny thing is—and it’s one of these Murphy’s Law or...I  don’t remember whose law it is, but...as things get faster, your ideas get bigger. Some of the things I’m interested in...like, see what they’re doing with the particle accelerator at CERN. It’s pretty exciting. Cloud computing is very exciting, and the idea of crowdsourcing CPU power using other people’s computers and spreading out very computationally intensive processes across webs.


I think that things are going to continue to grow and evolve technologically and stylistically. We’re going to see incredible new ideas cropping up and this incredible proliferation of not just new ideas but software to address those ideas. The rate of change is changing. That in itself... It’s a very exciting moment to be alive. I don’t know how sustainable what we’ve created is, but it’s a very exciting moment to be a part of...anything, honestly.

Time Covers Kurzweil

Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1 headliner Ray Kurzweil is under the spotlight of a new Time Health & Science story introducing readers to the idea of the Singularity and Kurzweil's thoughts on the radical extension of human longevity. It's a well-written, thoughtful piece and well worth your 10 minutes to read.

Now Who's the Sucker?

In the introduction to my interview with Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes.com, there's a passing reference to P.T. Barnum's famous saying, "There's a sucker born every minute." As it turns out, though, P.T. Barnum never said this. The line belongs to one George Hull, who crossed swords with P.T. Barnum in court over a rather exceptional hoax. A link to this tale, as told by R.J. Brown on HistoryBuff.com, is given in the interview's introduction, but feel free to check out the fascinating back story now.

PayPal Co-Founder Ready to Code Through the Revolution

I interviewed PayPal co-founder Max Levchin just as he was getting social media company Slide off the ground. Of the 75 people profiled in Architects of Tomorrow, Levchin has one of the most compelling stories in his rise to success. At first, I supposed that by the time he'd blown through PayPal, passed Yelp, and reached Slide, the entrepreneur routine would have become old hat. However, the truth turned out to be (as always) more complex.

WVW: You’re an engineer and a coder by background, but you keep turning yourself into a corporate executive. Do you have any identity crises during these conversions?

Levchin: A little bit.

WVW: But you keep remedying it by starting something new?

Levchin: Pretty much. I wrote a lot of the original code in the Slide server and a lot of the original code in PayPal. All the security code, all the crypto stuff was coded by me. And I stayed on some of the tasks over time in PayPal to make sure that my skills stayed sharp. When we started Slide, I was very happy to be back in the programming saddle. For the first half of the year, I was writing lots and lots of code and tried to move the programming needle personally. At this point, the company has 30 people in it, so I don’t get that much time for programming, but I spent most of yesterday writing something that we’re going to use in Slide.

I have an occasional fear that— Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t remember exactly how old I am. I try to think, “What’s my skill set? What can I do if everything goes to absolute crap? What can I offer to society that will provide me with food and clothing?” The thing that I generally fall back on is, “Well, I can still code really well.” Yeah, I came up with some decent ideas, and I can manage people, raise money, and I understand financial models pretty well now. But all that stuff seems very intangible. The thing that’s very tangible is I know how to code pretty good.

Red Hat's Founder on the Secret of Successful Programming

Bob Young founded Red Hat Software, built it up into a credible threat to Microsoft during the dot-com boom, and in 2002 left the company to go shake things up in another sector: book publishing. He started Lulu Press, which is now one of the world's top self-publishing services.

My discussions with Bob Young will be in the upcoming Architects of Tomorrow, Volume 1. He's a fascinating, clever entrepreneur with loads of experience and wisdom to share. To give you a taste, at one point I asked him what his first experience was with a computer, and what I got was a lesson in work habits.

Young: While I define myself as a salesman, my interest in computers goes back to my second year at the University of Toronto in 1973. I was taking a computer programming course, and the practical component of our course involved sitting at the keyboard of a big desk-like machine that punched what we typed onto 8" by 3" punch cards. Of course, the University’s computer department was seriously underfunded (some things never change), so there was a real shortage of these punch card machines, which resulted in long line-ups all day.

The most frustrating part of this course was that no matter how hard I worked, there was this group of kids who scored grades that were dramatically higher than the rest of us. Having spent most of a semester with them, I was convinced that they were not genetically superior, so I was curious. One day, standing in line at the punch card machines behind one of the smart kids in my class, I started whining about what a waste of time it was. Instead of sympathy, he sarcastically mumbled, “Well, then why don't you show up after midnight like the rest of us?”

Later that day, I did, and I learned one of the important lessons about computing I’ve never forgotten: real programmers don't sleep…which, I suppose, is why I never became a real programmer.

Fatal1ty Takes Revenge

One thing that has consistently struck me when interviewing the luminaries in Architects of Tomorrow is how humble and ordinary most of them feel during the interview. Many of them might tell you they were just lucky. Not so with Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, arguably the most accomplished professional gamer in the world. His unabashed and unapologetic approach definitely set him apart in this collection.

WVW: How did you feel when showing up at your first world tournament?

Wendel: It was definitely exciting. I mean, going to a LAN event where there are 1,000 gamers or more, and all the top gamers from all around the world there, it makes it really intense! When arriving at the tournament, I knew I had what it took to win it and dominate anyone I played against. I played against tons of gamers in the BYOC [Bring Your Own Computer] area, and I was playing extremely well. I didn't lose one game the whole time in the BYOC. During the tournament, I was playing flawlessly the whole time, just winning every game with ease every time. Then I finally had a tough match against one gamer named DethStalker. I literally felt like I was playing in my very first tournament again, where my nerves were going crazy and I couldn't shoot for anything. So I had to resort to 100% strategy and no aim. Fortunately, it worked out for me, and I came away winning 11 to 9.

After that match, I believe I finally lost one match, and I was in disbelief. I swore I was unbeatable. So after that match, I decided it’s all balls out now, and just play like you do at home. From there on out, I was winning every match again with ease and then I had to have a rematch with the guy who beat me earlier in the tournament. It was a very thrilling match. It actually went into overtime, and about two minutes in, I finally got the last kill while shooting him in the back with the lightning gun to win it. I remember I threw off my headphones, and I'm like, “Thank God!”