Pandora radio adds about 100,000 new users every day on mobile devices like smart phones. Pandora knows your age, gender, ZIP code, and type of music. They target their ads to that. And more.
See, the Pandora smart phone installer does more. It can maraud through your phone, linking the GPS information and your Facebook postings into a seamless picture of who and what you like, buy, eat, and take orally at bedtime.
I shop at the Cost Slasher grocery store downstreet every week or so. Every Sunday, I voluntarily plug in my zip code on the Cost Slasher website to get this week’s grocery flier. That’s a good thing.
Thanks to Pandora and other similar data miners tapping into iPhone’s newly discovered iTracker, though, Cost Slasher could already know that.
My iPhone already knows more about me than I do. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to give every other grocery store within 50 miles of my instant location that advantage whenever I listen to the “radio.”
Like millions of Americans (except Rufus), I used tax preparation software again this year. Rufus is about the only individual filer I know who uses a computer and who does his taxes in a spreadsheet.
Like millions of Americans (except Rufus), I wanted to “click here” and have a finished return print out with the stamp(s) already attached.
Sigh.
I don’t much like Intuit’s Tubbo Tax. I’ve had years of experience trying to get that program to manage my not-very-complicated mix of a couple of small businesses and some 1099s from Charles Schwab, a brokerage house of which neither Intuit nor H&R Block has heard. I decided to try the other guys this year.
Yup, I bought into H&R Block At Home. Deluxe.
Mr. Block will be history here in No Puffin in 2011.
My first run through, it gave me twice the mortgage interest deduction I had entered. I’m sure I made a mistake by putting it in twice, but I have no idea where. I burned down that return and started over using the tax-software-for-dummies interview exclusively.
“That is the problem with these freakin’ programs,” Rufus said. “They presume you have no idea what you are doing (or that you know the software intimately.)”
When I assumed I knew what I was doing, Mr. Block said I would owe a few grand more in taxes than I had already paid in. That was also when I saw Mr. Block had doubled the declarable mortgage interest I claimed.
Time passes.
The time came to checkprint the Vermont return (“full return for filing” the Blockheads call it). Mr. Block did not print the three Vermont homestead claim forms. Vermont has those forms online as PDFs, fortunately, because nobody mails tax booklets any more. Unfortunately, all I can do is print them and fill them out by hand.
Transferring all the appropriate figures from one form to the next (which is why we all buy tax software) and doing the calculations (which is why we all buy tax software) is all on me.
By hand.
!@#$%^ Blockheads.
I don’t care how much trouble Tubbo gave me, at least it printed all the freaking forms I need.
The very nice overseas tech support girl said, “First I want you to reinstall Windows…”
Actually, she sent me a link to download a new copy of the program. Yes, they wanted me to uninstall my current copy of H&R Block At Home and install the new copy. As expected, the new copy of the program comes with exactly the same state feature as the purchased CD has, meaning that after I install it, I must then download the Vermont files from exactly the same place I got them last time.
!@#$%^ Blockheads.
So I uninstalled the old version and installed the new one. The uninstall apparently did not remove the registry entries because it knew just where I had left all the data files.
Time passes.
Mr. Block includes an Error Check. It found a bunch, many related to Copy 9 of the Vehicle Worksheet for which the program couldn’t figure out in which Schedule C it belonged. Their Forms Central display is so crammed together that I simply can’t tell what data it has, let alone where it belongs.
Time to checkprint the Vermont return. Again. Everything is still smushed together.
Mr. Block has a nice online forum with bonafide tax experts just moments away to answer your pressing tax questions in real time. I posted as “Disappointed User” yesterday evening.
“Q: This program won’t print anything but squeezed together ‘Not For Filing’ pages.”
Mr. Block answered my question this morning at 4:39 ayem through Kathleen Drenzek, Master Tax Advisor and Enrolled Agent who wrote: “Disappointed, did you try rebooting your computer to see it that works. Or call tech support at 1-800-HRBLOCK.”
Another happy user worried about this:
“Q: software is telling me I sent my tax estimate late and owe a fee- but in RI we got an extension last year. What to do?”
Jayant Kanitkar, Master Tax Advisor and Enrolled Agent wrote: “If you believe otherwise, pay only the amount due.” What, is he nuts?
I think I did resolve the smushy question. When it prints its “mini worksheets,” it sends out the smushed up text you see in the example. When it print the return forms alone, they appear to come out fine.
OK, sort of fine. It is still printing three blank copies of Form 4562-page 1, but I can simply throw those away. And it keeps putting xxxxxxxxxxxxx in for the bank account number. Means no e-filing for me, though.
Looks like I cannot use even the one form TaxCut DID print. Here’s the word from the Vermont Tax Department:
FORMS THAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED
If your filing is not acceptable for our processing equipment, the Department may send your filing back to you… The Department may also transfer your filing information onto acceptable forms but you can be assessed a $25 processing fee that partially covers the costs of transferring the information. Examples of unacceptable filings are: forms marked “draft”, forms not pre-approved by the Department, photocopies of forms, faxed forms, writing in other than blue or black ink, and mixing computer generated forms with forms printed by the Department.
This software used to be called TaxCut but H&R Block wanted to leverage their own name to boost sales.
Why?
If this were my program, I’d never put my name on it. I might call it Rufus’ TaxCut. Anything but Dick’s Own Software.
Despite all that, I made the trip to the post office today. All three returns are in the mail at a cost of only three Forever stamps and two additional ounces at the new-today rate.
I wonder if the IRS shares DNA samples collected today with other agencies.
Don got me thinking about fixing or tossing stuff (we call it “repair or replace” now, because that’s how we roll). I grabbed a long-favorite 10-year old shirt this morning and noticed the cuffs are fraying. I suppose racer tape will keep that from being too too noticeable but I need to find my roll with the pale red, blue, green and white stripes to keep peeps from remarking on the tape.
Anyway, I never bought a netbook but I do have a Palm Tungsten T and a pellet stove.
Both broke.
Even if I hadn’t lived in Vermont (motto: Bet ya can’t name two of our towns) for more years than anywhere else in my life, so far, I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. My loft is living proof. When we moved here, I brought 30,000 pounds in two moving vans and still had to tow the race car behind my truck. When my parents and grandfather moved out of the family home, I got the rest of the family history.
New Vermont motto: If Harper can’t find it in the attic, you don’t need it.
When I “upgraded” to Windows 7, it immediately orphaned my Palm PDA. The Palm still works perfectly well but the Palm HotSync app won’t load and my calendar and address book sync doesn’t.
Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, really really used to believe in fixing things.
I have tried to “fix” the Palm. I still have some hope but it is on the shelf for now. Meanwhile, it got cold in here.
The pellet stove has been difficult all this heating season. It all started when Anne noticed the fire was “doming” in the firepot. The dome threatened to pus fire back into the pellet poop chute. Not a good thing. Pellet stoves put out very little ash and what ash this one did make seemed to form a dome instead of flying out of the firepot like good ash should. I was down to South Puffin at the time and couldn’t tell if our new pellet supplier caused the problem or that the forced combustion air system wasn’t forcing enough (or any) air. The combustion fan ran but Anne couldn’t detect any air going through the firebox. Trouble was, we had no way of knowing if that meant there wasn’t any air going through the firebox or just that Anne couldn’t detect any air moving.
I have tinkered with it, cleaned it, and even invented new parts for it for most of the past couple of months. The fire kept doming. On Friday, the automatic pellet feeder stopped feeding pellets. And I’ve washed my hands entirely too many times, although not of the stove.
Wood ash gets into everything. I should have remembered that.
I thought I was doing a good job cleaning the stove but I took it apart this weekend. Something was blocking the air flow and by golly I was going to find it. I found hideyholes I didn’t even know existed. And to find them, I disassembled things I wasn’t sure actually came apart. I even had to RTM.
That’s why I had to keep washing my hands. Wood ash and soot gets into everything.
The right “brick” — it’s actually cast iron — in the firebox hides a passage to the flue. The brick should come out by pulling it up and then towards the front of the stove. The peeps who designed this thing and wrote the manual obviously never worked on a stove after it had been in operation.
Got the brick out. Lots of dust and soot and ash buildup clogging everything. Lots.
I took a bucket load of the dust and soot and ash out of the stove, learned a bit more about how it works, and discovered that it goes back together a whole lot better when clean than it came apart when clogged.
On to the feed auger which was what started this entire exercise.
I cleaned out the feeder tube and the auger still didn’t turn. When I say “cleaned out the feeder tube” I ain’t whistling Dixie. Our vacuum cleaner apparently has an Express Mode on the hose operation which sucked a magnet off the refrigerator at 50 paces. It made short work of the pellets in the tube. Pretty simple operation that. Suck, let some fall past the screw, suck more. A quick look with a mirror showed shiny metal everywhere so I pushed the start button. Ignition and combustion air but no pellet feed. I could hear and feel the feed motor running.
Turns out I looked too quickly.
A better look with a mirror showed some pellets still hiding up in the northeast corner, sort of jammed between the screw and the square corner (square corner???) of the tube. Wiggling the screw didn’t move them and the gear motor made it impossible to turn the screw. I couldn’t even bend a tool up to them, including the ubiquitous coat hanger.
Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, are ingenious about finding solutions. I called Anne.
Anne fixed it.
I had given her bad instructions for disassembling the auger assembly back when we were trying to clear jams over the phone but she made ’em work anyway. I asked her to show me what she had done to clear the feed tube jams. She wasn’t able to pull the motor-and-brackets-and-auger out of the tube but she unbolted it and could turn it through almost a full rotation and that cleared it.
We have fire thanks to our own ingenuity.
But I AM ashamed to admit I replaced the Palm with an iPod Touch.
“I have to switch back to my iPod, since my audio book is on that device,” Liza Arden told me. “I can listen to it in iTunes and on my iPod, but not on my Android phone because Audible dot com does not provide multiple versions when you purchase a la carte.”
Elizabeth “Liza” Arden is an engineering manager with a long commute, a gymnast, and no relation to the cosmetic maven.
She still likes print on paper but is more likely to read with her ears or on a device.
Liza may be one reason Dorchester Publishing has stopped printing its bread-and-butter “mass market” paperback books as it transitions to e-books and “trade” sized paperbacks.
The typical mass market paperback uses cheaper paper, has few illustrations, and smaller print, all to fit the story into the smaller (usually about 4″ x 7″) book. The larger trade paperback are usually printed on better paper and have font and line spacing similar to a hardcover book.
E-book revenue has gone from 0.5 per cent of publisher revenue about two years ago to nearly 10 per cent now. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll of 2,775 American readers, 8% of the reading population uses e-books already and those reading electronically are reading more books more often. Popular e-readers are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and applications are available for computers, iPads, smartphones, and PDAs.
I have that gut feel as well although the numbers are probably closer than we think. Typical trade margin ranges between 37% discount and 50%. Most popular books cost the publisher half the cover but reference titles typically run 37%. Wholesalers work on low single digit spreads. Co-op is another 3-5 points at most publishers.
Printing costs (meaning for a physical book) also include the cost of returns and warehousing. There is a non-negligible “warehousing” cost for the server farm and Internet infrastructure for an e-book. The biggest problem with trade publishing and the reason it is a single digit net margin business is returns which can run as high as 40%. These are good numbers:
by %
in $
Book List Price
100%
$6.99
to retailer
50%
3.50
printing
8%
0.56
inventory and obsolescence
10%
0.70
royalties
7%
0.49
sales and marketing
10%
0.70
overhead and warehousing
10%
0.70
co-op
2%
0.14
editorial
4%
0.28
If you noticed, the publisher’s cost adds up to more than the 50% “take.” The actuality is that some of the fixed costs (like printing) really is fixed based on run size and other constant costs (like , overhead, and editorial) probably are indeed fixed for any issue, meaning it costs, say, $1,000 to edit a book. That’s the reason a mass market paperback now costs $7.95-9.95 instead of $1.50-3.95. Ditto the $6.99 e-book cost.
Let’s consider that from the e-book side. These are made up numbers but pretty accurate:
by %
in $
Book List Price
100%
$6.99
to online retailer
50%
3.50
royalties
20%
1.40
sales and marketing
15%
1.05
overhead and warehousing
10%
0.70
editorial
4%
0.28
There’s the potential for actual profit in there.
Founded in 1971, Dorchester is the oldest independent mass-market publisher in the U.S. Their romance line has included Christine Feehan, Jayne Ann Krentz, Katie MacAlister, Lynsay Sands, and more. The private company specializes in mass-market paperback fiction in romance, horror, Westerns and thriller genres. They also distribute pulp mysteries of the Hard Case Crime line and the Family Doctor series.
Dorchester sees the market soaring as more devices, apps, and programs become available. They predict that e-reader and e-book sales will continue to increase. The company will also offer print-on-demand (paper) copies for selected titles through Ingram Publisher Service. Some e-books that sell well will also be released as P-O-D trade paperbacks.
Dorchester’s e-books are available at most major vendors and compatible with most platforms at an average price of $6.99. Trade paperbacks will be priced in the $12 to $15 range.
Romance novels. Science fiction. Textbooks. Mainstream fiction. Are newspapers next?
Four years ago, IFRA — the newspaper trade group in Germany — and The New York Times started looking at De Tijd “e-paper” devices.
What a lousy idea that is!
Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that I’m the typical book-or-newspaper reader today. I have a few minutes here, a few there to read. I might take a little downtime at my desk. I’ll poop at least once for a few uninterrupted minutes in the “reading room.” I’ll stand in line at the grocery store, do 40 flights on the stair climber, and commute to work.
I absolutely do not want yet another device just to read my newspaper on.
“My desk has a computer that I usually stare at; I want what I’m reading right there,” Liza said. She won’t take her laptop to the reading room, so “I want today’s tome on my (waterproof) smartphone for that or for standing in line. Sitting by the pool is a great place for a full size e-book. Drive time isn’t, but that is perfect for an audio book. So is going to the gym.”
Americans once had a love affair with multi-featured gadgets. I have a Shopsmith, for example, that my grandfather built furniture with in the fifties and my father cut two fingers off with in the sixties. I still have all my appendages. The Shopsmith is a lathe-based woodworking tool with a single motor that drives its lathe, tablesaw, drill press, horizontal boring mill, and disc sander. Like MS-DOS, you have to stop using one tool to mount, setup, and use the next.
Most of us today have individual tools, hence our pockets and purses crammed with smart phones, iPods, netbooks, and Kindles.
A monthly Audible contract would give Liza access to multiple versions of a file but even that offers Mac, Windows, or Linux computer and iPod files, but not for computers, iPod and any additional MP3 devices. Audible also offers a monthly subscription to The New York Times Audio Digest.
The book publishing and the newspaper industries can make both the Shopsmith owner and Liza happy.
Bundling.
Dear publisher:
I can nuke my TV dinner or cook it in the oven. Surely you can do the same.
When I buy my next book, I want a printed book on actual paper. I want an e-book in the three major formats. An audiobook on CD, AAC, and mp3. And a cross-platform app for my computer and my PDA or smartphone. All in that one package.
Even if I hadn’t lived in Vermont (motto: Bet ya can’t name two of our towns) for more years than anywhere else in my life, so far, I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. My loft is living proof. When we moved here, I brought 30,000 pounds in two moving vans and still had to tow the race car behind my truck. When my parents and grandfather moved out of the family home, I got the rest of the family history.