Unsurprising, but still sucky: Amazon stymies Lendle e-book lending service. You don’t buy eBooks from Amazon, you rent them. I’ll stick with old fashioned dead tree editions, thankyouverymuch (although I’d love a Kindle as a dedicated Instapaper reader).

Jeff Bezos’ commencement speech to Princeton’s Class of 2010: We Are What We Choose. Starts with a great story.

The Kindle DX looks terrific, exactly what I want in an eBook reader: big screen and PDF support. Unfortunately, like every other eBook reader out there, it is priced around $150 more than I want to pay. I would have paid $200 for a Kindle 2, so of course they want $360. I would have paid $300 for a DX, so naturally they want $489. I assume DX stands for “Deluxe”, but I think EX for “Expensive” is more on the mark. Alas.

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma describes the results of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pose variations of the Trolley Problem to a bunch of strangers. For example:

…a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

They varied the scenario and the number of people one would save, and charted the results. (via waxy)

UltiVillage recently posted a trailer for the 2007 Emerald City Classic. It features tons of great clips, and it really wants to be available in a higher resolution, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.

Speaking of UltiVillage, I don't know what they pay for bandwidth now, but it occurs to me that at least for the Clip of the Day and trailers they could get a SmugMug account and store hi-res video clips there (check the quality of that demo video, would only cost them $60/year to host 2.5 minute clips, $150/year to host 5 minute clips). I've also wondered about them moving to some kind of pay-per-view model for UltiTV. I assume the UltiTV clips are the same low resolution, but a pay-per-view model would allow users to choose to only watch the clips they want to see, and to pay more to watch them in higher resolution. Bandwidth costs would be a concern, obviously, along with managing the payments, but Amazon has some tantalizing web services available that are really perfect for this kind of application. I'm pretty far afield from a fitness post now, so you can stop reading if you want, but here are the services that UltiVillage could use:

First, for storing the videos online there's Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers (write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited).

The thing that really makes this shine is the pricing, which is practically tailor-made for pay-per-view:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

So lets say UltiVillage wanted to store a full DVD's worth of video online (a bit less than 5GB for a single-sided, single-layer disc, but we'll round up to 5GB for these back-of-the-envelope calculations). Nice, high-res stuff. It would cost $0.50 to copy the data into S3, and $0.75/month to store it. It would cost $0.90 for a user to download it (assuming they watched the whole thing, at high resolution). So suppose it's up for a year, 100 people watch it, and you charge $2.00 per view. UltiVillage costs are a one-time upload of $0.50, $9.00 to host it for a year, and $90 for it to be downloaded 100 times, for a total of $99.50. They collect $200 for a profit of $100.50. Of course, the numbers would change if they offered several resoutions to choose from; users could choose to pay more/less depending on what resolution they wanted to download.

Now, I'm not a businessman, and I have no idea if $2 would be a good price point for them. There's salaries, cameras, film, and all the other costs that come with running the business. I have no idea how many customers they have, whether those customers would prefer a pay-per-view model, and how much people would pay. Finally, I have no idea how this might affect their DVD sales. But speaking for myself, I'm not an UltiTV subscriber currently because I don't like the low-res QuickTime files, and I'm only interested in a few of the videos they offer. But I'd definitely do pay-per-view for higher resolution versions. How much would I pay? Not sure. I'd probably put $20 into an account and then pick and choose a few high-res games to watch, hopefully at somewhere between $2 and $5 a pop. Totally off the cuff, but that's the ballpark.

The other piece of this would be managing the pay-per-view accounts/payments. For that there's Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS). It's in limited beta now, but it looks promising (and you could always see about getting in on the beta). Pricing (which obviously affects the estimates above):

For Transactions >= $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
2.9% + $0.30 for credit card

For Transactions < $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
5.0% + $0.05 for credit card

For Amazon Payments balance transfers < $0.05:
20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025

It could be done! The question of whether it should be done is one for the bean counters. I'd sure like it, though.

(Oh, it would be nice, while we're at it, if the UltiVillage site had some social networking components built in. Perhaps allow paying customers to rate the videos so others know how to best spend their pay-per-view money, maybe a forum so videos can be discussed, allow users to upload commentary tracks that synchronize with the video, etc. I mean, as long as I'm musing about somebody else's business model...)

(The piracy issue is a whole 'nother can of worms. I don't know how much sharing/stealing of UltiTV videos happens now: one guy on the team gets an account, downloads the videos, passes them around. I'm sure it happens. Heck, DVDs can be ripped and the high-res files shared, for that matter. Not sure how high-res pay-per-view changes this behavior, or again, how that would affect DVD sales. If it makes it worse, hopefully it is offset by new customers like me, who don't subscribe to UltiTV because of the low-res, and don't buy the DVDs because I only want to watch them once, not over and over.)

If you buy used stuff at Amazon, this script alone makes Greasemonkey worth installing. Amazon TotalUsed tacks the shipping price onto the lowest used price so you can see how much savings you'll really be getting (it assumes, of course, that you always boost your Amazon orders of new items to $25 or more to take advantage of free shipping):

Especially handy for me, as I always tend to look at the pre-shipping used price and think "what a bargain!" before being ultimately deflated upon purchase.

Y'know how when you want to paste an Amazon URL to somebody, it's really long, it wraps, and it's ugly? Well, it's possible to greatly shorten such URLs. For example:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E6EK3S/
ref=amb_center-9_160116401_1/104-0734288-7167943?
n=130

...becomes:

http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000E6EK3S

I had a bookmarklet for doing this conversion with a single click, but in the ultimate display of laziness, I wanted to do it automatically instead. Hence my new "Short Amazon Permalinks" Greasemonkey script. What it does is this: when viewing an Amazon product, it converts the big title text to a link which points to the shortened version of the URL. Now all you have to do is right-click, "Copy Link Location", and you have the shortened version ready for pasting.

To use it you'll have to be running Firefox and Greasemonkey. If you are and want to give it a whirl, click the link to the script above and install it, then visit a worthy Amazon page. It should be all linkified.

One of the better phishing attempts to hit my inbox:

Dear [my e-mail address],

Greetings from Amazon Payments.

Your bank has contacted us regarding some attempts of charges from your credit card via the Amazon system. We have reasons to believe that you changed your registration information or that someone else has unauthorized access to your Amazon account Due to recent activity, including possible unauthorized listings placed on your account, we will require a second confirmation of your identity with us in order to allow us to investigate this matter further. Your account is not suspended, but if in 48 hours after you receive this message your account is not confirmed we reserve the right to suspend your Amazon registration. If you received this notice and you are not the authorized account holder, please be aware that it is in violation of Amazon policy to represent oneself as another Amazon user. Such action may also be in violation of local, national, and/or international law. Amazon is committed to assist law enforcement with any inquires related to attempts to misappropriate personal information with the intent to commit fraud or theft. Information will be provided at the request of law enforcement agencies to ensure that perpetrators are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

To confirm your identity with us click here:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/...[snip]

After responding to the message, we ask that you allow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated. Emailing us before that time will result in delays. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for your cooperation as we review this matter.

Thank you for your interest in selling at Amazon.com.

Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com

This message and any files or documents attached may contain classified information. It is intended only for the individual or entity named and others authorized to receive it. If you are not the intended recipient or authorized to receive it, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately then delete it from your system. Please also note that transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free.

Of course, where the URL goes and where it appears to go are different, but even the real URL looks vaguely Amazonian.

The bookmarklet I was using for shortening Amazon URLs recently broke, so I found this nice one at Distilled Illusions and modified it to handle what is apparently a new URL format at Amazon. Here is my version of the bookmarklet. To use, bookmark that link (putting it in your toolbar makes it very convenient), navigate to an Amazon product page, then click the bookmarklet (bookmark). A popup will appear with the shortened Amazon link for your copying/pasting pleasure. And here's the code, formatted a bit for readability:

javascript:
var index=location.href.indexOf('/-/');
if(index==-1){
  index=location.href.indexOf('gp/product');
  if(index==-1){
    var asin=location.href.substring(index+5,index+15);
  }else{
    var asin=location.href.substring(index+11,index+21);
  }
}else{
  var asin=location.href.substring(index+3,index+13);
}
var u='http://'+location.hostname+'/o/ASIN/'+asin;
w=window.open('','','height=3,width=400');
w.document.write('%3Ca href=%22'+u+'%22%3E'+u+'%3C/a%3E');
w.document.close();

I also modified the output slightly so that the shortened URL is a link. In Firefox you can thus right-click, "Copy Link Location" to get the URL onto the clipboard.