Jay-Z’s Decoded

Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z’s book Decoded hit stores today. Brick and mortars think it’s a music book–it’s in the music book section. Or rather the service that categorizes print for retailers thinks it. They’re wrong.

This is a business book.

Decoded is fillerless. No intros. Just story from word one. There’s an urgency and clarity to communication in the world from which Jay-Z came.

The first 18 pages are among the most entrancing, gritty, authentic, poetic and sophisticated story channeling I’ve read. I’m on record saying Jay-Z is not a rapper–but  a storyteller.

Who it’s for:

• The business minded who aren’t tricked about value because of packaging.
• White people like Seth Godin, with marketing “expertise” who are culturally walled off from unique value propositions in strong US microcultures.
• Black people who don’t speak “urban”.
• People mastering their 10% vs. succumbing to the 90%.
• Brand builders.
• Poets.
• Hustlers. Which really, is anybody who ever had to eat and think about it.  It’s a primal timeless human testimony.

And the photography and presentation are perfect, likely due to the sufficiently autonomous and thankfully rogue sub-brand of publishers Spiegel and Grau.

Update:
Decoded discussion with Charlie Rose: An hour with Jay-Z from the Brooklyn Museum.

law jobs, organic chemistry, bad books and clouds

An attorney tweeted that he’d found a “bad___ IP job” but lacked the requisite organic chemistry background.  It got me thinking.

For reasons still mysterious, organic chemistry texts aren’t well written and the classes fail. I don’t know who the student focus group is for the texts.  Silly me: there aren’t any.  The books have been bad for a long time, with emphases in all the wrong places.

Take catenation for example. Or resonance.  Finding much on either topic in your $350 worth of book + solutions guide is hopeless. Yet they are at the center of the subject. Any texts improvements are empty repackagings focused on the publisher’s increased receipts:

<<Commence publishing diatribe>>

• Text book content is “unbundled” and disaggregated to populate online problem banks + on-line quizzes + the all-famous hard problems’ solutions guide sold separately;
• thereby requiring students to pay additionally for each enhanced tier of instruction they want—because surely after scaling that tuition + housing + parking + student fees  barrier your learning fundamentals should be based on your income.
• However poorly conceived material may all be, the students are too scared not to pay every fee and access every online enhancement that some other students might have.
• Plus the professor likes grading automation afforded by online access so you end up required to buy the online quiz access.
• That will be a cool $400.
• Don’t forget flash cards.  That will be a cool $430.

It’s a racket. What’s lost in the end is organic chemistry.

What students of this fascinating and important topic need is not more rotating molecules, or online supplements, but better written discussion and a reallocation of discussion. The course itself–which I’ve passed with a decent grade–is a nonthinking over emphasis on empty memorization. Typically, the drop, fail or below-C grade rate for this course is easily 50% no matter where it’s taught.  Those who pass it go to medical school or get Ph.Ds. Those who don’t leave science.  It’s a shame.

Enter David Klein.

This book is the most coherent organic chemistry book I’ve ever encountered.  Written by Johns Hopkins lecturer David Klein, it’s not a textbook and is a cogent departure from typical text content—for example he spends 30 pages–THIRTY PAGES—on resonance.  That’s class. The current “standard” organic chemistry textbook by McMurry spends 2 1/2 pages.  The topic gets a murmur in lecture. No wonder people fail. And Klein’s is a whopping $39.

It’s all over chemistry–disconnects between topics of import and the discussion allocation.  Chemists think, write and talk in clouds, not steps. It’s a hazard.

Pick up an inorganic chemistry lab manual and try to follow the instructions. I took time once to rewrite a whole lab manual for which I had paid ever so dearly. It was horrid. It had been written characteristically cumulously with no clear beginning, end, list of deliverables, procedural steps or purpose.

Before my rewrite it looked like this:

After my rewrite it  looked like this:

Lab time should be spent doing and observing and learning not figuring out what to do. It’s a shame for a topic this old and fundamental and important—and today, basic to any modern scientific education—to be so poorly conveyed. Klein’s book is so good that the other organic chemistry textbook authors should apologize and voluntarily remove theirs from the market—they should be sideshows, not the main deal.

There are no shortcuts to organic chemistry, but Klein’s book is invaluable to scaling a learning curve expeditiously like the attorney would want.  The attorney should take a class, buy (rent or use) one text book and buy Klein’s book.  Forget the rest (if not mandatory). I’ve seen nothing comparable.

e-readers: right baby, wrong mother

I just learned that the new nook e-reader by Barnes & Noble is now officially sold out for the 2009 year. Any additional purchases, for example for Christmas, can be made in receipt of a certificate-styled promise of a slated January, 2010 shipment, the soonest shipment date now available. Barnes & Noble’s communications suggest they greatly underestimated the demand for the e-reader.

There’s another story here. e-readers, for all their heraldry, are quite right fixes to the wrong problem. They have in fact come from the wrong place: Amazon introduced the Kindle, but Amazon arguably knows little about reading. They’re a logistics firm. They’re glorified book fetchers. That’s a legitimate service, but it shouldn’t correlate with any automatic according to Amazon of an expertise on reading and readers, or of a likelihood to adequately serve the heartiest of reading customers.

The Kindle came from a book fetcher when it should have come from the legal publishing and IT industry. It didn’t come from the legal industry because that industry, dominated as it is by an oligopoly in Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis, lacks real competition and innovation. The value creation for the industry that is consequently precluded is arguably staggering.

The Kindle and the nook, likely decades late in light of the legal industry’s practices and available technology, are a real testament to how staid and non-innovative that industry is. More reading, publishing and printing occurs in the industry than in likely any other—no book is thicker or professionally read with greater care, income-dependence and frequency than a law book —and it above any other sector would benefit from provision to apprentices, educators, practitioners, governments and scholars of law of a means to (1) free up information from the associated energy-consuming heft that is the legal hardcover, and (2) retrieve information more efficiently by locating it to one portable place which reduces briefing and even research time.

Imagine an attorney having the entire state and federal code on an e-reader and being able to download updates in real time vs. using pocketparts or being required to log in to a proprietary database that raises accounts payable.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble are thinking about rock star authors like Stephen King, or maybe about John Smith from demographic X who “travels” and “reads a lot” and spends Y dollars per year on books.

But a generic e-reader’s real ROI lies with neither and instead comes from the captive legal customer about whom no one appears to be thinking. That industry would not only readily downsize from the onerous weight of hardcovers at a significant operational level, but would likely pay premium dollar for the privilege. The margins available in the industry obliterate what can currently be found in conventional or online retail book-selling. Theirs is livelihood-dependent book reading in the legal industry—every legal apprentice, every law school, every legal library, every private legal actor, every state government, every governmental regulatory body (indeed, a full third of our GDP is government)—vs. generally elective reading by individuals for Amazon and brick and mortar bookstores. Moreover, it is higher-end sales as cheap paperback law books still cost into the hundreds of dollars; it is recession proof book reading; and it is predictable volume book reading.

It’s the right thing to do environmentally. Hardcovers in code and casebooks are quite enough. But otherwise the famous paper mills that are the Lexis Nexis and Westlaw printers are precisely such because the information they print isn’t differently accessible, “hand-holdable” and portable. So voluminous is the law and secondary research, that they often involve significant printing queues that require strategically timed print commands and physical visits to a singular legal printer by a legal researcher. That researcher must pay per page for their printouts which normally range into the hundreds of pages, not all of which will assuredly be useful, atop the fees paid to both query a legal database, and then digitally view a retrieved page to prioritize it for printing.

It now makes sense for one of these existing e-reader firms to take the technology to the most demanding standard (a legal one) and target the legal industry vs. that industry now charting any such course. However, their disconnect from the value creation that this technology provides to the legal industry may ironically preclude such.

That is the inefficiency of the technology’s origin in retail booksellers. Had it originated in law where not only the greatest value creation potential resided, but where every possible application and feature would be stringently designed and debugged (for example, hardly a mishap like the recent text-to-voice design glitch in the Kindle for the visually impaired would have made it out of the door of a legal manufacturer where blind attorneys practice and the field is naturally attuned to the fullest range of disabilities, special needs and required legal accommodations in workplaces and general society), it easily could have been tweaked or pared down for informal readers. The reverse, however, will be trickier, and I think will take longer.

If it doesn’t come from within the legal industry, it isn’t likely to come at all by disinterested retail oriented firms, or will be met with sufficient oligopolistic resistance to dissuade any such foray by highly competitive firms that “compete” against the hardcover province so long golden to these publishers. The legal industry won’t readily embrace e-readers as a value creating energy conserving efficient evolution of information storage, retrieval and portability in general. Otherwise it would have already done so. It suggests that the legal customer may not well have any such accommodation soon, but given the evolution of how reading is now facilitated in other industries, casually, in libraries and in schools, will now be too familiar with the ilk of convenience it can offer.

e-reader companies are adjunct value creators doing incrementalism for some larger and still dominant business model and appear fixated on each other; they are not breakthrough firms challenging hundreds of years of legal practice modalities or industry behemoths.

Contagiri Alpha Romeo watch

I’ve admired these since their ultra limited production commenced. Having worked for the dominant industrial grade high horsepower engine firm, my appreciation for this Italian watch design comes easily.

The face of the Contagiri watch is modeled after an RPMs guage. It features one hour hand which after the twelfth hour retrogrades after its traverse of a 270° arc, effectively reversing in position like a sudden drop in RPMs; and a red floating counter that circulates. The twelfth hour is in the red zone.

“The watch does not use a crown to wind the watch or to set the time. The watch has a lever similar to a “gear shift” and through the lunette of the watch you can carry out the functions usually done through the crown. In the triangular aperture the four-leaf clover marks the position of the gear with number 1 indicating the position to wind the watch, and number 2 indicating the position to set the time.”

It is exceedingly excellent Florentine craftsmanship as usual—from designer and Alpha Romeo racer, Giuliano Mazzuoli.

Meeow and the little chairs

This is a childrens’ book that wowed me from the shelf. I encountered it entirely accidentally as I was not shopping for childrens’ books. It simply towered over the other books aesthetically and commanded my attention. It was differentiated by its radiant cover. It’s a hardback with a sufficiently tactile dustcover—the word “Meeow” and the cat are in rich black velvet that you can’t resist rubbing, and the colors worn by the cat resemble saturated oil color in their brilliance. The effect is a stunningly brilliant cover and visual feat squarely setting it apart. I stopped cold and read it and was impressed. By my taste, it is delicate, imaginative, geometrically correct and right-sized and joyfully written. By Frenchman Sebastien Braun, I consider it quite well done.