Here's a very interesting blog post from a thriller writer who publishes his own books for the Kindle, Joe Konrath.

There's an interesting blog post on the new Kindle and how it compares to the iPad by the BBC's fab technology correspondent (and my own dear husband) Rory Cellan-Jones. I've been watching him assemble comments on the Kindle. He concludes:

So while my focus group was underwhelmed by the Kindle, I'm betting that
price will prevail – and the UK's publishing industry needs to focus on
Amazon, not Apple, as it contemplates its digital future.

I'm more sceptical, and in fact am with the second comment on his blog post:

When the latest Kindle announcement was made, and the UK Amazon eBook
store became available, the first thing I did was check to see if my
favourite authors' most recent books were available. They weren't. So
until every book (or at least every new book) can be purchased for an
eReader, and is priced at a point that reflects the reduced production
and distribution costs I doubt I'll be leaving my real books behind.

Baby boomer guilt is in the air.

I've just finished reading The Pinch by David Willetts, the Conservative MP and minister for higher education in the coalition government. It's a thoughtful analysis of how the demographic wave of the 1945-60 baby boom has fundamentally affected the economy and the financial arrangements in UK society. I wholeheartedly agree with the main point. “The central argument in the book is that we are not attaching sufficient value to the claims of future generations,” Willetts writes (p266). The blurb sums it up neatly:

Willetts argues that if our political, economic and cultural leaders do
not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people
of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have
lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay
for their parents’ quality of life.

He's sceptical though about whether greedy boomers will care enough to do anything about their legacy. Yet he doesn't have a list of specific recommendations – although, as one would expect for a Conservative politician, he places much weight on the role of the family, and the mutual obligations between different generations within it.

One of the most fascinating chapters is the first, which traces back some of the specifics of Anglo-Saxon society, including small family sizes and greater mobility than in many other countries, to laws of heredity dating back to the middle ages. Willetts cites the French demographer Emmanuel Todd, whose After the Empire I greatly admired. Todd is one of the few scholars to explore long-lasting demographic characteristics of different countries, such as the north-south gradient in birth rates in Europe – higher the further north and west one travels, contrary to what one's expectations of the Catholic Mediterranean might have led one to expect.

Willetts also has an interesting section on the size of different generations. Conventional wisdom always used to be that it was better to be a member of a small generation as there would be less competition for resources. Until I read about the phenomenon of large generations being lucky in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, the only other person I knew to have explored in any way the benefits of being part of a boom was Harvard economist Michael Kremer (whose 1993 paper on why large populations are good for growth I describe in The Soulful Science). I think the evidence is clear – and Willetts sets it out – that the economy as a whole does better during the prime of a large generation, whose members also hold the most political sway.

The Pinch also looks at the impact of the ageing baby boom on the housing market, savings, education and the job market. It sets out the issues very clearly, and draws on its author's fount of knowledge and research about all kinds of relevant science and social science. I'd recommend it highly as a survey of the problem, but was surprised that a politician didn't offer more by way of solutions. Although having said that, it actually makes a refreshing change and perhaps speaks of Willetts' openness to ideas now he's in office.

Anyway, no sooner had I finished the book than Will Hutton popped up in today's Observer with a long feature about the iniquities of the selfish baby boomers and the bill they're leaving younger generations. (It seems to have been prompted by his 60th birthday, a good age for reflection.)

And inter-generational inequity is in a different way a big theme of my forthcoming The Economics of Enough, out early in 2011. As I noted, it's in the air.

Those of us who blog about economics books don't get out all that much in Literary London, but this evening I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Francis Spufford's superb new novel about the economics of central planning (and much else), Red Plenty. For more on that, see my earlier post. (It was at the excellent Daunt's in Holland Park.)

Amongst the many people I met were dignitaries of the UK Science Fiction Foundation. They highly recommended Charles Stross – see for example his novel Accelerando – as sci fi for economists. It's a new name to me but regular readers of this blog will know my theory about economists and certain types of genre fiction. Not just me: Paul Krugman made the same connection in an essay he once wrote about how Isaac Asimov got him into economics.

By the by, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) – and my beloved husband – was at this evening's launch too and took this photo of Francis Spufford.

A new publishing venture, the London Publishing Partnership, has made me reflect on the tide of new competition digital technologies are unleashing on the industry. Most of the comment about tech and books has focussed on the retailing end, the battle of the iPad/Kindle and how e-reading will affect the sales of physical books. Less attention has been paid to the earlier parts of the supply chain. But digital modes of working and especially print-on-demand technologies are starting to make a big difference to the process of publishing and potentially to the structure of what is a highly concentrated industry.

The London Publishing Partnership is a brand new publishing services company formed by Richard Baggaley, an experienced publisher who most recently worked at a university press. The new company offers either all or part of the production package: editing, typesetting through printing to distribution and marketing. Customers so far include the London School of Economics, for a publication on The Future of Finance, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research, for the sale of physical copies of its very successful e-books. An organisation with its own strong brand or natural market (such as a client base) could obviously find it useful to outsource the production of publications, and might well not need to shelter under a large publisher's brand and reputation. But in addition, authors who self-publish some books (I've blogged in the past about John Kay's DIY-publishing) could in future decide to outsource the practicalities.

According to Richard Baggaley, two key technology-related developments have made LPP possible.

One is print-on-demand technology. LPP uses a print-on-demand company to produce the physical copies in small quantities, minimising warehousing and stock levels. This is less risky, less costly and more flexible than conventional large print runs. Break even print runs are very small – no more than a few tens of copies. Many large publishers are already doing this too, but aren't so upfront about it (with exceptions – for example, Faber for its Faber Finds and Bloomsbury Academic.

The second is the scope for selling books online. LPP has some key accounts for physical distribution and sales but otherwise will sell over the internet. How successful this proves is, of course, a marketing question. Marketing muscle is a key advantage that remains to the biggest publishing houses, both through affording ad campaigns and buying space in bookstores and through the ability to get attention from reviewers; but online word-of-mouth dynamics may be able to challenge that – and, again, some individual authors and organisations have their own reputations and marketing channels.

So all in all, it seems to me that the conditions are ripe now for some successful new entry into the publishing business after decades of consolidation into a very small number of global publishing titans and a somewhat larger number of small publishers including the important university presses and a few successful independents. Perhaps the new entrants, including self-publishing authors, will only ever form a competitive fringe, without really affecting industry structure. But I hope the impact of the technologies will be more dramatic than that.

Anyway, I'll revisit the London Publishing Partnership in 6 months or so to see how it's going for them.