"Price they sell at" is how big a tax deduction you can claim. Which was the point.

60% of face value is the going retail rate at used bookstores in Raleigh NC, Durham NC, and Charleston SC. At least for paperback SF.

With real books, I can donate them to charity when I'm done with them. Given that the general retail rate for used books is 60% of face value, that means the donation is worth about 30% (taking both state and federal tax deductions into account), so my effective printed book-price is 70% of face value. E-books need to be priced fairly against that.

...increases energy usage, as well as increasing the death rate. Studies also say the heart-attack and stroke fatality rates are much higher the weeks after both (Springand Fall) time transitions.

Nor what flags he means by "full optimization". Nor what the hardware really is - for some problems, with the right flags Haswell performance is very different from Core-2.

Headphones (or background music or ...) are known to impair left-brain::right-brain coordination in one's thinking -- especially important for activities needing both creative and analytic thinking.

Mount Vernon, which is actually owned by a private foundation. The Feds are part-owners of the *parking* *lot*.

subject says it. (I don't do MS-Windows...)

Yes!!!

And AT&T DSL, with per-keystroke latency that I've measured as high as 17 seconds, is awful!-- much worse than a 300-baud modem. It reeks!/EM.

With paperbacks, my typical behavior is to buy the book, read it, and then donate it to charity (at a retail used-book valuation) for a tax write-off. Given my marginal tax rate (state and federal combined), the net cost of the book is about 65% of face-value.

With E-books, I can't do that "donate to charity", so the face-value is the net cost, which seems to be about 10% under the paperback price.

E-book prices need to come down by at least 25% in order to become economically competitive for me.

"Dearer than paperbacks" means they are priced far too high. With a paperback I can donate it to charity when I finish. Valuing it at used-book prices, I still get a 60% tax writeoff. Given a marginal tax rate of 50%, the book then costs me a net 70% of its face value.

I can't donate e-books, so for me to break even the price needs to be no more than 70% of the paperback face value.

I really appreciate the job you've done.

As a software developer myself (software engineering for environmental modeling; high performance computing), the one thing I do wish for is more "devel" and "static-devel" library packages.

Which is one of the bones I have to pick with RedHat, by the way: it feels as though they've gone out of their way to make cross-distro software development difficult.

See http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html:

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might...

...an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany...