Category Archives: The Hawaii Project

Books, The Hawaii Project

Death in Veracruz, by Héctor Aguilar Camín

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As part of my continuing test of Scribd’s subscription ebooks service, I stumbled on Héctor Aguilar Camín’s Death in Veracruz. Set in the ‘60s and ‘70s during the ascent of Mexico’s oil industry, A Death in Veracruz is a classic of Latin literature, only recently translated ably into English by Chandler Thompson.

Death in Veracruz

This novel marks the long-awaited arrival-in English-of a masterful voice in Mexican and noir fiction Death in Veracruz is a gritty and atmospheric noir centered on the so-called oil wars of the late 1970s, which pitted the extremely powerful and corrupt government-owned oil cartel PEMEX against the agrarian landowners in the coastal regions of Southern Mexico.

Amongst the conflict, graft, corruption and collusion between PEMEX (Mexico’s corrupt government-owned oil company) and the powerful Oil Workers labor union, our narrator (simply called by his nickname, Negro) is an investigative journalist specializing in sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. His lifelong friend Rojano is an aspiring politician and landowner, married to the stunning and willful Anabela. Negro has been in love with Anabela since his youth, but lost out to Rojano. But he remains in their orbit, as Rojano and Anabel slowly draw him into their schemes to rise in power.

Rojano’s enemy (and simultaneous political sponsor and mentor) is Lazaro Pizarro, a charismatic and ruthless leader in the Oil Worker’s union. Pizarro is rendered by turns philosophical, ruthless, cruel and yet clinically unemotional when ordering deaths. Each of the main characters is wholly believable and mesmerizing, but Pizarro stands center to me. As the leader of the oil workers union, he is trying to build the worker’s paradise in Mexico and will let nothing stand in his way. At the prompting of Rojano, Negro interviews Pizarro, and more or less accuses him of murdering people to advance his cause. Pizzaro’s response:

“Try to understand,” he said in a voice that was barely audible. “Listen to what I’m telling you. People there are dying at the rate of two a day just from drinking mezcal. Have you ever been in one of those jails? I was in the one in Chicontepec last week. One of the inmates had killed his mother. Another a friend he was out drinking with. Another raped his daughter and almost beat her to death. None of them remembered what they’d done. All that death and suffering was pointless. It bore no fruit. Nothing blossomed or contributed to the wellbeing of others. These are the deaths that must be stopped, the barren ones driven by mezcal and ignorance. There are always going to be violent deaths, that’s the law of history. It’s up to us to make sure they’re fertile and creative, that’s all.”

Death in Veracruz is a dark, classic noir, where nobody is who they seem, double crosses are common, and nobody can be entirely trusted. It’s also a love story, an exploration of Mexico’s culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and a hell of wild ride. You’re never sure whether you are being told the truth by the author or the characters, or precisely sure what’s actually happened, kind of a Mexican True Detective.

It’s an entirely atmospheric novel; since books and music often go together well, I made a playlist for you as you read:

Death in Veracruz (A Book Playlist)

Death in Veracruz (A Book Playlist) · Playlist · 14 songs

Startups, The Hawaii Project

How Twitter could monetize the entire Internet in one click.

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twitter

So, Twitter’s in a hole. User growth stagnant, stock price plummeting, laying people off, swirling questions around how/whether Jack Dorsey can fix things.

Herein, we offer a proposal for how Twitter, with a very modest effort, could monetize (almost) the entire Internet, gain enormous goodwill, juice their earnings, help save journalism, and help motivate new usage of Twitter. Get the Street Off Their Back while they fix other stuff.

If you ask the average person what annoys them about the internet, you’ll mostly get the same answer: ads. But ads are the way internet content businesses get paid. The “subscription” model for content hasn’t caught on, because the cost barrier is too high. Most people don’t want to commit to $10/month for access to a website, with so much “free” content out there. Twitter has the opportunity to become the defacto Content Subscription service. 

Here’s how:

Look at virtually any webpage these days and you’ll see a Tweet button. This button is powered by Twitter. Developed by Twitter, owned by Twitter, embedded via some javascript, which Twitter can easily change. If there’s one thing Twitter has, it’s this ubiquitous distribution via the tweet button.

Suppose when you Tweet an article you like, Twitter offers you a choice. Just tweet your link as usual. Or, make a small payment ($0.50?), tweet the link, and in return your browsing on the source site is ad free for the next month. Tweet out that Esquire link about how make a Martini, pay your $0.50 and your Esquire viewing is ad-free for the next month. Twitter keeps $0.25, gives $0.25 to the source site, and the source honors the “ad free” pledge for a month, via a cookie or something. Twitter could even distinguish between a “like” (a free tweet) and “love” (an article/tweet I liked so much I was willing to pay for it). And as more people learn they can do this, they’ll tweet more, generating distribution and viewers for the Publisher’s content.

This is the “tip” model of content monetization. Or “micro-Freemium”. Call it the Twitter TwipJar. It’s a win-win-win. Twitter gets $0.25 and enormous goodwill, the publisher gets $0.25 (vs about $0.0015 for an average monthly visitor, per below), and the consumer gets a wonderful ad-free viewing experience.NoiseTrade is doing interesting business this way in music and books, for artists, as an example proof-of-concept.

Now imagine the Twitter ad campaign: “An ad-free internet, brought to you by Twitter”. Twitter would be hailed as a conquering hero. Or — “Help the brands you love stay alive with the Twitter TwipJar”. Twitter wins.

People tweet about stuff. TV shows, events, sports, news articles…. content. 95% (99%?) of people only consume content, they don’t produce it. What’s the single most irritating thing about content? Ads. Ever try to read that stupid BuzzFeed article with a dozen ad flashbombs going off like an old Myspace page? Of course you have. And god help you if you’re trying to do that on your mobile phone on the train.

Why are all these web pages so loaded with ads? All those mid- and low-tier content sites are trying to stay alive in a world of “free”. But it’s hard to generate enough revenue by ads to survive, unless you grow to enormous scale.

The single most common irritant people express about the web is ads.

And it’s not that great for businesses either — here’s why:

  • CPMs are Terrible
  • The UX Impact is Terrible
  • The Impact on the nature of content itself is Terrible

CPMs are Terrible

Your average mid-tier website is lucky to get a $1 CPM on run-of-site ads. (CPM = Cost Per Mille, or the revenue per 1000 views of an ad). If you’re ESPN or Huffington Post, you can charge a higher CPM. Everybody else, not so much.

Let’s do the math on ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), to see the challenge. Let’s say your average visitor views 1.5 pages per month (most web traffic is “fly through” — read a page then leave). Then ((1 user x 1.5 pages) / 1000) * $1 CPM = $0.0015. That’s right. A visitor generates a tenth of a penny in revenue. 100 visitors yields $0.15. Not sustainable for long. That’s why most mid-tier websites eventually disappear, unless they grow fast or find another revenue source.

UX Impact is Terrible

Mid-tier publisher sites are usually buried in ads. To the point that the content itself is often near invisible, or inaccessible. (and on mobile devices, even slower!). Exhibit A, below: it’s pretty hard to find the “actual” content (vs. the ads) and the UX controls in this page:

Content Impact

The insatiable drive for pageviews has given rise to it’s own language describing bad content. Clickbait. Listicles. Trolling.

And in fact, in the page below, it’s arguable whether the “content” is even any better than the ads.

But you knew that. Ads suck. They create perverse incentives (who’s the customer? The reader, or the advertiser?). (That’s why, at The Hawaii Project, a personalized book discovery engine, we show no ads and are pursuing a “freemium” business model. The reader is the customer.)

If you want to get rid of ads, you have a limited set of choices. Pretty much the only one is to charge for your service — either with a paywall (as newspapers have experimented with in various forms), or via “Freemium”, having a free product plus charging some users a fee for access to advanced features.

But many sites, especially content-rich sites that are basically blogs in some form, don’t have an easy way to create premium features. And they don’t have a lot of developer resources hanging around.

What do they have? They have a “Tweet” button on most every page on the internet. The Twitter TwipJar gives them an easy way to monetize more effectively and provide a better user experience, and Twitter does the work!

More broadly, ad-driven Journalism is a race to the bottom. Lower cost content spun to generate more outrage, more titillation, more holier-than-thou, more page views — rather than content that is of sufficient quality people want to share it, and pay for it directly. A Twitter TwipJar might be the way to fund high quality content via frictionless micropayments. ($0.50 might be great for Bleacher Report but not enough for the New York Times, so Twitter might implement variable tipping, to allow big brands to define the tip size required to trigger the ad-free.)

This is an “everybody wins” scenario:

  • Consumer gets: An entirely optional ad free experience and the happiness of supporting a brand they love, while enhancing their own personal brand by tweeting interesting stuff and doing what they’re already doing.
  • Publishers get: Extra Revenue, User Happiness, Content distribution via Twitter. And with a small effort (just need to allow for an ad-free experience — cookies plus some modest site changes)
  • Twitter gets — extra revenue, enormous goodwill as the company that saved Publishing and Killed Bad Advertising, and more users (as people learn they can use twitter to get rid of ads). They could even hand out “badges”, similar to Facebook “likes”, for brands the consumer supports.

Twitter already has access to an enormous slice of the internet via the Tweet button. They wouldn’t have to field a giant sales force to distribute this, just work with what they have already done .To implement this, Twitter would need some kind of near frictionless micro-payments. But seems like Square (Jack Dorsey’s other company) knows something about payments and credit card processing.

And, in the same way that Facebook became the de facto authentication system of the web via Facebook Login, Twitter could become the de facto Content Subscription service via the Tweet button.

(this article was originally published on LinkedIn — thanks to John C Abell for reviewing a draft and providing great feedback, but his endorsement of this post’s content not implied).

Books, The Hawaii Project

Some great surfing books

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While I’m not a surfer, I’ve always had a fascination with the sport. The mystical side of being in the ocean, the raw physicality of the sport, and the counter-culture and sub-culture of people who surf.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite books about surfing.

Tapping the Source is the classic surfer novel. Kem Nunn more or less invented the genre.

Tapping the Source

People go to Huntington Beach in search of the endless parties, the ultimate highs and the perfect waves. Ike Tucker has come to look for his missing sister and for the three men who may have murdered her.

The Dogs of Winter might be my favorite. Kem Nunn does surfer noir like nobody’s business.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Here’s a look at the dark underbelly of surfer culture, set in Hawaii’s North Shore.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Here’s a more positive view — the story of Eddie Aikau, Hawaiian hero.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Here’s some other ideas:

Barbarian Days

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2016 WINNER OF THE 2016 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Kilometer 99

Malia needs to leave El Salvador. A surfer and aspiring engineer, she came to Central America as a Peace Corps volunteer and fell in love with Ben. Malia’s past year has been perfect: her weeks spent building a much-needed aqueduct in the countryside, and her weekends spent with Ben, surfing point-breaks in the nearby port city of La Libertad.

The Surf Guru

A book of brilliant, adventurous stories from the award-winning Doug Dorst. With the publication of his debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst was widely celebrated as one of the most creative, original literary voices of his generation-an heir to T.C. Boyle and Denis Johnson, a northern California Haruki Murakami.

The Hawaii Project

The Hawaii Project – personalized book recommendations

Enjoy!

Books, The Hawaii Project

The Far Arena, by Richard Sapir

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f

One part Gladiator, one part Jurassic Park. Eugeni was a Roman Gladiator (in fact, the best) under the emperor Domitian. Until he fell from favor after failing to kill a friend during a gladiatorial contest. The Praetorian guard was ordered to take him to the North Sea and kill him, but succeeded only in causing him to be frozen, and awakened two millenia later by cryogenic techniques. He’s discovered by Lew McCardle, Ph.D. texan hunting for oil. To keep the discovery secret, Lew enlists the aid of Semyon, a Russian cryonics specialist, and Sister Olav, a non who speaks fluent latin.

The Far Arena
Released from the Arctic ice after two millennia, a former Roman gladiator must contend with his haunted memories while…

The book alternates between Eugeni’s life in Rome, and his experiences coming to grips with being alive, and being in the modern world. The scenes from ancient Rome are simply brilliant — historically accurate, by turns gripping and harrowing, and capture the intrigue of Rome. Interesting details (the Legionnaire’s equivalent of “combat pay” was called “nail pay” — because they wore out the nails in their sandals during long marches) are interspersed with wonderful characterizations. Eugeni is a brilliant character — he has the black humor of soldiers (“How are your pains?” — “My pains enjoy themselves immensely. I do not.”). The interplay between the wordly-wise Eugeni and cynical, aging Lew are priceless. The scene where Eugeni demonstrates in the modern word how brilliant a swordsman he is, is harrowing and devastating.

The modern scenes are done equally as well as the Rome scenes. So it’s hard to characterize the book. It’s one part fantastical historical fiction and one part modern day thriller, combined with a morally compromised realpolitik that drives the plot. It’s a great book, and the writing is smooth as glass. Can’t recommend this book more highly if you are interested in Rome or Gladiators.

As a bonus, here’s a list of other great books about the Roman world:

Roman Empire
My favorite books about the Roman Empire

Happy Reading!

Books, The Hawaii Project

Whither the eBooks subscription model?

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oysterThe news that Oyster is closing shop (or at least, abandoning their eBooks subscription business) suggests a re-evaluation of the subscription eBook business model is in order.

We’ve written before about the challenges of the subscription model for eBooks. The model has fundamental challenges:

  1. Limited catalog
  2. Poor discovery methods
  3. Proprietary Readers
  4. Competition from Amazon

Because the publishers live off their best-sellers and the subscription business is an all-you-can-eat model, the publishers have been reluctant to add their top titles to Oyster and Scribd. (For example, this article suggests 15% of books account for 80% of sales — if that 15% isn’t well represented in the subscription inventory, users are likely to abandon the service when they can’t find the books they want).

This leads to the second issue. If I can’t find the books I want, that the marketing world has told me I am “supposed” to read (The Girl on the Train, 50 Shades of Grey et. al.), then what am I going to read? I need tools to proactively discover great things to read, that are in the subscription catalog. And the recommendations need to come pro-actively, otherwise I am going to the catalog to read something the NY Times tells me I should read, and when I don’t find it, I get frustrated and leave. Oyster and Scribd aren’t very good at that.

Both Oyster and Scribd use proprietary readers. That’s not a fatal flaw, and the readers are actually quite nice (I particularly like Scribd’s iPad reader — clean, minimalist and easy to use). But it’s one more thing I have to learn, one more bit of friction in a world where I’m already reading on my Kindle, my computer, my phone, my Amazon Fire tablet, downloading eBooks from my library, not to mention physical books. Readers really don’t need another environment to read in. And with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, the bar to jump over to get a user to subscribe on an ongoing basis to a subscription reading service is just too high.

And that is what Oyster found out, after $17M invested and major partnerships with most of the big publishers.

What might save the day?

Subscription services need to bring more value to readers than just “all you can eat” reading. Bring me things I can’t get anywhere else. Some ideas:

  1. Great books I can only get from you. (Negotiate a deal with 20 major indie authors to write books solely for your platform).
  2. Deliver great news and information about books. I might only read one book every few weeks, but The Martian is coming into theaters and I’d be very interested to read lots of news about that, since I loved the book. I’d love author interviews with my favorite authors, and a Medium-like news feed filled with booky goodness (especially if it was personalized). If Scribd were “organizing” the bookish part of the Internet and bringing me personalized book news every few days, I’d be on the service all the time.
  3. Truly personalized book recommendations. It’s not enough to say, “oh Mark likes Fantasy, let’s recommend The Lord of the Rings (which is what Scribd is doing to me right now). I mean, come on. Give me something interesting! Give me a way to import my Goodreads account so you can see all the books I’ve already read and stop recommending them to me.
  4. Book Clubs. People love to discuss books. Give me a virtual book club environment where I can chat about what I’m reading. Reddit has a vast community interested in books. If a subscription service wants to be sticky, find a way to bind me to a community of book lovers.

The key is, a simple all-you-can-eat reading environment isn’t enough, not at ~$10 a month. If it’s $10 a year, no problem — but that won’t support the publishers.

(btw: at The Hawaii Project we’re tackling #2 and #3, check us out).