There has been quite a kerfuffle around the apparent fact that Hillary Clinton solely used her personal email account for government business. This piqued my curiosity, especially since I’ve been playing with a service called Conspire lately.

Conspire is a startup that analyzes your email and then seeks to provide you with an email chain with which to introduce you to the desired person. So, say I wanted to email my current business crush, Marcus Lemonis, Conspire’s system found a path with which I could ask for an introduction. In my case, my friend Espree could email her friend Nathan for an introduction to Marcus. Neat. I can definitely see how Conspire could become a useful tool, albeit one that raises some very interesting privacy questions.

So, I looked for Hillary Clinton’s now famous hdr22@clintonemail.com email address in Conspire. No luck. Conspire is still growing, so I suppose it makes sense that none of its members have yet to email Hillary. But then I tried just the clintonemail.com domain in the search, and got one hit. Huma Abedin, Hillary’s long-time aide, had an email address with the clintonemail.com domain in Conspire’s records. Unfortunately, I have no connection path to Ms. Abedin, so I can’t ask the system to facilitate an introduction, but it is fascinating. What other Clinton staffers were using email addresses at the clintonemail.com domain? Seems like at least one was.

To be fair, Abedin not only was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in the State Department, but she also continued to work for Clinton after Clinton left office. It is possible that she only got the email address after leaving the government, but it certainly raises some serious questions about whether or not other State Department staffers were provided private clintonemail addresses to avoid transparency requirements. In fact, Politico is reporting specifically that Abedin and other staffers used non-government email addresses while in the State Department, which suggests the clintonemail address may have come earlier:

Clinton?s personal aide, Huma Abedin, and her communications adviser, Philippe Reines, regularly used unofficial email accounts for work-related email, former colleagues said.

This also makes me wonder what other new communications mediums our government officials are using. Could world leaders be SnapChatting each other? Or perhaps sending international YO’s? Or trolling each other on YikYak? And, if they are, are they complying with records retention laws?

Hello Techdirt! I’m Dennis Yang. I was one of the original folks that helped Mike get Techdirt started way back when. Now, I’m working on something a little bit different called Bureau of Trade, which, despite its official-sounding name, has actually nothing to do with anything remotely governmental. That said, it’s been a long, long while since I’ve posted anything on Techdirt, so when Mike asked me to do a Favorites post, I leapt at the opportunity.

• This week started off with nicely with Tim Cushing’s post about Time/CNN’s oft-tweeted poll about Americans being less willing to sacrifice civil liberties to combat terrorism. In light of recent events, it’s nice to see that more Americans are not willing to trade their civil liberties for the appearance of security.
• Google Glass has clearly reached the public consciousness, with SNL doing a parody of it this week. So, as to be expected with any new (scary) technology, fears of its misuse start to surface, as evidenced by Mike’s post about the White House petition to ban Google Glass. The petition’s supporters are asking for Google Glass to be banned until “clear limitations are placed to prevent indecent public surveillance.” Thankfully, the petition has only garnered 34 signatures thus far.
• I was quite concerned about this week’s news about the senate’s approval of an online shopping sales tax. That said, having it approved by the senate was a great reason to re-read Mike’s earlier post about the concerns of the “Marketplace Fairness Act.”
• I certainly laughed quietly to myself when Timothy Geigner found Disney specifically wanted to trademark the term Dia De Los Muertos for use on fruit snacks. Disney has long kept their lawyers quite busy with IP cases, and this was no exception.
• In the post about EA no longer officially licensing guns in its games came my favorite Techdirt oneliner of the week: “EA may find gun makers willing to test the legal waters and attempt to pry EA’s unlicensed guns from its cold, injunctioned fingers.”
• And finally, I was very happy to see that Mike posted about Zach Braff’s Kickstarter project. There have been numerous posts deriding Braff’s use of the platform to raise money for his film, and as a proud supporter of the project, I appreciated this post greatly. Sure, if people don’t like Braff’s project, then they don’t have to support it. But to call it a misuse or exploitation of his fame/talent/whatever is ridiculous. I will happily be attending the special screening of the movie (just for supporters) when it comes out.

And, that’s it for this week — thanks to the Techdirt team for writing a great flight of posts this week.

While we’ve seen pay-what-you-want models work quite well for digital goods, it’s still uncertain as to whether the model works for tangible goods where the marginal cost of each sold item does not approach zero. However, that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try. A Brazilian company launched a line of vending machines that sell books without a set price, allowing customers to decide what they want to pay for the book. That said, it’s not entirely pay what you want, since the machines require that customers put a minimum of a 2 BRL note (equivalent to about $1.17 USD) to get a book.

Initial reports claim that “sales at the promotional machines had already more than doubled within just over a month after the program’s launch, and most purchases are indeed paid with a BRL 2 note.” While this sounds promising, there’s no mention of how much more the books were priced before the new model was implemented, nor the profit margin beforehand. Furthermore, in looking at the vending machine, it’s not apparent that customers are given any real reason why they should pay more than the minimum for the book. The books are just placed in a normal looking vending machine — customers can’t leaf through the book or even look at the back cover until after they’ve bought the book (and decided what to pay for it). This seems like a lost opportunity. Especially in a pay-what-you-want situation, it’s still about giving customers a reason to pay more.

Needless to say, there’s a pretty big protest going on right now against SOPA, with many sites either shuttering fully or making obvious changes in support of the protests. Leading the charge are Wikipedia, Reddit and Google. Sites like SOPA STRIKE and SOPA Blackout disseminated code to allow sites to easily join the blackout, but many sites have actually decided to take the time to tailor their protests for their own sites, which is amazing to see. It is this creative energy that drives the Internet and makes it what it is (for better or worse), and it is this very energy that legislation like SOPA and PIPA threaten to extinguish.

I’ve created a gallery of SOPA blackout screencaps, but here are some of my favorite takes on the protest today:

Reddit’s blackout is probably the most complete; all URLs, including deep links, on Reddit lead to the blackout page, which is very impressive for such a largely trafficked site. For Redditor’s going through Reddit-withdrawal today, they feature a handy countdown timer on their blackout page.

Wikipedia’s blackout encompasses all of the English site, and as evidenced by @herpderpedia (who is collecting various angry Tweets about the Wikipedia blackout), it is certainly causing some frustration (and hopefully some awareness). That said, Wikipedia’s blackout is very, very, very easy to thwart (just hit the ESC key before the page fully loads), so there’s an easy escape valve for those that are in dire need of its content. In that same vein, Craigslist’s full blackout also has a release valve that gracefully loads after a few seconds.

Google promised that it would do “something,” and followed suit with a Google Doodle, essentially blacking out its logo in protest. Several sites followed suit, including Hacker News, 4chan’s /b/ (link to a SFW screenshot), and TwitPic.

Taking the “censor-style” protest to the next level are Wired’s blackout and Daily Kos’ blackout. Wired’s coders decided to mark up the page itself with black censor boxes, so that the page looks like it’s been through the hands of some very aggressive government censors. Very clever from the design-minded folks over at Wired.

Elegant as always, xkcd’s blackout offers the simple message, “[don’t censor the web]”.

And, the most amusing blackout of the day comes from McSweeney’s (of course), who has handily replaced its site today with “A DAY’S WORTH OF FACTS TO GET YOU THROUGH WIKIPEDIA’S 24-HOUR BLACKOUT.”

Check out the full gallery here, and let me know if there are any awesome blackout implementations that I’ve missed.

Happy New Year everyone! Last year’s “The Numbers” post proved to be quite popular, so we decided to do it again. 2011 was yet another banner year for Techdirt.

We handled around 14.7 million visits last year (up from 2009’s 11M). Those visitors checked out the 3,923 stories that we posted and submitted 205,129 comments. Oddly, the #1 story for 2011 was one that was actually written in 2010, about the ubiquitous “Free Public WiFi” mystery. It turns out that a lot of people remain curious about all those “free public WiFi” ad hoc networks you see. Two stories about SOPA/PIPA graced the top ten, as well as the harrowing censorship tale of dajaz1.com. It appears that you folks are concerned about government censorship.

2011 was also a great year for the comment voting system. Congrats to Marcus Carab and Dark Helmet, who garnered the highest cumulative scores for insightful and funniest comments, respectively — and, amazingly, each came in second place to the other in the category they didn’t come in first. I sense a growing rivalry…

The top browser used by Techdirt readers was still Firefox (35%). Chrome, which lost by a narrow margin to IE last year, blew past IE’s 15% to 30%. And there are still nearly 100,000 that are, despite all of the best efforts of Microsoft to convince you otherwise, still inexplicably using IE6.

Mobile usage jumped up to 1.6M visits this year, which is nearly a 200% increase from 2010. 615k of those visits came from iPhones, versus 566k for Android and 322k from iPad. In aggregate, Apple devices did beat Android. iPhone beat out Android last year by nearly 2:1, so clearly that gap is quickly closing.

Where did this year’s traffic come from? Reddit jumped in the charts this year, referring 2.1M visits, up 277% from last year’s 557k. I’m a little saddened to see that Slashdot is definitely not what it used to be — referrals from them dropped by nearly a third last year. I suppose getting Slashdotted is no longer what it used to be. Continuing to perform quite well, however, are both StumbleUpon and HackerNews. Facebook also sent a decent amount of traffic.

To hear some of Google’s enemies (including politicians in Congress) tell the story, the only way sites get traffic is via search engines — and Google specifically. They act as though, if Google isn’t sending you tons of traffic, you don’t exist. Google definitely does send us a fair bit of traffic, but only about 20% of our actual traffic came from searches. We certainly value that 20%, but it definitely shows that you don’t have to rely on search traffic to get traffic. Even more telling, here are the top three search terms that brought people to Techdirt in 2011:

1. techdirt
2. sopa
3. tech dirt

Where are you all coming from? It’s really not that different than in 2010. The vast majority of you are from the US. Canada is second, followed closely by the UK. After that, there’s a pretty sharp drop off to Australia, then Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. France, India and New Zealand round out the top 10. Last year, we noted that Japan narrowly beat out China to follow India as the leading Asian countries. This year (despite stories of how we’re sometimes blocked in China), China jumped into second place in Asia, followed by South Korea, who leap-frogged Japan. Brazil was tops in South America and South Africa was tops in Africa — same as in 2010.

All in all, people from 230 countries or territories visited Techdirt. Just like last year, there was a single visit from Christmas Island — though, last year, we had someone in our comments suggest that the single Christmas Island visit may have been him, and not really from Christmas Island.

Last year, we noted that the only countries that we appeared to get absolutely no visits from were… North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Western Sahara and Chad, once again, failed to send any visitors… but, in a stunning development, we got two visitors from North Korea. And, in case you were wondering, Belarus, whose new laws will make it difficult for people there to access many websites, actually sent over 1,000 visitors last year. Also, I have no idea why, but the nearly 1,000 visitors from Gibraltar spent the highest average time on the site of visitors from any other country/territory — averaging nearly 20 minutes per visit. People from Macedonia actually visited the most pages (on average) per visit — at just under 6 on average from over 3,500 visitors.

And, of course, this isn’t just about the odd facts, but about the overall community — with many of you being quite loyal, which we appreciate to no end. 1.5 million of the visits — or just over 10% came from people who visited Techdirt more than 100 times last year — and the vast majority of those (just under 1 million) actually visited the site more than 200 times. You people rock.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for making yet another year of Techdirt awesome. Here’s to a fantastic 2012.

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2011:

1. The History Of The (Fake) ‘Free Public WiFi’ You Always See At Airports
2. SOPA Markup Runs Out Of Time; Likely Delayed Until 2012 [Update: Or Not…]
3. Apple Continues To Insist Only It Can Use An Apple In A Logo; Threatens Small German Cafe
4. Guy Who Created The TSA Says It’s Failed, And It’s Time To Dismantle It
5. Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
6. Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details…
7. Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops… And The Bill
8. NY Times & LA Times Both Come Out Against SOPA & PIPA
9. EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright
10. PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America

2011’s Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

1. If You’re Arguing That Someone ‘Deserves’ Copyright, Your Argument Is Wrong (823 comments)
2. Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love…Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial) (457 comments)
3. Judge Bans Handing (Factual) Pamphlets To Jurors; Raising First Amendment Issues (429 comments)
4. TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search 'Rape' (403 comments)
5. Revisiting The Question Of Who Deserves Copyright (376 comments)
6. PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America (376 comments)
7. Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos (374 comments)
8. Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos (372 comments)
9. Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK? (351 comments)
10. Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details… (341 comments)

• Note that only 2 of the most commented stories were also among the top 10 most visited stories, once again showing that traffic and the number of comments don’t necessarily correlate.

2011’s Top Users, by comment volume

1. The eejit – 3,963 comments
2. Jay – 3,433 comments
3. Marcus Carab – 2,255 comments
4. Richard – 2,209 comments
5. PaulT – 1,841 comments
6. Hephaestus – 1,662 comments
7. nasch – 1,456 comments
8. Dark Helmet – 1,426 comments
9. abc gum – 1,357 comments
10. HothMonster – 1,313 comments

2011’s Most Insightful Users, as voted by the community

1. Marcus Carab
2. Dark Helmet
3. Karl
4. Richard
5. Jay
6. Chris Rhodes
7. The eejit
8. PaulT
9. That Anonymous Coward
10. E. Zachary Knight

2011’s Funniest Users, as voted by the community

1. Dark Helmet
2. Marcus Carab
3. Capitalist Lion Tamer
4. The eejit
5. :Lobo Santo
6. Chris Rhodes
7. Gwiz
8. Hephaestus
9. ChurchHatesTucker
10. That Anonymous Coward

2010 was a great year for Techdirt. We thought we’d share some stats about 2010 with all of you (and yes, we’re a little late on this but we finally got around to pulling together the numbers).

We posted 3,798 stories, generating 152,683 comments. According to Google Analytics, Techdirt had 11,490,135 visits in 2010. So, if Techdirt were a National Park (and you readers were visiting us in real life), we’d be the #3 most popular park in the country, just behind the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Or if we were a museum, we’d be well ahead of the top ranked Louvre, who only did a paltry 8.5 million visits last year. Yes, I know those are unfair comparisons but it’s still a fun way to view things in perspective. Of course, if any of you really do want to visit us in real life, we’d love to have you.

Separately, the traffic numbers represented continued growth over the course of the year. If we’re just looking at our December numbers, traffic in December of 2010 was 62% higher than in December 2009, and that was after continued growth throughout the year. So, it looks like we ended the year with a lot more folks here in the community than we started with, which is always a nice thing.

While certainly a large part of our traffic is US-based, the community here really is quite global with visitors coming from an astounding 230 different countries or territories (and yes, we did recently have a discussion about how there were fewer countries than that in the world, but Google Analytics counts “territories” too — so a big shout out to you, the one visitor from Christmas Island).

Not surprisingly, the top four countries were all English speaking countries (US, Canada, UK and Australia) but Germany clocked in at number 5, followed by the Netherlands, India, France, Sweden and Spain. After India, Japan was the leading Asian country, which narrowly beat out China. Brazil was the leading South American country, topping Argentina by a decent margin. In Africa, not too surprisingly, South Africa was tops with Egypt coming in second. Of course, it looks like we did not get visits from every country in the world. Among those with no visitors at all were North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Pretty much every other country I checked had at least one visitor, though there may be some tiny Pacific Islands that I’m unaware of that didn’t send any visitors and which I can’t easily spot on the map.

Within the US, just looking at states, our top visitors were from California and then New York (with Texas close behind). The state that sent the least number of visitors? Wyoming. Not like anyone lives there anyway (kidding Wyomans, kidding). If we look at the top cities worldwide, New York dominated in terms of visitors, with a surprise second place finish from London, beating out all other US cities (perhaps less surprising taking into account population totals). San Francisco, LA and Chicago round out the top five. DC comes in at number seven. Sydney, Australia is the second non-US city and number 9 on the overall list.

Most of you still use Windows, followed by Mac and Linux pulling up in third place. iPhone visitors topped Android visitors (2:1) but I would bet that’s going to change over the next year. Firefox was the most popular browser. Internet Explorer (?!?) eked out a tiny victory over Chrome, though I can’t imagine that staying true much longer.

In any case, thanks to everyone for making Techdirt the thriving community that it is. Here’s to a great 2011.

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2010:

1. Best Buy Firing Employee Because He Makes A Funny Video That Doesn’t Even Mention Best Buy – July 2nd
2. The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet – November 18th
3. ‘Hollywood Accounting’ Losing In The Courts – July 8th
4. Facebook Threatens Greasemonkey Script Writer – March 25th
5. Why Congress Isn’t So Concerned With TSA Nude Scans & Gropes: They Get To Skip Them – November 18th
6. Guy Building A Working (Yes, Working) Computer Inside A Video Game – September 29th
7. RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales – July 13th
8. Why The Wikileaks Document Release Is Key To A Functioning Democracy – December 1st
9. Sony Deletes Feature On PS3’s; You Don’t Own What You Thought You Bought – March 31st
10. More Casinos Succeeding With The ‘That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch’ Claim – June 7th

2010’s Top Posts, by Comment Volume:

1. UK Hairdresser Fined For Playing Music Even Though He Tried To Be Legal – 599 comments
2. Defining Success: Were The RIAA’s Lawsuits A Success Or Not? – 417 comments
3. The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet – 401 comments
4. Four Years In, How Successful Has Hollywood’s Attack On The Pirate Bay Been – 376 comments
5. Can Someone Explain Why Circumvention For Non-Infringing Purposes Is Illegal? – 364 comments
6. Is Intellectual Property Itself Unethical? – 337 comments
7. Why Debates Over Copyright Get Bogged Down: Conflating Use With Payment – 315 comments
8. Give A Man A Fish… And Make It Illegal To Teach Fishing – 302 comments
9. Why Voting For COICA Is A Vote For Censorship – 300 comments
10. Composer Jason Robert Brown Still Standing By His Position That Kids Sharing His Music Are Immoral – 292 comments

It seems worth pointing out that there was almost no overlap between the stories that were most visited and those that had the most comments (only one story makes both lists). This is actually pretty common. Many people assume that more comments automatically means the most popular stories in terms of traffic, but that’s almost never the case. Traffic and comments do not correlate nearly as much as you would expect. Some of the stories with the most comments often involve a very small number of people continuing to have a (often quite interesting!) discussion long after everyone else has moved on…

2010’s Top Users, By Comment Volume*:

1. Dark Helmet -2,278 comments
2. Hephaestus – 2,277 comments
3. nasch – 1,597 comments
4. Richard – 1,539 comments
5. Technopolitical – 1,265 comments
6. Karl – 1,249 comments
7. average_joe – 1,156 comments
8. Rose M. Welch – 993 comments
9. PaulT – 982 comments
10. ChurchHatesTucker – 918 comments

*Mike had 2,964 comments so he’s technically the top commenter, but I’m not counting him here.

As DVRs usage and on-demand program watching increases, commercial breaks are becoming easier to skip. Product placement has long been discussed as a way to combat this trend, with shows like SNL getting into the act. However, if more shows are going to be placing products into their shows, it’s important to remember that it’s not just a matter of shoehorning a sponsor’s product into the plotline. The soap opera, Days of Our Lives painfully illustrates this point with several embarrassingly awful product placements. Sure, the writing on soap operas might not be great to start with, but the product placement in these spots is so incredibly awkward, that it’s hard to believe that the sponsors were happy with these ads. Surely writers struggled with trying to fit the term “Wanchai Ferry Chinese Food” into normal dialogue:

But, the phrase sounds painfully out-of-place, even in soap opera land, which, ironically, was created by Procter & Gamble as a platform with which to hawk their wares. Of course, it’s not exactly clear if these are paid placements, since there’s no active indication on the screen as such. Then again, when a bag of Chex Mix gets an obvious close up:

it certainly feels like a paid placement. These placements almost feel formulaic, when you start to watch them in succession. Product shot, check. Marketing message inserted in dialogue, check. This placement for Cheerios follows this formula perfectly, and ends with a hilariously melodramatic shot of the comely protagonist, with a huge box of Cheerios included inexplicably in the shot:

These placements are so bad that I almost wonder if this is yet another case of anti-product placement designed to muster negative sentiments for a competitors’ products.

A story suggest to us by reader Dan describes how an Ohio town recently issued 980 speeding ticket refunds. The city of Garfield Heights, Ohio, installed two speed cameras, attached to unmanned police cars, and then sent speeding tickets to those that were deemed to be speeding. The policy was to only issue tickets to those driving more than 11 miles per hour over the speed limit, so, when it was found that a number of tickets were issued to those driving 10 miles per hour over the limit, almost $100,000 in ticket revenue was refunded. Apparently, city officials had told the public that the tickets would be issued if people were caught driving 11 miles over the limit. So, if that’s the case, then is the speed limit actually the speed limit or not? Once again, this goes to show how completely arbitrary speed limit enforcement can be. Is there really a difference in safety in going 10 mph over the speed limit vs. 11? And, if anything, it seems that widely circulating this policy would simply encourage people to drive 9 miles over the limit.

Clearly, it’s a great money maker for the city. Since the month of June, when the cameras were installed, they sent out nearly 11,000 tickets, representing about $1,000,000 in added revenue. Sure, it’s possible that the city may need to cover a shortfall in a budget, but is the false guise of public safety the appropriate manner in which to obtain this revenue? At least this method is a little more scientific than other Ohio towns, where a policeman can issue a ticket by simply guessing how fast you were going.

With all of the buzz lately around the fantastically successful Old Spice campaign, some numbers are finally starting to trickle in about whether or not the campaign actually translated into more sales of the body wash. Although initial reports suggested that the ads did little to boost sales, according to Nielsen, sales of the body wash rose 107 percent in the past month. That said, the increase cannot be necessarily attributed entirely to the social media campaign, since a coupon campaign for the body wash was also running at the same time. In an age, driven largely in part by the supposed traceability of online advertising, where there has been a large push to track ad spends all the way down to individual purchases, this ad campaign reiterates the adage attributed to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Since this campaign was very much a branding campaign, just because it happens online does not necessarily make it more traceable, so it’s difficult to say what percentage of the increase can be attributed to the campaign. That said, at least for me, I know I considered buying some Old Spice body wash when I was at Walgreens last week, and apparently I was not alone.

With the increased adoption of the iPad and the Kindle, eBooks are finally becoming a viable alternative to traditional paper-based books. And with this shift, comes an opportunity that some publishers may not like — it is now easier than ever for authors to self-publish their works. Popular Japanese author Ryu Murakami announced that he will be self-publishing his next novel directly to the iPad, sidestepping his publisher in favor of working directly with a software publishing company on this eBook. Murakami’s eBook, “The Singing Whale,” will include video content and music by composer Ryuichi Sakamoto that will hopefully leverage some of the strengths of the new platform. By self-publishing, Murakami has the chance to make more money from this book than he has with his previous deals. That said, he’s also assuming the risk that it loses money; in order to break even, Murakami needs to sell 5,000 copies of the digital book, which is priced at around $17. To be fair, $17 seems a little high for an eBook, but Murakami’s eBook attempts to justify the cost by incorporating video and music, elements not typically found in the run-of-the-mill eBook. But, even if this experiment doesn’t succeed, Murakami will probably be just fine — his publisher, Kodansha, reports that they are in talks with the author about publishing “The Singing Whale” as a traditional book. Since Murakami clearly has other options at this point, undoubtedly those negotiations will play out more favorably for the author. We’ve seen a few interesting new models arise for book publishing in the recent past, so hopefully this is a sign that we will start to see even more.