“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales.
The Shakespeare Algorithm
The study focussed in part on function words, the heavy-lifting but unglamorous class that includes pronouns, articles, and prepositions—“I,” “you,” “the,” “a,” “an,” “on,” “in,” “under.” As Pennebaker has written, there are only about four hundred and fifty of them in English, but they account for fifty-five per cent of the words that we use, the linguistic glue that holds everything together but goes mostly unnoticed. “We can’t hear them,” Pennebaker told me recently. “You and I have now been talking for ten minutes, and you have no idea if I’ve used articles at a high rate or a low rate. I have no idea.” Everyone has a pattern, though, ..
.. Indeed, as Maria Konnikova reported in March, function-word patterns and other metrics may be able to establish not only an author’s voice but also her disposition and mood.
.. But Gary Taylor, an editor of the complete Oxford Shakespeare, sees something more than academic principle at play. “Many great writers and literary critics chose to concentrate on English because they hated math,” he told me.
Andrew Sullivan Shuts a Door
There’s an increasingly common view—Ezra Klein expressed it, at his site, Vox, after Sullivan announced his retirement—that old-fashioned conversational blogging is being killed by social media, because the big traffic is driven now by Facebook and Twitter, which can only trade in quick hits. Long conversations don’t go viral. Bloggers linking to each other can only ever be small scale.
.. Since he is given to intellectual drama, he often overreacted, and much of the entertainment of the Dish was watching him walk back his more outrageous arguments. Truly, it was nothing like a magazine.