Prior to the election, Nate Silver’s statistical methodology was called into question by pundits skeptical of his reliance on polling data, including David Brooks of the New York Times and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. Silver’s model that is based on poll aggregation correctly forecast the winner in all 50 states. Florida, which he gave Obama a 50.3 percent chance of winning, is still up in the air, but the 50.3 percent forecast more or less accounts for that.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t – Review

From the Amazon reviewer Darryl Campbell:

People love statistics. Statistics, however, do not always love them back. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver’s brilliant and elegant tour of the modern science-slash-art of forecasting, shows what happens when Big Data meets human nature. Baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling: In all of these areas, Silver finds predictions gone bad thanks to biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. But he also shows where sophisticated forecasters have gotten it right (and occasionally been ignored to boot). In today’s metrics-saturated world, Silver’s book is a timely and readable reminder that statistics are only as good as the people who wield them.

Comments related to The Signal and the Noise book:

Tom Ontis · Top Commenter · San Francisco State University
With cocked left forefinger, sort of Southern accent: “…Arithmetic.’
Reply · 1 ·
· 3 hours ago

Dennis Flomo · Top Commenter · IT Production Business Analyst at Health Data Insights
It’s simple math…now conservatives can believe in polls, math, science, innovation and investment. Foxnews need to hire Nate Silver… Hennity and bill orielly have 1/3 of Silver’s brain.
Reply ·
· 4 hours ago

Robin Brenizer · Top Commenter · Co-Founder/Managing Partner at The Wilson Ellis Company
Lesson to the right, never, ever listen to the predictions of those that have money on a horse. Nate didn’t have money in this game. Just his reputation. Karl Rove had millions on the line.
Reply ·
· 4 hours ago

Ed Steel · Boston Architectural College
hey Dylan…you were wrong about most everything…why are you still employeed?
Reply ·
· 6 hours ago

Chris Lin
nate silver, you a boss.
Reply ·
· 6 hours ago

Indrani Dutta-Gupta · Jadavpur University
A whiz kid out of UChicago, our son’s alma mater! Made us proud again.
Reply ·
· 6 hours ago

Donna Renn · Top Commenter · Pastor at The United Methodist Church
Nate Silver won big last night. After weeks of critics who couldn’t dispute his math and so went after him personally (“small” and “effeminate” come to mind as two of the comments in the press), he was finally vindicated. He’ll be walking onto the stage of the Daily Show in just a few minutes. I feel like Stewart needs to hand him a medal, or something
Reply ·
· 6 hours ago

Keith Fannin · Top Commenter · University of Southern California
Dylan, how hard is it to admit that you were wrong, that Nate Silver, analytical thinking, and math were vindicated, and that Silver was unnecessarily maligned by the very same people who claim that global warming isn’t real, President Obama is a Kenyan and a socialist, “drill baby drill” constitutes an actual long term energy policy, rape and resulting pregnancy are an act of God, and that tax cuts for the wealthy “create good paying America jobs” and “pay for themselves”.

It is time for republicans to let the helium out of their balloons and come on back down to earth. America needs two legitimate parties who both use silly things like facts and math to come up with innovative and effective policy solutions for the challenges we face. That can’t happen as long as republicans are determined to blindly deny any fact or basic common sense analysis that might challenge any aspect of the broad underlying tenets of its party philosophy.
Reply · 1 ·
· 6 hours ago

eBook settlement offers Amazon and Apple eBook refunds

As part of the settlement terms in several states’ Attorneys General lawsuits against some of the Big Six publishers over alleged ebook price fixing, Amazon and Apple customers received some welcome news today: they would be receiving account credits on eligible purchases. Three publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon&Schuster, settled out of court in the resulting lawsuits and the monies paid will result in a credit to customers who purchased digital titles published by those three parties.

Amazon customers need take no action, but will notice an account credit typically ranging between thirty cents and $1.32 per eligible title purchased between April 2010 and May 2012. Those customers who would prefer to receive a check for the amount they are owed may do so by following the guidelines outlined in an email from Amazon.

The publishers, along with Macmillan and Penguin, were accused of collaborating with Apple to artificially raise the prices of ebooks under what they still maintain is an acceptable and legal “agency model.” At the time of the alleged anti-trust collaborations, Amazon was operating under the wholesale model that it had always employed for ebooks. This model allowed Amazon to sell ebooks from the major publishers at what was often a lesser price than Amazon had paid for them, a move the retailer employed to encourage customers to purchase the then-newly introduced Kindle e-readers.

It has been estimated that the alleged collusion between the publishers and the resulting requirement that Amazon raise its ebook prices cost consumers around $250 million. This account credit to Amazon customers is intended to recoup some of those consumer dollars.

eBook settlements checks to be requested via eBook AG settlements website

Customers of both, Apple and Amazon, also have the option to receive a check instead of a credit. Checks can be requested by calling 1-866-621-4153, or going to the Settlement website:  www.EBookAGSettlements.com

Amazon continues to roll out its content offerings in Europe. Soon, Amazon Prime members will be able to borrow books from the Kindle owners’ lending library. 200,000 books are available at the time of this writing. Amazon will increase the KDP Select program fund to catch up with the increase of demand in book lending.

According to Amazon, authors who choose to enroll in the Kindle Direct Publishing program and skip the publisher step earns 77 percent more royalties on average than other authors.

Like in the U.S., Harry Potter e-books will be available in the lending library. In October, the KDP select fund has been increased by $100,000 to $700,000. Amazon hints at another increase coming in November. Every time a book is borrowed, the author earns on average $2.29.

Over the past couple of months, Amazon has been trying to bring its ecosystem to Europe ahead of Kindle Fire HD‘s release. Amazon makes little or no money on hardware devices and hopes that customers will actually use the device and buy content.

When it comes to book lending, other companies have been trying to move away from the traditional buying model for eBooks. For example, Oyster is trying to bring the unlimited subscription model to e-books, with community and curation features.

Yet, the lending library launched last year without any of the big six publishers in the U.S. Most of the books available to lend are self-published books. Some restrictions apply as well. For example, you can only read one book at a time. But when you are a Prime subscriber, it’s a nice addition.

The lending library will be available the U.K., Germany and France at the end of October.

Now, Amazon.co.uk is selling 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books, and what is very noticeable is that Amazon introduced its Kindle reader in the UK only two years ago.

The latest press release related to growing ebook sales follows the companies’s announcementthat their media tablet computer, Kindle Fire,  would support international app sales in the near future. However, the company’s move towards international sales of ebooks was far more significant for authors and ebook publishers worldwide as it ensured a steady growing of readers ready to spend money on digital titles.

Last weekend Creston Mapes’ thriller Nobody became No. 1 best seller in the Amazon Kindle store and has gone on to sell thousands of electronic and paper editon copies since then.

Microsoft invests $300 million in new Barnes & Noble’s  subsidiary - Newco

Barnes & Noble has found a new, major partner in its fight to get an edge over Amazon and Apple in the market for e-books and the devices being used to consume them: it is teaming up with Microsoft in what the two are calling a strategic partnership, name yet to be determined. It will come in the form of a new subsidiary of B&N that will include all of its Nook business as well as its educational College business. Microsoft is making a $300 million investment in the subsidiary, valuing the company at $1.7 billion in exchange for around 17.6 percent equity in the subsidiary.

The news leaves the door open for B&N to eventually spin these off into a separate business altogether — or even sell them to Microsoft. And it leaves a load of questions about what B&N will do next with the Nook, which is currently built on a forked version of Google’s Android platform. The new company, referred to for the moment as “Newco”, will contain B&N’s digital business, as well as its College division. While Microsoft will take 17.6 percent, B&N will own 82.4 percent of the venture. This is a key way of getting more content on to the Microsoft platform — specifically e-books content to ensure that its Windows 8 tablets will be able to compete not only against the best-selling iPad but also the Kindle Fire from Amazon, along with the rest of the company’s e-readers. The Kindle Fire has stolen a march among Android tablet makers and part of the compelling offer is not only the low price ($199) but also the fact that it contains so much content, including seamless access to all of Amazon’s e-book offerings.

This is also a progression — a very big one — of the funding etudes that Microsoft has been making to developers to make sure they are making apps for the Windows Phone platform, a way of getting more content on its platforms, which, it can be argued, may have come too late to the market. The first product to come out of the door? A Nook application for Windows 8, the companies say.

And given that education has been one of Apple’s bigger pushes this year, and the obvious and close links between education and e-reading, it’s not too surprising to see that B&N has also put its College division into this subsidiary. Microsoft, too, has been courting the education market — making its biggest-ever cloud-services deal in the education sector. Nevertheless they have a long road ahead of them. In January, Apple noted that there were already 20,000 educational apps for iOS and that there were already 1.5 million devices deployed in schools, numbers that will inevitably have grown in the last 4-5 months with the launch of the new iPad and numerous initiatives to spread the tablet in the educational sector.

B&N and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents

There is a legal twist to the deal, too: the two companies say they have definitely sorted out their patent litigation now: “Moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products,” the two write in the release below. If Microsoft doesn’t use this as an opportunity of possibly persuading B&N to swap over to Windows 8 for a version of the Nook, it will also give it a very interesting inroad into developing more for Android.

As for B&N and the future of these products… this deal looks like it could potentially pave the way for B&N to spin off this business into its own standalone operation, if not into the waiting arms of Microsoft itself — long speculated to be looking at ways of gaining a stronger foothold in the area of mobile devices to better implement its bigger strategy. The idea of a subsidiary was something that B&N had first floated back in January, when it noted that it was weighing up how best to separate its digital business to “maximize shareholder value.”

There are many more questions — such as what this could mean for the company’s broader strategy for growing the market for the Nook (international being a key push that the company has yet to make, apart from some baby steps); and how well, exactly, those products are doing for the company: IDC puts the Nook’s share of the tablet market at just 3.5 percent. The company is holding a conference call on the deal later today and we’ll update as we learn more.

Comments on “Microsoft invests $300 million in new B&N subsidiary”:

Brian Daniel Gallof

It means next round of Nook devices will no longer run on Android. Let’s add the biggest forgotten thing to all this.. Microsoft was suing Barnes & Noble for infringing on patents.

Piet Opperman

Microsoft has become the fat kid who is always last to be picked for the team.

Sparta Kakanjac

I am on Amazon…..is the best.

The largest eBook sellers, such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon do practice the wholesale pricing model that allows them to purchase the rights to sell books at their own price. This practice sometimes helps the independent publishers to turn their works to the bestsellers. However, in Apple’s case only the big publishers can price books how they want to.

Along with the fact that getting an online presence is very important for any bookseller looking to take a piece of growing revenues for ebooks sales, expanding outside of the existing market is essential for B&N, as they want to get more interest  for their Nook ereader and attract more publishers and developers to its ePub ecosystem.

Pottermore Store website

“Pottermore Shop” – a new online hub for all digital stuff around Harry Potter

Pottermore.com, the official J.K. Rowling’s website that aims to become a digital hub for all things around Harry Potter books has been opened for business as the first and exclusive distributor of Harry Potter ebooks and audiobooks. This is for the first time in the history of digital publishing that a popular author has ventured forth to sell ebooks and audiobooks directly to the customers and completely bypass  online bookstores and even the publisher in the process. Thanks to the “Pottermore Shop” readers are able to buy the books directly from the website by simply choosing their ereader platform: as of ebooks, both Kindle and ePub format are available. Books are available in English (both GB and US).  French, Italian, German and Spanish version are expected to come soon.

Two biggest online bookstores, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are now directing customers wishing to buy Potter eBooks and audio-books to the Pottermore store due to affiliate marketing arrangements.

This is a development on a model that has seen proposals to tax online ads from the likes of Google and the revenues made from ISPs, in order to help out media companies that have been negatively impacted by the rise of digital content.

This newest tax, as described by the French daily Les Echos, would be applied not only to books sold online by companies like Amazon, but also those sold in larger physical stores, with the proceeds then going into a fund for smaller booksellers.

Amazon is not the only online bookseller in France — there are some very big local players, too, like FNAC, selling a range of goods in addition to books, just like Amazon does — but it is very popular there. France is also one of the international markets where Amazon has launched its Kindle ereader and ebooks.