Humble eBook Bundle

Standard Deviation for ratings. I have a hunch that with the standard-deviation, all ratings for all books even out at 4/5. Not sure why, but I think that goodreads-users are too nice due to using real names.

Edit: Just played around with the "rating details" tab and numpy:

Magic for Beginners has a mean rating of 4.01 and a stddev of 0.99, Pirate Cinema has a mean rating of 3.85 and a stddev of 0.89, Pump Six has a mean rating of 4.11 and a stddev of 0.81, so looking at only the standard deviations, all books have a very similar rating. Interesting, but that doesn't tell me much, except that the standard-deviation is massive in this context.

(4.11) doesn't really tell me much, is that 4.11 out of 5, or 4.11 out of 10? (To pick a random rating).

Yes, I can not be lazy and visit the site to find out, but if you are leaving the comment up to be helpful, it would be appreciated to clarify their rating scheme for those of us who aren't familiar.

It isn't that much their fault either, since it is inherent human nature and culture to share, and having grotesque IP laws that conflict with what your perceived normalcy is can potentially damage profits!

On Linux the humble bundle was almost always the first chance to get a hold of the games, while on Windows they'd often all already been out for 6-12 month. I'd almost always already bought and played at least 3 of games in the bundle for $10-20 each and often the games that I hadn't bought where games that I wasn't interested in. So for me 'buying' the Humble bundle was a straight up donation to support a concept I liked, rather than a way to get games. I suspect many windows users where in the same position.

I'm usually around average Linux when I buy a Humble Bundle and I'm making under $50k a year.

(Given that it is not that hard to develop cross-platform especially since OS X is usually targeted as well.)

And there's another meta-cultural observation: European-style liberals barf at that idea, too.

If it were not for this "prix unique" law, there would be as many local bookstores as there are local disc stores out of Paris: 0, and apart from amazon and fnac, there would be no big bookstores. But we have quite a number of them (chapitre, le furet, cultura, decitre...). Don't forget that Amazon Europe is located in Luxembourg where the tax on books is one of the lowest in Europe (3%).

So I am happy to be able to buy my ebooks from independent french bookstores for the same price as it would be from amazon.

It stipulates that the publisher's book price on the back may only be discounted up to a further 5% by the retail store.

There are also other fixed book price laws [2] around the world.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law - English version [1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Lang - French and more information [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_Book_Price_Law

But it's a typical european intellectual view, especially in Germany and probably it's the same in France. Here we have the state support for the higher arts, like subventions for museums, to have them let a positive effect on the population. That is to counteract the evil influence of the pop-culture, especially of american movies and music. And all pc-games are garbage, responsible for kids killing people and the brutalization of the youth.

That view is deeply routed here and equally present in right-conservative circles as in left anti-imperialistic circles, who even in the 80s and 90s commonly didn't had a tv (or at least claimed to not watch it, if they had one, apart from watching the news and arte).

I hope that the following generations will change that, but just talk to a non-gamer about his view of pc-games. It will take years for a normal development here, though movies are much more accepted now (still censored, of course, and only the removal of the censorship will show me that this society here has accepted them fully)

Of course there are already intellectuals not fitting into that scheme, an example is Wolfram Knorr who wrote the book "Weil sie wissen, was sie tun" ("Because they know what they do") about the quality of the american influence on the german culture, showing the beginning of intellectual german anti-americanism in the 20s and more so in the 50s and the following development.

Anyway, that thought of a good german/european high-culture being in a fight with the american low-culture leads to a lot of state-intervention here, a process in which not only museums and theatres are given money so they can focus on not popular higher arts, but also books are bound to have the same high price so they aren't devalued as mere products.

Something like that bundle couldn't exist here, which is a shame (and which maybe explains the high average price).

p.s.: i just saw that kindle is also on the appstore. So i may sync without itunes AND have it on my smartphone (android) and the ipad. yay!

(and no, I'm not affiliated with them, I just think they've built a great platform)

I think this is a chrome PDF viewer issue. You may want to fix this.