An American CS prof talks against H1B visas

Some interesting points. Basically he says American students are avoiding tech and science fields because of the devaluation of the fields from cheaper foreign workers and that the foreigners are not better workers.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2011/03/an-internal-bra.html

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/03/21/161211/CS-Prof-Decries-Americas-Internal-Brain-Drain

Some notes on self-publishing books

Barry Eisler, a NY Times best-selling author, recently turned down a $500,000 advance and will self-publish his next book. The issue is what makes more money: 70% of everything forever, or $500,000 in advance that has to be earned back at 14.9% per sale, followed by 14.9% of a copy for a long time, with the knowledge that the book will eventually probably become unavailable. He chose to forgo the half mill.

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20110321/00183913568/best-selling-author-turns-down-half-million-dollar-publishing-contract-to-self-publish.shtml

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/22/0125218/Best-Selling-Author-Refuses-500k-Self-Publishes-Instead


26 of the Amazon Top 100 are currently occupied by indie authors, here's a post by John Locke, the current #1, who self-publishes and sells his books for $0.99. He pays an editor $1,000 who takes care of the cover art and converting his book to the various eformats. Apparently Amazon royalties pay the author 70% if the book is published at $2.99 or higher and only 35% if it's priced at $0.99.

"And yet, when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies--about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner."

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html


An IT book writer self-publishes, puts his book on Amazon's cloud. It's made him $9,000 since 2009.

http://slashdot.org/story/11/03/18/1932216/The-Adventure-In-Self-Publishing-an-IT-Book