Everything Is Bullshit: A Book by Priceonomics

It seems like the Amazon reviews might be stacked. There certainly are a ton of them popping up at 10 am this morning. Plus you can always tell a sock puppet review when they don&#x27;t actually mention content and say things like &quot;Greatest Book Evah&quot; instead.<p>I know it&#x27;s important to appear that the book is a proven reading experience, and reviews are the essential way to do that, but fake&#x2F;paid&#x2F;friend reviews just raise red flags.<p>I&#x27;m a huge fan of Priceonomics, and I would love to buy their book, but my concern is that a good portion of the book is repackaged articles. And anything that is a &quot;heavily edited mashup&quot; makes me cringe.<p>&quot;Everything Is Bullshit consists of some new essays, some of our favorite older essays, and some chapters that are heavily edited mashups of various pieces we’ve written before.<p>If you’re a fan of our blog, we hope the new essays will be reason enough to buy the book: The Seal Clubbing Business, Why Is Art Expensive, How to Sell Nothing for $1000, The Big Lie, The World’s Most Expensive Free Credit Report, and The Food Industrial Complex.<p>Some of our most popular essays on diamonds, taxi medallions, academic publishing, wine, colleges, and other bullshitty things also make an appearance. Some of the essays are in a different form than when we originally published them; others look mostly the same.&quot;<p>So, with the sock puppet reviews, and the essays that &quot;look mostly the same&quot;, they didn&#x27;t convert me into a buyer.<p>My advice:<p>1. Sincere pre-release reviews. Praise and criticism. 2. A clear TOC with the new stories outlined (and republished ones linked to) 3. Enroll in Kindle Match. $9 an Ebook is outside the optimum pricing range for Ebooks. (2.99-4.99) 4. Use this to build the Priceonomic brand and not as a revenue structure. Price accordingly. 5. Look at your Freakonomics and Gladwell covers. I like yours, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the best version you could come up with. Though I recognize that good covers are hard. Very hard.<p>If you want my help, msg me. This, all of this, is what I do.

I wouldn&#x27;t have said it in so much words, but the authors are onto an important new business model:<p><pre><code> free web stuff and sell books </code></pre> The key point is that content in the form of a book (a unit of meaningful discourse) can be productized and offered in a sidebar. Instead of advertisements that pay micro cents per impression, why not offer a book and make 40% profit on print books and 97% profit on eBooks sold?<p>I&#x27;m not sure this will work for journalism, but for a lot of other types of content (ahm... hm.... textbooks), it&#x27;s going to work for sure. The questions are: (1) what kind of reading is better done in book-sized chunks, and (2) how to decide which content goes into the free stuff and how much into the paid book.<p>The OPs are using the improved blog posts + new content equation, which has never been tried before. It will be very interesting to watch.

Just did an impulsive amazon checkout. All this frictionless online shopping is getting dangerous.<p>HackNews -&gt; Amazon -&gt; Paypal -&gt; Gmail (confirmation) in less then 1 minute.

Just a quick suggestion to the Priceonomics team... Start with the bottom half of the article. I had to go half way down the page to find out what the book is about. The first half talks about you WAY too much.

The fake praise at the top is a great touch. All the reviews on amazon are 5 stars, too.

I&#x27;ve enjoyed Priceonomics blog posts and will probably get the book. Anyone remember when this was a pricing service startup though? Did they pivot to writing?

Kinda off topic, but still: anyone besides me noticed how the logo and the favicon looks a lot like PayPal&#x27;s?<p><a href="https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic/i/logo/rebrand/ppcom.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paypalobjects.com&#x2F;webstatic&#x2F;i&#x2F;logo&#x2F;rebrand&#x2F;ppcom...</a><p><a href="http://priceonomics.com/static/images/logo/front.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;static&#x2F;images&#x2F;logo&#x2F;front.png</a>

its amazing to me that these guys pivoted (or at least forked) from data services to journalism, but i think they do a phenomenal job as writers. watching their path has been as confusing as its been encouraging. congratulations on your book!

I&#x27;m genuinely confused about the legality about building a business whose sole purpose is to scrape the web, repackage and sell that information.<p>One side of the fence, you have all this publicly accessible information, so it&#x27;s like.. why not? Anyone can obtain it. Why should you be restricted?<p>Then on the other side you have companies who will place all sorts of legal restrictions, TOS&#x2F;EULAs, etc to prevent against web scraping; sending out cease &amp; desists and even sometimes going as far as taking someone to court.<p>What&#x27;s the best + safest approach here for a company like Priceonomics?

I have never so quickly impulse bought a kindle book. Didn&#x27;t even read reviews, since I love their blog so much.

Looks like they read their own guest posts...<p>The Economics of Writing a Book, by Carter Phipps <a href="http://priceonomics.com/can-authors-make-money-selling-books/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;can-authors-make-money-selling-books...</a>

Just curious -- how much of the book is based on blog content and how much is new?

I was so expecting the justification for pricing the kindle version at $9.26!

In japan the kndle version costs 20 percent more. That too is bullshit.

Go Priceonomics! I really enjoy their approach to journalism.

It made me chuckle that trying to share the book on Amazon using the email share option on the page is blocked. I suspect due to the word Bullshit in the title

They should be more specific: Everything is Bullshit, except for this Book. Otherwise people may arrive to wrong conclusion.

Thanks for explaining that you get $6 either way (Hardcopy or Kindle) I would have assumed you get more with the hard copy.

Looks great! Any plans releasing this as an audiobook? I do most of my reading while walking or washing dishes these days.

Can you buy it in an ebook format other than Kindle?

Not purchasable as a print copy in germany. And no, I will not buy a license to read it on my not existing kindle. The joys of Amazon.

I think this book should get some kind of Godwin award for mentioning hitler in the fourth paragraph.

No iBook?

Can I get this on iBooks?

I know my karma is going to get nuked, but as a datapoint to the authors of Priceonomics: I&#x27;ll <i>never</i> buy a book with a curseword in the title. It screams &quot;amateur hour&quot;.<p>EDIT: Maybe you can use that topic for an upcoming blog post.

I guess when you can&#x27;t think of a creative title, just use a profanity.<p>I don&#x27;t want my 9-year-old to be exposed to this kind of language either on the coffee table or on the tablet, so I won&#x27;t be buying the book.<p>Could you put out a PG-rated version for those of us prudish and old-fashioned types?