First, here is the article that I found. It says the Dan Brown’s new book was downloaded 100,000 times illegally. So, I wanted to find a few numbers to put this in perspective.

So, I tried to find out how many sales were included. This article says that in the first week, 2 million copies of Dan brown’s book were sold and that 5% or 100,000 were in digital format.

The amount of shrinkage (lost merchandise) is about 2% of sales. Here is a good article that describes this. Applying this number to the Lost Symbol sales, you get 40,000 books were stolen or lost.

Depending on how you look at it, the eBook downloads are 250% of what is expected. So, yes, ebook downloads are pretty big compared to normal and compared to amount of books actually sold.

But I wanted to go a step further and found this article. It describes where the money goes. I applied this to Dan Brown’s book.

$3.55 – Pre-production – This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 – Printing – Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 – Marketing – Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 – Wholesaler – The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 – Author Royalties

$4.13 retailer and $0.25 for digital retailer.

Total is $15.37 for a printed book and $9.74 for an eBook (remove printing and wholesaler cost).

However, I wanted to see how much each person made for this two week run. Remember, this is for a two week run.

$7.1 million – Pre-production – This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$5.66 million – Printing – Ink, glue, paper, etc
$4 million – Marketing – Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$5.6 million – Wholesaler – The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$8.4 million – Author Royalties
$8.26 million – Retailers

Total is $39 million dollars for the first 2 weeks. Pretty incredible. So, thinking of making money, write a book.

Until next week.

Don

Google Power Meter

The beginning:

I wanted to start my post with what prompted this journey, basically that my wife and I (collectively WE) believe we are using too much electricity.

Since this blog about numbers, we own a 4,700 sq ft in Concord, Massachusetts. According to our bill, we use about 2,468 kWh per month. At first glance I could not tell is this was high or not.

So, I called our local electricity provider. Concord has it’s own electricity plant, Concord Municipal Light Plant (CMLP). I have to be honest and say that every time I have called them, they are the most pleasant and helpful people I have ever met. I talked with Dale Cronan who is assistant director. He talked with me for over 20 minutes and was very helpful. Dale told me that the median residential usage for Concord is 684 kWh per month. WOW. We are so far above that.

But this only answered part of the question. The next part is: how big is the median house in Concord? So, I called the assessors office. I assumed that they would have statistics on every house in town. I emailed the assessors office and a Joanne Graziano wrote back saying that she did not know the average sq ft per home in Concord and would not know where to get it. Since I have had a run in with Joanne before, I am not surprised by the answer. So I went to the assessors page and found the 2009 and 2010 assessors report that lists every house in Concord with effective sq ft numbers. So, I found out some interesting information.

The average sq ft for single family residence in Concord in 2010 is 3,193 sq ft and the median is 2,810 sq ft. Good information. The largest house in Concord is 18,169 and the smallest is 470 sq ft. A note on these numbers; this is effective sq ft which includes garage space. This means that there is about 6% too much space but I am going to leave that for another conversation.

Below is a graph of the distribution of house sizes in Concord.

So, from this I derived the median house size of 2,810 sq ft and recall that the median electricity use is 684 kWh per house per month. So,  that comes to just under 0.25 kWh per house per month. OK, this is a terrific start.

Now if I input my house information, 4,700 sq ft, I get an expected usage of 1175 kWh per month. From the first calculation, we are using 2,468 kWh per month. Almost twice as much. So we have to start cutting back.

Earlier this week, I ordered a device I found on the internet. It is a whole house electricity monitoring device, the TED 5000. What makes this device different is that is monitors and sends the data to a computer program in the house but also sends the data to a new program called Google PowerMeter, which allows you to monitor usage from anywhere. I cannot wait for it to arrive and install it to start measuring our energy use. However, do NOT order it from The Energy Store. When I placed the order, they said it was in stock and would arrive in 3 days. A few days later, I received an email saying that the parts are not coming to the manufacturer. I receive an update every few days saying it is not coming, even though my order is marked complete on their website. Typical of a low quality retailer, bait and switch.

Anyway, if the unit comes soon, I will update this blog with that information. If not, I will continue my analysis of the data provided.

Don

P.S. All of the information I have received or found is public information. I have not asked for private information and have not been given private information for this analysis.

I have a home DVR that I customer built using a package called SageTV. I have been using it for over 5 years, since about the time TiVO came out and I love it because I can record our favorite shows and stream them to any room in the house and any computer, both inside and outside the house.

Last week, I installed an add-on program that allows me to stream video from multiple sites including CBS, NBC, ABC, and Netflix and HULU. When I started to think about this, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of video that I could watch, so I decided to add up all the hours of video I could watch. For simplicity, I made some assumptions about the amount of shows available, but I think I was pretty close.

First for the big one, Netflix. According to a snapshot of Netflix’s website found here, Netflix has over 17,000 videos and television shows available on demand. Assuming a 50/50 split, that is 8,500 movies at an average length of 1.75 hours (I looked it up) and 8,500 TV shows at .75 each. That is a total of 21,250 hours of video to watch. Although I am going to continue, that means if I watch Netflix straight for 16 hours per day, it would take me 1,328 days or 3.6 years. Wow. That does not include all the new content added daily.

So, next was Hulu. According to Wikipedia, there is expected to be about 10,000 hours of programming on Hulu. This sounded light but then on a Hulu blog, I found a reference that it would take from March 12, 2009 to Jan 4, 2010 to watch everything on their site. That works out to 7,152 hours of programming. Ok, so Hulu has a lot of clips instead of movies.

From here on, I am going to summarize what I found per sire and add them up.

1. Netflix – 21,250
2. Hulu – 10,000
3. CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC – about 2,000 each
4. All the secondary stations, F/X, SyFy, CNN, others about 2000 each for a total of 20,000 hours.
5. Nasa and other specialty networks – another 5,000
6. My internal video collection – 2,000

So, adding these up, I get about 66,250 hours of available video. I am going to assume that there is overlap, but during my sample, there is not as much as you think. So remove 25% or overlap content, or we have 49,687 hours of content.  For this next calculation, I used the average time each person watched television per day, 6 hours, 47 minutes.

So if watched all this content for the average viewing time, it would take 7,325 days in a row or 20 years. Remember, I have not included YouTube, Google Videos, or other user sites. Perhaps in the next post.

So the next time my wife complains that I watch too much television, I will tell her that I have not even scratched the surface.

Don

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D) is presently asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS
to rebuild New Orleans . Interesting number… what does it mean?

A. Well… if you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, and child) you each get $516,528.

Washington , D. C HELLO!
Are all your calculators broken??

I did not quite believe the numbers so I checked them out. First I found the reference and it seems that Senator Landrieu did propose this money in 2005 and even admited that is a lot of money. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/politics/23congress.html

But, although this money will go to all of Louisiana, a lot will probably go to New Orleans. So, Louisiana has 4.4 million residents, so each person would get $56, 818. For a family of four, that is $227, 272. Now, I looked up the media family income for Louisiana, and it is $39,000 per family. That means each family would get 6 years of income. Sobering.

But wait, if the average tax rate for a family earning $39,000 is about 20% (Federal Income Tax only), that comes to $7,800 per year. So it would take all the residents of Louisiana 29.13 years to pay back this money if all they did was pay for the bill. Of course that is with no interest added.

First let me apologies to all the Louisiana residents as I did not mean to pick on your or your beautiful state. I just picked the article.

So, lessens learned:

1. All the numbers are accurate in this analysis, but numbers can be made to accommodate the writer and the reader.

2. We need better measurements before we spend money we do not have.

Comments please.

Don

Enough about me, as I am boring enough.

I started this blog to discuss numbers that we use everyday but we do not quite realize what they mean to us. I will come up with as many examples as I can and do the analysis and research but if anyone has any ideas for number analysis, then please send them and I will do the work.

I hope you enjoy and would love to have any comments.

Don