You are sitting alone in this confined space. Except occasional distant noise from late night trains, the house is simply dead silent. The bathroom door next to your elbow is loosely shut, you can hear your breath echoing inside this space. The dim light above your head can barely light up the room, as well as the paper you are holding. But it casts an annoying shadow of you head onto the paper, making it even hard to read the small print. You move the paper closer and closer to your nose, tracing every line of the horror novel, and your heart beat is mixed with your ever faster breathing.

Can you picture this experience in your head? I am trying to describe a Japanese product: a horror novel that is also a toilet paper roll. The name of the novel is called ドロップ (Drop) written by 鈴木光司 (Suzuki Koushi). Mr. Suzuki also wrote the famous horror novel リング (Ring).

From User Experience point of view, the combination of toilet paper and horror novel is a brilliant idea.

• Time condition: People are usually free for 3-5 minutes (or longer) in bathroom. They would find all sort of things to kill the time, such as handheld gaming device, magazine and book.
• Emotional condition: When a person is alone in a confined, quiet space (the bathroom), he/she is more emotionally vulnerable to horror stories.
• Convenience: toilet paper is always placed in a bathroom, there’s no doubt about it. It is right at the place of reach, doesn’t require battery, and you don’t need to bring a book in and out of the bathroom. Even better, after reading a page you can simply use it for it’s primary purpose: toilet paper.

A walk in a local bookstore is a good way to observe the culture. In a Japanese bookstore I discovered a very interesting book called “英語でTwitter!” (Twitter in English!) It is a book full of short English tweets paired with Japanese translation. The tweets are grouped by categories such as Cosmetic, Work, Relation…etc. Here are some examples:

• Can’t sleep lately.（最近、眠れない。）
• Just had a tooth removed/taken out.（痛み止めが切れて来た。メチャクチャ痛い！）
• Gained 2 kilos this week. Agrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.（今週２キロ増えた．ギャーーー！）

Japan is quite famous for it’s huge variety of manuals, with spectrum of topics including falling love, playing golf, getting married, job hunting, interview, and committing suicide.

While some argue that Twitter is a social network full of useless noise from people broadcasting what kind of sandwich they had for lunch, here is a book full of such examples encouraging you to report every bit of your life that’s very much uninterested to all human kind except yourself. Entertaining cute little book, but not sure if it’s really useful.

Some more self-help manuals:

The book is obtained from LibriVox (http://librivox.org/anthem-by-ayn-rand/), a volunteer community that recruits people all over the world to read public domain books and then distributes them for free, as in free-of-charge AND DRM-protection free. I am always a supporter of the idea that education and knowledge should be easily available to those who seek them.

Another thing is that, although the iTunes and iPod duo (more accurately the iPhone in my case) supports audiobooks out of the box, the process of putting the audio files together is not trivial.

• (1) You have to go to your file info and change the type to “Audiobook” in order to make them appear in the “Audiobook” tab on iTunes.
• (2) Once sync into your iPod, the files are grouped under one album, much like the CD albums in the Music section. However, if your audiobook is ripped from CD, or obtained from “your favorite sources”, chances are you will get a load of small 5-min MP3 files. Navigating through the multiple files on your iPod and keeping track of your listen is very difficult.

To solve the problem, I did some research and found a paid application call Audiobook Builder from Splasm (http://www.splasm.com/audiobookbuilder/). The app costs $10 USD, which is the average price for one audiobook, but the productivity it saves you is worth way more than that. You can stitch multiple MP3 files into one gapless chapter, and bind multiple chapters into one book. It also automatically splits a super long audiobook into multiple parts of your desire length, makes it easy and efficient to transfer the files and store them. Most importantly, since you have one audiobook file (with M4B extension) rather than 96 small MP3 files, the built-in bookmarking can remember where you left off last time and resume from that point next time you listen to it.

A Whole New Mind

I am reading a book called “A Whole New Mind” from Daniel H. Pink, who argues that right-brain thinking, or the abilities to solve problems in a holistic, artistic, and humanized perspectives, rather than solely focusing on the technical, logical thinking and analytical skill, may provide insights to such question.

Technical skills are becoming easier to replace than ever. Because of their advancement of higher education, manufacturing experience and design quality, India and China are becoming the logical choices for companies that are trying to lower their product research and development cost in order to remain competitive in the global market. Characteristics of the western engineers, such as accuracy, reliability and attention in details, can now be achievable from their Asian counterparts. Also since the cost to hire these Asian engineers is low, the companies afford more of them.

Secondly, computer power, network speed and technology are advancing in breath-taking speed. Many tasks considered uneconomic and inefficient today will become cheap to achieve in the next year. We can almost reliably expect technology breakthroughs to happen in an annual basis if not shorter, which will make your craziest business ideas today to come true very soon. In other words, the importance to optimize your software and product engineering is diminishing. You can use many easy to learn, high-level scripting tools, without worrying about the computer resources overhead, and still create very usable products.

Therefore, we cannot compete just at the engineering level anymore. Instead of engineering isolated hardware and software products, we should offer holistic solutions that cater the whole customer experience. When designing a solution, we have to think about the big picture, the context, graphical presentation, interactive technology, customer support, future development and maintenance, community management, and many more. The tasks should not be divided and assigned to individuals who work in their own silos and not communicating with each other. Everybody should participate and contribute their ideas. Better yet, those who can master the usage of both their left brain (technical, analytical, engineer’s mind) and the right brain (creative, artistic, empathetic, contextual mind) will be successful.

I am not planning to be a software developer for life. What I want to be is an “artistic geek”, or “technical designer”. Seems oxymoron?

First, I want to relate this concept of giving away free items to the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. In his book, namely at Chapter 3 – The Cost of Zero Cost, and Chapter 13 – Beer and Free Lunches, Dan illustrated some interesting researches on human psychology and behavior towards free products and services.

• the experience of getting free things is pleasurable.
• there is less sense of lost ties to free things. We don’t feel sorry for abandoning them after using it for a while, or even not used them at all.
• even if the free items are not completely satisfying, we tend to forgive and keep using it.

Also, as illustrated in Chris Anderson’s another book The Long Tail and many other similar books that describe the new Internet business ecology, we know that:

• the cost of maintaining atoms, which physical products and services, is relatively higher
• the cost of maintaining electronic bits and bytes, such as online banking services, book store, music store…etc, is getting cheaper and cheaper, at a rate of getting about halved every year. For example, the cost of maintaining Youtube at 2010 will be half as much as 2009.
• the technique of offering products by scarcity is not ideal nowadays. With the advancement of digital storage, commercial tools and internet technology, we can serve a large amount of products digitally with abundance. We can serve niche markets without the concern of shelf space, physical storage, logistic cost and so on.

It will be fun to see how the traditional media reacts to this. Will they freak out? Will they accept and adopt the model? Will they try hard to resist the trend of openness and free, even though more and more evidence shows that it is inevitable?

Another interesting thought about the free release of FREE is translation. As a participant of TED open translation project, I am very interested to see, that how this free availability of the book would trigger a wave of internationalization, in an unimaginable speed and near-professional quality. Inspired by a post in The Global Voices Online – “Japan: ‘Yoshiharu Habu and Modern Shogi’, an Open Translation Project” published in May, is it possible to reproduce the same voluntary translation movement?

Resources mentioned in this post:

• About Chris Anderson
• FREE on Scribd.com (unfortunately, not accessible from Canada as for July 13, 2009)
• FREE on Audible.com
• FREE direct mp3 download (courtesy to Wired.com)
• FREE on Google Book
• Predictably Irrational
• Dan Ariely
• The Long Tail
• “Japan: ‘Yoshiharu Habu and Modern Shogi’, an Open Translation Project” from Global Voices Online

Here is the the customer experience for sampling/buying a book:

• First, you must phone or check online to see if the closest bookstore carries the book. If they do not, you must request them to order some for you, and then wait for days until they call you back to notify you that the 5 copies are now available, and that you can only hold it for 48 hours until they sell it to someone else.
• If they otherwise carry the book in store, you must immediately drive to the store and get it. Speaking of driving, I hope you are not too concern about the gas price, traffic jam and carbon footprint, since it is quite some overhead to travel for a distance to get a stack of paper bound together.
• If you want to first read a few chapters of the book to see if it’s really your thing, you will have to either stand next to the shelves, sit on the floor or bring own foldable chair to sit on for hours. Keep in mind that there are only few copies of the book, so people may want to just buy the one you’re reading now. By the way, the store closes at 8pm.

Now with the newer Amazon model:

• You can “Look Inside”, sample the table of content and a few random pages that are not connected and hardly making sense. At the time I write this post, Amazon still hasn’t open the “Look Inside” feature for this book.
• You can still pre-order the book online, so when the book is available, Amazon will ship it to your house. Still, I don’t really like the overhead of carbon footprint and stuff, but I’m cool with that.
• Sure, they have Kindle (which is not available in Canada) that can take away those tree chopping, printing and logistic stuffs, but still you cannot sample the full book just like you could in the bookstore.

Now with full book viewing on Scribd.com:

• 24/7 reading at your personal computer: no store hours, standing by the bookshelves and angry eyes on your back for keeping the book too long.
• Sample the book as much as you want, since it is fully available to you. Not just the table of content and a few random pages.
• Immediate purchasing in PDF so you can load it into other reader gadgets of choice.

This free, full book reviewing concept is still not very popular in main stream publishing industry, but I am really looking forward to see some smart publisher, who gets it and understand that the value of the “free” is so powerful and manipulative.

You can learn more about Chris Anderson on his website at http://www.longtail.com.