The Paperback is Now Available and a New WoW Journal Look

Posted on September 16, 2007 by

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The paperback version of The Wages of Wins – which I announced two weeks ago – is now available at Amazon.com.  With a new version comes a new price.  The hardcover was priced at Amazon.com for $19.77 (although you could pay more elsewhere, as I noted in June of 2006).  The paperback – which includes a number of updates – sells for $13.57.   Yes, you are now getting more for less. 

And not only do you get an updated version of our book, you also will get a new  front cover (which you can see below or click here for a larger version of the new cover).

paperbackcover.jpeg

Plus there is a new back cover, with a new selection or reviews, which you can read below (you can also read more from these reviews and others on the page titled Reviews of The Wages of Wins):

The New Back Cover Reviews

“Wages is provocative, stimulating, and challenging.” Dick Friedman, Sports Illustrated

“The Wage of Wins brilliantly and provocatively argues that our eyes betray us when we watch professional athletes.  To see the truth about how good a point guard or quarterback is, we need the help of algorithms.” Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

“When I read the book, I was impressed by the amount of effort that went into compiling the reams of data that underlie the work… The fundamental case the authors make is that the statistical analysis shows that the conventional wisdom about sports is dead wrong — that the data, as they put it, ‘offers many surprises.'” Joe Nocera, New York Times.

Each of these reviews came out in May or June of 2006. After more than a year it is still nice to read each of these.  It’s also nice to see your book in paperback.  Academic authors publish many, many hardcover books each year.  Few of these sell enough to justify a paperback edition.  So it’s nice to see our book attain this status (and the paperback does look really neat).

A New Look for the WoW Journal

In addition to announcing the paperback (again), I also wanted to comment on the new look for The Wages of Wins Journal.  WordPress.com – who are the people who provide the software behind this forum – provides a number of themes that people can use for their blogs.  Although these themes have some flexibility, unless you have programming skills (which I don’t), you generally have to go with how the theme is constructed. 

What I would prefer in a theme is one where the first paragraph of each post is listed and then the reader could click on a link to read the rest of the entry.  Unfortunately, I do not see any themes at WordPress.com that have this feature.  The previous theme seemed like progress in the right direction, with one entry listed on top and several entries listed with just a title.  But the comments on this theme were hard to navigate and furthermore, I wanted people to be able to see more of other entries than just the title.

So now we have this current theme.  This theme goes back to having several posts listed in their entirety.  So you can read all of this entry (and if you go this far, you are almost done) and then continue reading the previous entry (which is a story on The Non-NBA Melo).

Again, not sure I like the latest look of the WoW Journal.  But again, not sure how to get exactly what I want.

I should note that WordPress.com provides these blogs for free.  So I can’t complain too much (okay, I really can’t complain at all).  Still, if anyone has any idea how I can get closer to what I described above, or has any other comments, please let me know.

– DJ

Posted in: Basketball Stories