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).
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
Wages of Wins Journal 
Eric
September 16, 2007
Completely off topic of the latest post…it’s too late now for this fantasy season, but can you write an article about your ideal fantasy football scoring system?
dberri
September 16, 2007
Eric,
Not sure I have one. I play fantasy basketball, but have stayed away from football. Football performance is very hard to predict so the winners are just people who guess better. Basketball performance is easier to predict so it seems like the fantasy game for that sport requires a bit more skill.
Kevin Broom
September 17, 2007
Are you planning to make the paperback updates available to those who paid for your hard copy book? Or do we have to buy the paperback as well?
Owen
September 17, 2007
Not sure I love the new look. I feel like the type is much smaller and harder to read. And having it centered doesn’t do much for me. I think I liked first format the best, and this one the least, but that may change as I get used to it.
Mike H
September 17, 2007
Yuck, I hate this new look. The old one wasn’t great but it was better than this.
Kontiki
September 18, 2007
I prefer the new look, better use of space to me.
Anonymous
September 18, 2007
When I am writing a blog post on wordpress I can put
in the text and it will only put the lines before the “” in the main page. It will have a “Continue Reading” link after that which leads to the rest of the article. You might want to give that a try.
Also, not a big fan of the new theme. It’s too narrow. I prefer themes that are fluid width as opposed to fixed width.
Anonymous
September 18, 2007
Hmm.. it seems what I typed has disappeared. Let’s try this again. The separator is:
without the spaces. Let’s see if this works.
Anonymous
September 18, 2007
Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s try again. The separator is:
without the underscores.
Anonymous
September 18, 2007
Wow, this is tough. The comments seem to be filtering the key word out. Okay. The magic seprator is
{(less than),(exclamation point),(minus),(minus),”more”,(minus),(minus),(greater than)}.
Anonymous
September 18, 2007
This is probably easier. Check out this page from wordpress:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More
Sorry for spamming your comments. Just trying to help…
dberri
September 18, 2007
Thanks Anonymous. It turns out there actually is a button in the menu bar that you can click in to activate this feature. The damn button has been there all along. Never noticed it before, though.
Anonymous
September 19, 2007
Well, what do you know, it is there!
Shows what I know.
lastwownews
September 20, 2007
dberri , you r right ! :)
Tom Mandel
September 20, 2007
Very hard to read the text on your site in the new layout.
1. too small
2. “fully justified” (making it left-justified would provide immediate help)
3. too small… did I say that already?