O'Reilly talks about the lessons learned by its foray into e-book publishing.

Many people, both inside and outside of the publishing and media industry, are skeptical about the potential of paid content on mobile phones, especially given the troubled history of e-books. I beg to differ. In December 2008, O'Reilly's "iPhone: The Missing Manual" was published as an iPhone app. Since its release, the app has outsold the printed book, which is a best seller in its own right. We're learning a lot from the experience. Here our some of the questions that we're starting to answer.

Was the iPhone app for the "Missing Manual" an anomaly? After all, iPhone owners are the most likely audience for the "Manual."

O'Reilly: Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. This was a best-selling author on a red-hot topic. We're gearing up to release about 20 more books as iPhone apps, but realistically we don't expect any of those to sell as well as this first one.

Is the iPhone the most convenient place to get content about problems you're trying to solve on a computer?

For many of our readers, a first or second pass through one of our programming books is mainly about orienting to the landscape and getting a sense of the platform and what's possible, not about solving a particular problem at hand. The iPhone is a perfectly suitable environment for that kind of reading.

Won't you make less money selling iPhone apps than books? The computer book market is the computer book market, period. It has a certain size, and that's it. If you convert that market into iPhone app buyers instead of book buyers, say good-bye to your publishing business.

It would be economically bad news to sell a $5 product to someone who would otherwise pay $50. But it's good to sell a $5 product to someone who would not otherwise be a customer (provided, of course, that the marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost). For Safari Books Online, for direct sales of our e-books and now for this (single) iPhone app, the data suggests that they have created growth without sacrificing print market share. For example, our market share for printed computer books sold at retail was 14% in 2004, and is now 16%. According to Nielsen Bookscan data, the print version of iPhone: The Missing Manual has sold nearly as many copies as the next two competing titles combined in the time period since the app version went on sale in December.

This data only goes back to mid-January, but the 90-, 30- and seven-day averages on Amazon sales rank for the printed book have been steadily improving, suggesting that sales of the iPhone app version are not cannibalizing print sales--and may even be helping them.

LONDON, Dec 21 (Reuters) - International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said insufficient fiscal stimulus by governments to tackle the global slowdown may make a bad 2009 even worse, according to an interview released on Sunday.

Strauss-Kahn told BBC radio that the IMF may need to cut its next economic growth forecasts, due in January, referring to "2009 as really being a bad year".

"I'm specially concerned by the fact that our forecast, already very dark ... will be even darker if not enough fiscal stimulus is implemented," he said in an interview.

The IMF has called for higher government spending and temporary tax cuts worth $120 trillion, or 2 percent of global annual economic output, to fill the gap caused by slumping private demand following the credit crunch.

Britain has announced fiscal stimulus worth around 1 percent of output, and despite "disturbing" level of public debt, Strauss-Kahn said more public borrowing would be the lesser of two evils.

"The question of having social unrest has been highlighted by journalists and I can understand that, but it's only part of the problem," he said. "The problem is that the whole society is going to suffer." (Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

The problem with talking about jobs-per-kilowatt hour.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The details of President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus plan for early next year are not yet drafted, but one thing is clear: Obama wants a lot of the stimulus focused on creating "green jobs."

A supposed benefit of technology like wind power and solar power is that it creates more jobs per kilowatt hour than investments in other industries. So if you want to tackle the environment and unemployment, why not plow money into whichever green technology creates the most jobs per kilowatt hour?

A recent report from the Center for American Progress, the liberal Washington think tank with many of its scholars now helping develop policy for the Obama administration, cites this as one of the most compelling reasons for a "Green Recovery." CAP claims that its $100 billion plan would "create nearly four times more jobs than spending the same amount of money within the oil industry and 300,000 more jobs than a similar amount of spending directed toward household consumption."

The American Wind Energy Association claims it is wind power that creates the most jobs per kilowatt hour. One oft-cited statistic is that there are 27% more jobs per kilowatt-hour from wind than from coal, and 66% more from wind than from natural gas.

Is that true? And does that make it good policy?

"I'm not sure how clearly it's been empirically demonstrated," says Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "To the extent it's true, it illustrates these technologies aren't that efficient."

Green says this focus looks an awful lot like the "broken window fallacy." The fallacy is this: A kid throws a rock through a shopkeeper's window and therefore has helped the economy by creating work for window makers. If he breaks windows every night, he might even create a job for a janitor to clean up the shards.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday rescinded guidance it issued 42 years ago that has allowed tobacco companies to make claims about tar and nicotine levels based on testing by a machine.

In its advertising, the cigarette industry uses a test known at the Cambridge Filter Method to support any factual statements of tar and nicotine content in cigarette smoke. But the commission said the test method is flawed. It also said that the resulting advertisements touting tar and nicotine levels could cause consumers to believe that lighter cigarettes were safer.

The commission said it would not allow tobacco companies to use the FTC's "stamp of approval."

"Our action today ensures that tobacco companies may not wrap their misleading tar and nicotine ratings in a cloak of government sponsorship," said Commissioner Jon Leibowitz.