200 Gigabyte Wireless Data Plan

For those of us who with a very poor quality ADSL connection and NBN still years in the future, mobile data has seemed like a tempting alternative. Price has been the sole limiting factor -- running to $10 per gigabyte. A recent package released by Optus represents a dramatic improvement in affordability. Home users in approved areas can now sign up for a $80 per month plan that gives users 200Gb of data. If this trend continues, landlines might be a thing of the past, even for power users. And NBN will find itself up against competitors with much lower infrastructure costs.

The Rise and Rise of Indie Authors

The Author Earnings website has worked hard at 'scraping' data from Amazon's various sites to provide unprecedented detail on sales data. As Amazon now represents close to a majority of print titles sold, knowing what is being sold and by whom is very interesting indeed. The data shows that independent authors represent a large and rapidly growing fraction of book sales on Amazon. There is also ample evidence that having a book listed on the Amazon bestseller lists provides a substantial boost to non-listed titles from the same author. Overall, Author Earnings claim that they identified over 9,000 authors earning more than USD $10,000 per year, and half of that number were earning over USD $20,000 per year. Read the whole report, which goes into much greater detail.