Dark Value, a new book published today

I wrote this brief book in 2015 and promptly put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Then a couple of days ago  (May 3, 2016), Virginia Postrel posted a Bloomberg story about a new pricing policy by Uber.

What provoked Virginia was that Uber is now insisting that tips by removed from the Uber fare. This has a clear and irritating effect.

As Virginia puts it,

“One of the best things about Uber is that when you arrive at your destination you can just wish the driver a good day and get out of the car. No fumbling with your wallet, no calculating tips, no waiting for the credit card to go through, no juggling a pen, no asking for a receipt. It’s a seamless transaction. The company charges your credit card and e-mails you a receipt.”

“Aha!” I thought, “Uber doesn’t get dark value.” One of the things that has prompted me to neglect this little book was the idea that the argument was perhaps too obvious to need stating. But here was proof that it wasn’t obvious at all and that, for want of an understanding of dark value, Uber had made a regrettable decision. They had destroyed some of the dark value they once created. More precisely, they had destroyed some of the value that had helped them discover and create a new industry.

So I dug around on my hard drive and fished out the file.

Here’s the abstract

Innovators like Airbnb, Uber and Netflix are creating dark value. The trouble with dark value is that it’s hard to see and hard to harvest. I believe dark value is a chronic problem in the innovation and sharing economies. We will examine dark value created by AirBnb, Uber, Netflix, Evernote, Fitbit, and Facebook. We will show how to make dark value visible in three steps: 1. discover, 2. determine, and 3. declare. There is a part to play for ethnographers, designers, VCs, creatives, planners, PR professionals, marketers, story tellers, curators, content creators, and social media mavens. I’m hoping all of them will use this book to turn dark value into bright value.

You can buy Dark Value on Amazon here.

Why buy it? If you are a culture creative in design, marketing, planning, ethnography, advertising, curation, this is a treasure map. It will also help you find new revenue streams, as you find dark value for others.  (It now occurs to me that “A Treasure Map” should have been my subtitle.)

What will it cost you? The present price is $7.77. It will take you about 30 minutes to read. If you buy a copy, please send me an email and I will put you on a mailing list for updates. I’m thinking about a Keynote deck, and you would get this for free.

Some will ask, why self publish? The answer is that the internal between pitching an idea and publication is still many months. I wanted to respond to Virginia’s story in something closer to real time. As it turned out, it was 48 hours.