Chart Seminar Now on Amazon Instant Video

(Santa Monica, CA – March 10, 2011)  LaPuerta Books and Media today announced that How to Lie with Charts, a live interactive seminar based on the popular book by Gerald Everett Jones, is now available as Video on Demand (VOD) from Amazon Instant Video. VOD titles are sold for rental or for purchase and are viewable online or can be downloaded to a set-top video player or compatible portable device. The 46-minute seminar continues to be available in DVD format, also from Amazon. The book can be purchased from booksellers in trade paperback and Adobe PDF e-book formats.

Amazon Instant Video offerings, which include feature films as well as documentary and instructional videos include these viewing options: Mac or PC viewing online, Windows PC download, TiVO DVR, Sony Bravia Internet Video, Roku player, as well as a variety of portable devices, including MP3 players from Coby, Ematic, Philips, and SanDisk.

How to Lie with Charts - Training Video on Demand

Got (Adobe) PDF?

PDF eBook Release

(Santa Monica, CA - February 21, 2011)  LaPuerta Books and Media today announced publication of a new ebook version (Adobe PDF format) of its popular business book How to Lie with Charts by Gerald Everett Jones. Jones’s classic book about clarity and honesty in visual reporting was first published by Sybex in 1995, and it has become a kind of chartmaking bible for financial analysts, business presenters, and math students. It has been adopted as courseware by college-level academic institutions as a supplementary text for studies in statistics, visualization of mathematics, and business management.

Booksellers can buy from Ingram Digital at standard trade discount. Retail downloads will be available starting March 1 from  Diesel eBook Store and other online distributors. The suggested retail price of the revised and updated Second Edition PDF ebook is US $19.99 (£14.99 in the UK). The ebook ISBN is 978-0-9794866-8-5.

According to LaPuerta marketing director David Drum, “We’ve wanted to publish an ebook version of this popular title for some time, but reproducing the illustrations can be a challenge in the formats that have ‘reflowable’ page appearance. Reflowable format is fine for plain-text books such as fiction and permits line lengths and text size to be adjusted to fit the size of the display screen and the user’s preferences. However, this book is full of example charts and drawings – there are more than 300 illustrations. Reworking the layout to suit every type of device and reflow situation just isn’t practical. In fact, I wouldn’t know how to best show a technical book like this on an iPhone, for example. But the PDF format preserves the layout of the printed page, so the charts won’t shift in relation to the text and clarity of presentation will be preserved. We know that students in particular love the portability and ease of access of electronic textbooks, and we’re now able to offer How to Lie with Charts in a format supported by just about every make and model of device, including Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Sony Reader, as well as desktop computers, notebooks, and tablets.” (Note that some ebook readers require a third-party app to display PDF.)

Last year, LaPuerta released a companion DVD, How to Lie with Charts – Advice for Investors and Analysts. The edited seminar session runs 45 minutes, including Jones’s live presentation with more than 100 example slides. The DVD also contains a separate 3-minute bonus video that recaps his “Golden Rules” for the honest chartmaker. LaPuerta intends to release a downloadable streaming version of the seminar soon through Amazon Video on Demand (VOD) for rental or for purchase.

“Streaming VOD should be available shortly,” adds Drum. “Watch for our announcement. For the future, we’re looking at other formats and delivery systems. Vook, which can combine ebook and video in a kind of multimedia mashup on readers like the iPad, is intriguing, especially for courseware. We want to be able to provide instructors with test banks, distance learning tools, and course customization software. And not just for How to Lie with Charts, but for other subjects, as well.”

Several sample video clips from the DVD are available for free viewing on YouTube: "Part 1: 3D Bars and Perspective" (2:20 min.), "Part 2: Golfers Lie with Statistics" (6:10 min.), "Part 3: Cartesian Coordinates and Mercator Mistakes" (7:32 min.), and "Part 4: Six Dumb Mistakes" (3:10 min.).

The trade paperback is priced at $23.99, the seminar on DVD at $89.95, both available from Amazon.

LaPuerta Books and Media is an imprint of La Puerta Productions, Santa Monica, California. The LaPuerta name and its logo, an open door, symbolize unlimited access to knowledge, opportunity, innovation, fascination, and delight. The company specializes in developing and publishing on-demand digital media. LaPuerta publishes in trade paperback, plus a variety of ebook and video formats, including DVD and VOD.

For further information, contact David Drum, Director of Marketing, LaPuerta Books and Media, books@lapuerta.tv, (310) 742-5656.

How to Lie with Statistics - Hollywood Version

No, this isn't about creative accounting at the studios.

I was pleased to run across this clip on YouTube, where I also have a clip on the same topic - how interpretation of the "raw data" can be just as tricky as making pictures out of it:

Seminar DVD Just Released

News Release

(Santa Monica, CA – July 26, 2010) LaPuerta Books and Media today launched a new series of DVD training videos aimed at business students and professionals. The first title is How to Lie with Charts, a live interactive seminar based on the popular book by Gerald Everett Jones. According to LaPuerta marketing director David Drum, “Gerald’s been doing seminars for corporate clients based on this book, which over the years has become a kind of chartmaking bible for b-school students...(read the full release)

View the DVD Product Page

How to Lie with Charts - Seminar on DVD Just Released

Preview it on YouTube:

Order the DVD Online

So Obvious It's Not

One of the fundamental themes of How to Lie with Charts is that our interpretation of visual information is grounded in deep-seated notions about spatial orientation. These notions are cultural biases, even though widely held, and are not innate.

For example, we see motion from left to right as the progression of time. And motion up and down is gain or loss. Thank you, Rene Descartes for the Cartesian coordinate system that grew from these biases. The up-down is a glass-half-empty or half-full notion, and the left-right is probably rooted in the Western convention of reading from left to right on the page.

Likewise, the legacy of Johannes Mercator and his grid-plotted maps has been to link the notions of North-South to up-down and West-East to left-right, even though these choices are purely arbitrary.

Our brains make meanings automatically and involuntarily based on these assumptions. As just one example, a chart (or picture) can imply progress where there may be none simply by emphasizing rightward motion. And we can explain or rationalize such misperceptions, but the initial impression persists at some level.

Five Stars for 'Charts'!

Jared Matthew Kessler, author of The Poet and the Billionaire, just posted this five-star review of How to Lie with Charts on Amazon http://bit.ly/I2VXr.