Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 33

Frog, and Rabbit in "Today, In Science"

Bacon Jerks: Now You Need An APP?

I am SICK of bacon, and people talking about it.  Every now and then -- meaning all the time-- the Internet decides it loves something so much that it simply has to vomit it back all over the rest of us.  USUALLY this only lasts a month or two, but sometimes it goes on longer: Game Of Thrones, The Walking Dead, what's-her-name from the Hunger Games, the one who talks about poop? And NOTHING has shown more staying power than $($#&% bacon.

BACON JERKS exists, NOW, to make fun of those people, and the newest BACON JERK THING is "Oscar Mayer's Dating App For Bacon Lovers," called of course because people who think bacon is funny have no actual sense of humor, "Sizzl."

I learned about this on Huffpo, which is every bit as clickbaity as BuzzFeed but somehow avoids that reputation. HuffPo describes the basic idea of the app, which just takes your Facebook profile (Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century, mediating the Internet for people who are afraid of the 'wild' internet) and asks you some bacon-related questions.  Then you get to see if you are compatible with other people who like bacon! Wheeeee...?

The author of the Huffpo story says that

Shawn caught my eye, because he likes crispy bacon. I'm a chewy person. Since bacon opposites attract,  

Wait what?

we started chatting right away

She has a screenshot of their "chat"!



EVERYTHING ABOUT SHAWN IS WRONG WRONG WRONG. 

"Honestly?" How much courage does it take to say "I like a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich?" 

PLUS, Shawn puts way more effort into describing THE REST OF THE SANDWICH. Hey, Shawn we are about the bacon here so shut up about your lettuce and bread man do you think this app is called Breadlr? 

Look at the author's priceless reaction to Shawn's straight-up absolutely unironic description of the effect of  BLT on his mind: She explodes too! It is a match made in (Bacon) Heaven. 
Throwing caution to the wind, our intrepid writer asks him out:



 ice going, Shawn. "Science bacon." You didn't make me like bacon any better but now I like science a little less. The two went on a date and ate "peanut butter bacon burgers" (gross) and took exactly the kind of annoying pictures you would expect someone so stupid to take:



Now you've helped wreck, just a little, for me, science, Lady & The Tramp, pictures, and the classic Elton John song "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" (which you did via a bacon-related pun that also makes me dislike PUNS a little, and I LOVE PUNS.)

The "news story" which does not declare itself a sponsored post in blatant violation of FTC guidelines, goes on to heartily recommend that you try the App yourself, linking to it several times and including a helpful and totally not sponsored video that I didn't watch because I was worried it would make me punch my laptop.

App reviews on the Itunes store include one sad, sad lonely sad person saying they are "proud of the brand for being willing to do something like this." What is going WRONG IN YOUR LIFE that you feel the need to give props to a BRAND for being willing to PROMOTE ITSELF? "

*sniff* I was never more proud of Coca-Cola than when they unselfishly spent a zillion dollars on that ad campaign. C'mere you! Give us a hug!"

That review gets WAY worse. Here is the whole thing:

You had me at Bacon      by Adelmore
What a fun concept! Proud of the brand for being willing to do something like this!

Just wish the app didn't lag so much. It's caused a lot of sizzl ratings that I didn't intend for it to! Seems to get stuck a lot.

Other than that, I am just hoping to have a story for future grandkids...."well, we met on a bacon dating app. He liked thick cut, and I knew from that he was the one"

You've got to read this awesome paragraph from "The Bone Clocks"

It's so great I read it twice:
___________________________

THE BURIED BISHOP’S a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: “Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth”; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; “Did you see that oversexed pig by the loos, undressing me with his eyes?”; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; “Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas”; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke—“ Have you heard the news about Schrödinger’s Cat? It died today; wait— it didn’t, did, didn’t, did …”; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; “Make mine a double”; George Michael’s stubble; “Like, music expired with the Smiths”; urbane and entitled, for the most part, my peers; their eyes, hopes, and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers in statu pupillari; they’re sprung from the loins of the global elite (or they damn well soon will be); power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast— I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, “Has anyone told you you look like Demi Moore from Ghost?”; roses are red and violets are blue, I’ve a surplus of butter and Ness is warm toast.

“Hugo? You okay?” Penhaligon’s smile is uncertain.
We’re still logjammed two bodies back from


. The Bone Clocks: A Novel (pp. 109-110).

__________________________________


This is a great book.

Friday Five: Five Things I Use My Phone For WAY MORE Than Just "Calling Someone On The Phone"

Go read Toothpaste For Dinner.
Last week Thursday I dropped my phone of 18 months, and that was the final straw: the glass screen shattered in about four places, and I had to get a new phone. (Turns out repairing a phone is almost exactly the same price as a new phone. VIVA AMERICA!)  That required that I spend several days without a phone, which for me was exactly the same as spending several days without one of the more important senses or limbs.  Actually worse: if you took away my hearing, or my legs, for a few days I'd probably be just fine. They close-caption Hulu.

That caused me to reflect on the important things in life, namely, all the stuff I wasn't able to do because I didn't have a phone.  Here are five of them:

1. Take Pictures.  I can remember when pictures were expensive, and rare.  When I was a kid, I got for Xmas one year a "Kodak Disc" camera that was going to revolutionize taking pictures: Easy to load film! No 'advancing' the film manually like a sucker! Only costs $132,000,000 (adjusted for inflation) to develop those 12 pictures!  I went to Washington DC and Morocco back in 1994, and I took about 100 pictures of the entire set of trips. That's 8 months!, some of it spend in a foreign country I will almost certainly never go back to again! That number of pictures probably cost me $300-400, total, by the time it was all done.

By contrast, I have taken over 2,000 pictures... since May. May 2015. I am one of those people everyone complains about, whipping out my camera at every possible opportunity, taking pictures of everything.  (If you complain about that or want to make snarky comments, shut up. Let people enjoy a moment they way they want to, not the way you want to. I'm not bothering anyone.)

I experiment with my camera, taking close-ups of things and trying to get imaginative shots. I take snapshots to remember things. I take photos of funny signs to send to people I know because I think they will be funny to those people, too. I have seriously thought about getting one of those mountable cameras so I could just wear it everywhere and stop the hassle of taking out my phone and opening up the camera, etc.  Who has that kind of time?

2. Find My Way Around.  The other day, I had to go to an office near my own Milwaukee office for a meeting. I used my GPS to get there. I have lived in or around Madison for twenty years and I still use GPS to go almost everywhere.  I take the boys for rides and just head out into the countryside, turning left and then right and then left and then right until we are lost, and then I pull out my phone and GPS us and head home.  (Unless we are out of cellphone range, as we were one Saturday morning, and I had to use dead reckoning the way sailors used to: Head east I kept thinking, literally piloting by the sun's position in the sky.  Too bad my car doesn't have a sextant.)

I have long joked about outsourcing my brain's functions, only it's not a joke.  With calculators I don't need to know how to do logarithms. With online dictionaries, I don't need to remember what a logarithm is. With Google, I don't need to remember hardly anything.  And now, with GPS, I don't need to remember where I live or where the grocery store is.  I can let my brain do important things, like yesterday when I had to go to a doctor's appointment on the other side of town.  I've been there lots, but I always forget exactly which exit I'm supposed to take off the highway, mostly because I have never made even the slightest effort to remember which exit I'm supposed to take. I just put the address into GPS, start my audiobook, and drive along with the friendly GPS lady ("Eisenhower") telling me when and where to turn.

3. Remember Stuff.  I have (had!) these two functions on my phone that would keep lists and notes, and give me reminders. It was an intricate system that would help me keep track of when and how much I exercise, various deadlines and dates for things that we were going to do, all sorts of things.  I have a million different things to keep track of: days when I'm in Milwaukee or Madison, which session of yoga I'm on (I do yoga now!), how much my last weight was, when the library is doing the "read to puppies" day.  I could do grocery lists and have them pop up on my phone on the way home from work so I'd remember to go to the grocery store.  It was wonderful.  Now, I have to recreate them all.

4. BOOKS.  I drive all over the place.  Not only do I drive to Milwaukee about 2x a week (four hours, round trip) but I go to court all over Wisconsin -- sometimes 2, 3 hours away.  I used to, in the Dark Ages, have to listen to the radio, or to CDs, but those are unsatisfactory because they're never talking about what I want to hear about, and I go crazy if I just listen to music for four hours straight.

With my phone, I can download audiobooks and podcasts and have a ready selection of things to listen to at any time. I've listened to more books than I've read this year, plus there are about 10 really awesome podcasts that are way better than anything on the radio.  With a phone, I don't even have to plan ahead.  When I had my big iPod -- it died and they can't be fixed, either, although Apple was going to give me FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS store credit for it. You know what five bucks gets you at an Apple store? Diddly/squat, as Berke Breathed would say.

PLUS, when my old phone went down I was only about 1% into Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, and now by having to wait nearly a week to restart it I've lost precious time trying to figure out (in a very very good way) just what the heck is going on in those books.

5. Playing Plants vs. Zombies, 2:  This is about the only video game that holds my attention anymore and yet isn't too hard to play. Videogames on consoles have a billion different controls, and I don't want to take the time to learn how to play a game like that.  The last time I played one of them was about 70 years ago, when The Boy beat me 70-3 on Madden NFL.  He could duck and twist and stiff-arm and control his passes.  I could move in SEVERAL DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, sometimes the actual direction I wanted to go in.

Plants vs Zombies, or 'Zoms,' as Sweetie has nicknamed it, doesn't require a ton of hand-eye coordination, but it's still an action game.  I had only just gotten to the point where I was ready to take on the newest level when my phone died. I redownloaded the game, and have to start all over, which is fine, but I don't all the great plants like the banana and the coconut cannon, I have to replay the stupid Western level, and I had 93 diamonds, which doesn't mean anything to people who don't play but if you do play you're all Whoa man that sucks.  (Diamonds let you get the cool plants without paying. I don't pay for videogames.)

Picture of the Day

10 Minutes About ("The Bone Clocks" And The Difference Between YA And Other Stuff)

There was a moment the other day when I was reading The Bone Clocks, which has been pretty good so far (one of the books I look forward to reading and which I actually make time for) when I began to suspect that maybe I didn't like it.
It was strange: I began to think, despite the fact that I was enjoying the book, that perhaps this was a Young Adult book rather than, you know, a book.

I am not per se against Young Adult books; I don't really care what you or any other person reads.  This year I've read a lot of comic books, and I'm currently re-reading the book Spellsinger (by Alan Dean Foster), both of which are things that would give my mom conniptions when I was younger. She did judge quality of reading. I don't. Read what you want.  But I don't like Young Adult books.  I've read a few of them here and there, and found them uncompelling and unsatisfying.  The last book that I think could be classified as Young Adult which I read and enjoyed was the Harry Potter series.

Young Adult to me tends to present as a flatter read, less complex characterizations, not as many deep themes and personal insights, and overall more boring.  It doesn't grip me, doesn't engage my mind.  One of the things I like about reading is that it almost completely takes a hold of me.  A good book will absorb me and get me caught up in it, my mind working feverishly in all corners.  That's part of why I read so little these days, actually: I'm so busy and have so many interruptions and am sometimes so worn out at the end of the day, that I can't focus enough to really enjoy a good book, so I go for lighter fair, like Internet reading or TV.

That's part of how I judge a book: how much does it pull my mind into it, how much does it make me think. Not think like I have to decipher this puzzle but simply think like imagine the scene and wonder what happens next and empathize with the characters and so on.  That's part of why I can put up with Stephen King's interminable It: despite the fact that it is MILES too long, it's (mostly, about 85%) very engaging and just sucks you into the story.

Young Adult books do not do that for me.  I'm left sort of reading it while also noting that I'm reading it, and getting distracted by television, or the way my shirt feels, or whether my pumpkin is still growing in the backyard (it is!).  A book like Bridge To Terabithia is a perfectly fine book and I enjoyed it, I suppose, but it's, at its heart, too simple a book to pull me in.

I feel that way sometimes about old TV shows.  One night I found an old Three's Company on TV, and remembered how much I loved that show as a kid.  Watching it again, I was amazed at how slow and simple the plot was, how obvious the jokes and telegraphed the storyline was.  The same thing with Newhart, which I also enjoyed.  These were the Young Adult shows of television, without the wordplay and visual jokes and overlapping storylines of television I've enjoyed as an adult.  Consider the Jerk Store episode of Seinfeld, one of my all-time favorite episodes: It has four storylines, each of which overlaps the other and calls back to earlier episodes and interact with each other, and the jokes range from simple jokes like Kramer getting hit with tennis balls to more complicated, adult-level jokes:

GEORGE: So concerned was he, that word of his poor tennis skills might leak out, he chose to offer you his wife as some sort of medieval sexual payola? 

JERRY: (explanation) He's new around here. 

GEORGE: (hopeful) So, details?

 JERRY: (walking away) Well, I didn't sleep with her. 

 GEORGE: Because of society, right? 

 JERRY: (weary) Yes, George, because of society.

 Young Adult simply doesn't have that complexity, and because of that, I've sometimes decided not to read certain books, at all.  Eleanor & Park, by somebody, was a book that sounded good, so I requested it from the library.  When it came in, the blurb on the back said it was "YA".  I dropped it in the return slot, unread.  I didn't even want to try.

Which seems odd, again, because I am reading Spellsinger, which is about a guy who is transported to another world by a turtle-wizard, and he sings Beach Boys songs to do magic and fight off giant bugs.  His best friend is an otter.  This would seem to be on the same intellectual level as most Young Adult, but somehow it's not -- even though I read this book at 17 or so and enjoyed it.

It's hard to parse out, but the general idea for me is the aim of the book.  To me, Young Adult books aim at presenting a teenage world, and teenagers (on the whole) are less complicated and interesting than adults.  Their needs and thoughts tend to be self-centered, immature: everything is superimportant, even if it's not.  Most of the action is centered on how it affects the main character, which is often a stand-in for the (presumed) reader.  I know not all of it is like this, but most Young Adult books have at least some facets of those.

Adult books expand out the scope.  Even when they are written in first person, they tend to be books about how a person interacts with the world, and not every interaction, thought, or feeling feels like it rebounds back to how does this affect me personally?  This has the effect of making the story feel more universal, and a little deeper.  The actions people take are seen as affecting others directly, with less navel-gazing.

A good example of a book that is not a Young Adult book but feels like one is the His Dark Materials trilogy.  In contrast to Harry Potter, these books really feel grown-up.  Both feature precocious kids thrown into a magical world they didn't really know existed, but whereas Harry Potter dwelt a lot on Harry's own internal struggles to grow up and adapt to the world -- how does this affect me? -- Lyra's adventures involved her leaving her comfortable life to rescue her friend, Roger, and then undertaking even more travels because it was necessary for her to do so.  While Lyra occasionally feels sorry for herself, etc., the difference is marked in how each does things, and why.   Harry Potter faces Voldemort (the T is silent!) more because he feels destined to: Almost everything Harry does is because he is forced into it, rather than because he wants to. His powers remain undeveloped and in the end he 'wins' (Um, spoiler alert?) because of something his parents did.  That's a juvenile perspective: getting yanked around by fate, unwillingly, relying on others to help you through.

Lyra, meanwhile, goes against the advice of her daemon, then opts to reject some adult advice while opting to follow others; she has to pick and choose who to trust and makes those decisions sometimes without consultation. She, too, is a "chosen one" on whom everyone's fate rests, but she is consciously guiding her own role in this play.  That's what adults do.

The Bone Clocks, which is where I started this, was starting to feel like Harry Potter: the main character, Holly, starts out the book by finding out (mild spoiler alert) her boyfriend is cheating on her.  She runs away, and falls in briefly with a strange kid from her school.  By the time I'd gotten that far, as enjoyable as the book was, it was feeling Young Adult-ish.  So I stopped and googled Is The Bone Clocks YA? and learned to my relief that it wasn't.  So I've kept reading it, and hoping that this first part (which is, as I've said, pretty good) is going to grow beyond the limited, self-centered perspective.  There's hints that will happen, so I'll stick with it a bit.

If you are going to write about writing perhaps you should be RIGHT about the things you are writing about writing.

From an article on Slate talking about why writers sometimes don't catch on, during a discussion of one writer's abilities:

 each of these flawed people is exquisitely drawn, from a man whose infertility triggers a cascade of cranky masculine self-doubt to a teenage girl whose ambition to become a tennis champion gets derailed by an incipient eating disorder. Thomas’ metaphors sing: “What is it about the first sip of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc on a mild spring day? It’s like drinking a field of cold, slightly shivery flowers.”

That is a simile.

Maybe People Aren't Stupid And Understand That Ebooks Don't Cost As Much?

I was doing some windowshopping for books tonight, waiting for Mr F to fall asleep. I clicked on Infinite Home, by Kathleen Alcott to add to my wishlist on Amazon; my wishlist is where I keep track of the books I want to borrow from the library.

I noticed that the Kindle version was $13.99, which seemed excessively high to me. $9.99 is high to me, so increasing the price by 50% really turned me off. Plus, the hardcover was only $15.68!

That made me feel like a lot of books I'd put on the wish list were actually more than $9.99, the longstanding price for a Kindle book from a major publisher. So I went to the New York Times Best Seller list and checked it out, and only one book in the top 20 was under $9.99, while only two were $9.99.  Most were $13 or more.

By the way: Do you think that prices end in .99 because we instinctively think that number is much less than the number that's just one cent higher? That's only part of it. Tests show that people also associate .99 with something being on sale or discounted, so they think they are getting a deal. Some high-end clothing retailers price their items in whole dollar amounts simply to avoid that effect. The power of a '9' at the end is so valuable that it actually increased sales of a dress.  In a test run, a manufacturer was asked to change the price of a dress from $34 to $39. The sales went up by 33%. 

So I did some Googling around and found this article about a Wall Street Journal report on what's actually happening. Remember Hachette's fight with Amazon? You probably do; almost every author took Hachette's side in a remarkable display of naked greed sated only by soaking their readers out of every last penny for mostly terrible books courage. Hachette and a few other publishers "won" the "right" to set their own prices on Amazon, a model called "Agency Pricing." Those publishers have steadily been raising the prices of their bestsellers.  The major publishers' ebooks now cost an average of $10.81, while all other ebooks average just $4.95.

NOTE: AVERAGES ARE A TERRIBLE WAY TO MEASURE THINGS. The two best measures are the median, and the mode. AVERAGES tell you nothing about individual book prices. Half of hte major publishers' books might be priced at $21.62. The other half might be free. The average would be $10.81.  If we knew the median price, we would know that half of all books were more expensive, and half were less. If we knew the mode price, we would know the most commonly-occurring price. Averages are the lazy man's way of making a (wrong) point.

ANYWAYS, the point is twofold: one, major publishers are trying to stick it to readers even though ebooks cost way way less to produce. Publishers claim that ebooks cost only about 10% less than hardcover books to produce, according to this article, but they're cooking the books on two levels. First, they complain that the upfront cost: acquiring the content, editing, and marketing it, are the same as for a hardcover. That is disingenuous for two reasons. One, they count the 'author advance.' An advance is a payment against future royalties, so that's only a cost if they overpaid the author. Otherwise, the advance does not figure into the cost in the sense they're trying to say it does.

Second, those upfront costs are shared for the hardcover and ebook. No major publisher I'm aware of publishes only ebooks. So the 'upfront' costs are 50% for the ebook and 50% for the hardcover, at best.

Thirdly (? I lost track) publishers have hired special teams to oversee the conversion of books to electronic versions, and include those costs in the cost of an ebook. While that might be a reason that older, backlisted books cost more than a dollar or so, it's no excuse for a new book; when the book is turned in, it's ready to be converted to an upload on digital copy.  My own publisher, Golden Fleece, doesn't have a staff of thousands loading my book onto Barnes & Noble and Amazon, etc.

Fourthly the publishers say people don't account for shared revenues from online retailers -- but again that's a cost that exists for hardcovers, too. Or doesn't the local bookstore make anything when they sell Go Set A Watchman?

The second (? see, I'm really lost in the numbering) big point here is that the increase in pricing is hurting the big publishers: their sales are down on ebooks. So naturally they are accusing Amazon of causing the problem by creating a price war, saying that Amazon is the one discounting the hard copy editions to hurt the authors whose publishers are setting their own ebook prices.

If so, good for Amazon. Lowering hard copy prices will force publishers to continue to eat into their profits by producing paper books, a terrible model for them. Meanwhile, as ereaders become more popular, the major publishers will see their market share slipping. That'll open up room for smaller publishers and indie authors.

There is lots and lots of money to be made in writing. Major publishers are trying to squeeze the money into a few pockets, and major authors are backing it because they benefit. I'd say that if this keeps up, I'd start buying hardcopies to save money, but as I've noted a lot already, I just go to the library. Until everyone wises up and realizes that books cost $9.99 or less, I doubt I'll be buying many books.

Friday Five: Five Books I'm In Line To Get From The Library So HURRY UP PEOPLE.

I'm almost back. For about two weeks now my asthma's been really acting up, leaving me mostly exhausted at night and too tired to think about blogging or writing or anything except listlessly paging through the Internet. I know a lot of gossip about people I barely recognize.

Here's the filler (both of) my readers missed! 

I am not sure I'll ever buy a book again. The last book I bought (other than real books I buy for nostalgic purposes) was on sale for $2.99 on Amazon. It was To Rise Again At A Decent Hour and I'm about 1/8 of the way through it. I never really feel like going to read it. I think part of it is that I bought it for only $2.99.  Part of my brain thinks how good can it be if it was only $2.99? Did you ever find a really good book in the remainder bin?

Instead, I get my books from the library.  Right now, I'm reading The Bone Clocks which is superawesome and I'm only like 3 pages into it. I've also got Authority from Jeff VanderMeer as my audiobook. And I can go check out an infinite number of books (well 10 at a time) online right now! FOR FREE. #govtworksforme. (PS I STARTED THAT HASHTAG back in 2012 and IT CAUGHT ON and I was briefly a Twitter celebrity.  WOO HOO.)

The thing is though, the library is limited in how many digital loans it can give out, so you have to get in line for books, and that makes it a gamble.  It's like Xmas crossed with a scratch-off lottery ticket: go to the library website, put a book on hold, go about your life and then one day out of the blue you get an email saying your book is here! and you know you'll be readin' good that night.

Here's five books I currently am awaiting.

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander.  I'm next in line for this. So any day now, I will get that email! I'm on the edge of my seat.

This is another book I'm going to re-read out of nostalgia. I wanted to say that I first read this book in 8th grade, but clearly I didn't because it was published in 1984, when I was in 9th and 10th grade. It's about an assistant pig-keeper who fights a Welsh Darth Vader.  I hadn't thought of it in years, but when we go to the actual physical library here in town (having ended my feud with them on account of Mr Bunches likes the library), Mr F likes to sit in the 'teen' area, where they have comfy chairs. There are racks of books there, and one of the books in this series was on one of them.






The Color Of Magic, Terry Pratchett.  (Currently 18th in line). I've never read a Terry Pratchett book. Or at least I don't think I have? I think maybe he did one as a collaboration that I read.  I never thought much of him either way, until he died. Even then I wasn't going to read one of his books, but then I read this discussion of the controversy over whether his books are worth reading (and the post it links to which talks about what books will live on forever and why), and decided I'd give it a shot. I believe this is the first Discworld book ever, so I picked it out and put a hold on it. Apparently 17 people read that post before I did.

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. (Currently 3d in line). This is sort of an example of why physical bookstores (or libraries) maybe ought to live on in some form even after everyone finally goes mostly digital, the way music has: I was not going to ever buy/wishlist/borrow this book because when I read about it I thought oh man way too gimmicky. The setup is supposed to be that the story is somehow told in the form of an Ikea-like catalog. I despise gimmicks despite the fact that they're an obvious way to get critics to turn your book into a bestseller. Imagine how awesome(ly stupid) it would have been if my book Codes had come with two copies everytime you ordered one. You know, because clones? ANYWAY another day when we were at the library it was Mr F's turn to decide where we go (he and I are a team at the library; Mr Bunches goes his own way mostly as long as he stays in sight). So we went to get a drink of water, and passed by the new books. Horrorstor was there on the display so while Mr F quenched his thirst I glanced through it and decided to give it a try.

BY THE WAY: A SPECIAL NOTE ON LIBRARIES AND EBOOKS:  Ebooks only make up about 8% of library borrows as of the most recent figures.  Publishers are still trying to figure out how to charge for these.  Some ebooks are borrowed just like physical books: the library can loan out a copy to one user at a time, so they would have to buy multiple copies to let multiple people get it. Others are a cost-per-borrow basis, and some publishers require the library to re-buy a book after so much time or so many borrows.  For Harper Collins, that number was 26; for MacMillan, it was 52.  THAT IS A COLOSSAL GAIN FOR AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS. Ebooks are far less costly to publish, and re-selling the book to libraries every so often is just gravy for the people who get the money. (Those were 2013 numbers.)  Since ebooks are overpriced anyway by a factor of about 100, I do not mind borrowing them from libraries, especially since that lets me try more books than I would otherwise, and cuts my cost on books that suck. Subscription services like Amazon Prime and such are too expensive for me: I read maybe a book a month, so for $80 a year, I would lose money on Amazon Prime.

Aftermath, by Chuck Wendig. (Currently 57th in line.) If we didn't put ourselves on a budget, I'd have probably bought this book, or maybe not. It's the newest Star Wars book and helps tie Return of the Jedi to Episode VII, so of course I'm going to read it at some point. But what if it's awful? My threshhold for spending money on books is so high that I basically cannot commit to buying a book anymore.  Other than that $2.99 impulse purchase all my purchased books have been directly purchased for me as a gift.  I had an Amazon gift card last year, and I waited five months before using it. The day I was going to buy a book I dithered so much about it that I finally decided not to buy anything and ultimately I let Sweetie use it to buy something for the boys. I just cannot bear to spend money on a bad book. Maybe when I am rich I will do that, just buy a book with impunity and hope it turns out for the best. But I'm not rich and so many books are so bad.

So I put this one on hold and hopefully 56 people will read it all in like a half-day because that movie's coming out in December and I would really like to know what's going on. (PS I also have Heir To The Empire on hold. I'm third in line for that. I know it's not canon anymore but I was feeling Star Warsy and wanted to read it again because I remember liking it.)

Armada, Ernest Cline. (Twelfth in line.) Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was one of the most pleasantly surprising books I read last year. I didn't expect much when I checked it out; it was just filler while I tried to decide what to read next. Ho hum a guy basically goes into a massive online game trying to win a jillion dollars is what I thought. But the book was really good, and really engaging, and to this day scenes from the book pop into my head.  So when I saw he had a new book out, I put it on hold.

American Pillows

Here in America, we have a mattress whose manufacturer boasts that the fabric is "selected by hand," and sewn by hand (including some materials shipped in from Belgium, foam created by a special laboratory, delivery by bike messenger (?) and which costs $850.

Just thought you'd want to know.