Taking a page from the Book of Catherine, I’m sitting at Tully’s right now, a hot tea in one hand on one side of the computer, a paper shot-glass of eggnog opposite it. Eggnog is amazing, but more than a shot at a time and you might as well call the paramedics. Look, do yourself a favor, don’t wonder about the calories and just enjoy REGULAR eggnog this season, not that light/fat-free/sugar-free/piss-flavored stuff.

Pandora on my phone is a pasta-send. It’s what’s playing when I don’t have my usual music around or when I don’t really care what to listen to, but still want it to be good.

I surround myself with music almost constantly. At work, if I’m not watching Netflix, it’s gotta be some Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan or Bon Jovi that’s resonating in my head. In the car, it’s something old but fast, like select Rolling Stones tracks, or some version of “All Along the Watchtower”, or simply Joe Cocker. At home, when I’m reading or editing photos and need some background music that isn’t intrusive but at the same time it’s something I like, there’s Pandora, with a station where I rarely ever have to skip a song. (OK, I just had to skip the Beach Boys. But Pandora should learn from this. Ughh, Beach Boys.)

Finally having a non-Fischer Price phone, a phone that can actually hold a charge, I find myself starting up Pandora almost constantly. It’s an app that runs more on my phone than the Google Maps application. (And I use that fairly regularly, having just moved to a brand-new office building downtown.) I listen to it at home when doing housework, or loafing around in bed on a Sunday morning while catching up on comics or some random blog psot, or while out on a walk through the Kirkland waterfront.

Even the silly ads aren’t much of a distraction. Uhh, that is, until I actually bother to listen what they’re saying. A few minutes back they played a commercial where an excited consumer calls up the Rosetta Stone people and asks if the ads are true, that they’re offering a “free demo” of their product, and what the “catch” is. (Insert some witty pun about being that Rosetta Stone costs an arm and a leg and doesn’t actually teach you the language in question.) The helpful representative replies that the ads are true, there is no catch, that Rosetta Stone is so confident in their product, they’re offering a “free demo” of it! Yay! That means I can get a trial version for FREE! That’s quite different from all those other places that make me pay for a partial product. If only I could remember any of those instances…

Well, since I couldn’t recall one, I had to Google for something that stupid… and stumbled onto this made-of-win post: “Capcom Is Charging for a 3DS Demo”. Seems Capcom is selling the first chapter of a game. Unless the model is chapter-by-chapter, this amounts to a paid demo. Ok, so the article itself is kinda thing, but actually it’s the comments that make it a win:

Capcom touched my wife inappropriately and got my kids hooked on crack.

Capcom punched my mom down a flight of stairs and sent me the tape.

Capcom bundled AAA investments with garbage housing loans into premium packages sold to 401k managers, artificially inflating the financial market and causing an economic disaster following the collapse of the housing market.

Capcom swapped my office chair with someone else’s.

Capcom gave long-term financial advice to Greece back in 2000, leading to an unsustainable level of debt that has them teetering on the edge of a bankruptcy that would greatly harm the value of the Euro.

And many more…

Now, having no idea how I’ve arrived at this point, here’s something relevant*:

*In the totally irrelevant sense of the word

Click on the image to see the AMAZING trailer for the game.

Some highlights from the trailer and speculation on my part:

• The game appears to be set in Vinewood, a city featured in GTA: San Andreas
• There are mountains again (GTA:IV was great, but everything was city, city, city, there was no countryside to explore. Unlike Red Dead Redemption, of course, which was all countryside.)
• Vastly improved graphics
• Something that looks like a revamped and powerful new physics engine
• Convertibles!
• Dogs?
• A zeppelin! It appears in the sky a number of times throughout the trailer, and I’d be supremely disappointed if at least one mission isn’t set inside it
• Jet skis
• Countryside, complete with mountain ranges, wind turbines and what looks like low cloud cover
• Outside gym (does this mean more San Andreas-esque exercising and body building?)
• Crop duster! (Can’t wait to fly that thing through a metropolis)
• Automatic guns with suppressors? Hello stealth missions!
• A place that looks more populated, with people hanging around on corners and along streets (more to mow over with a tank!)
• A military plane WITH ROCKETS flying over downtown! About time that we got planes back. GTA:IV lost those, probably for fear of blowback against 9/11 reminders, or something. And that really sucked.

So, yeah, I’m going to suffer emotional pain until the game comes out. Hooray for the next year or so of waiting.

When Charles deGaulle decided to retire from public life, the American ambassador and his wife threw a gala dinner party in his honor. At the dinner table the Ambassador’s wife was talking with Madame de Gaulle.

“Your husband has been such a prominent public figure, such a presence on the French and International scene for so many years! How quiet retirement will seem in comparison. What are you most looking forward to in these retirement years?”

“A penis,” replied Madame de Gaulle.

A huge hush fell over the table. Everyone heard her answer… and no one knew what to say next.

Finally, Le Grand Charles leaned over to his wife and said, “Ma cherie, I believe zee Americans pronounce zat word ‘appiness.’”

But what is happiness? Happiness for me? For you? For Batman?

Happiness is a sunny day, a fast car, top down, hat on, a pretty neighborhood on a hill – such as Madrona – a good book by your side, lots of coffee and a tasty pile of potatoes, eggs and sausage.

Or maybe it’s taking a personal holiday, on a similarly sunny day, though this time a Monday, a trip to Anacortes – complete with the ferry ride from Mukilteo to Clinton – a couple photo stops along the way, Deception Pass (need I say more?), two good pints of IPA and, of course, a good book.

Maybe it is, as the Gods of Rock would have us believe, a warm gun. Maybe for some.

It’s getting colder, so I had to pack in a fair bit of Boxster driving into the weekend. Not a bad outcome. Even got some photos out of it. And also reminded myself that I don’t do too well with heights.

Deception Pass is beautiful, but damn high. And with the cars and the trucks going by, mere feet away, the damn bridge shakes and I get this feeling that maybe I’m going to fall. And then I look down, and remember that I’m not a fan of heights.

Big heights – the ones we encounter when flying – are OK. Maybe it’s the fact that you don’t really comprehend the reality of it. Or maybe you realize that even if you do fall from that height, you won’t really feel the impact. Whereas with most heights, like a hotel balcony just six stories high, you know that that fall might not kill you, and you’ll sure-as-fuck will feel it. The rest of your life.

While standing on the bridge, right over some shallow water (to make sure that, if it happened, I’d die a quicker death), I dribbled some water from a bottle I happened to be carrying. It was actually a pretty sight, and made me want to splurge some cash on a DSLR that could record video.

The water fell from the bottle in a predictable fashion for some dozen feet. Then the wind – which until then was being quite successfully blocked by the wind – ripped the globules into smaller drops. As the water kept on falling, it spread out and, as it vertically neared the strait, twinkled out of visibility. I didn’t really think that the drops had actually evaporated or had been reduced to a fine mist. That somehow seemed weird. Finally, the smattering of liquid impacts indicated that the water had actually reached its destination.

What is happiness?

Maybe it’s a new Batman game, or a glass (or two or three) of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey, or kicking vast amounts of ass at work, or actually having a fulfilling and interesting job, or taking some time to develop photos and listen to Pink Floyd, or that impulse-purchase of a car, or a Stephenson book, or an uber-cute picture of pug puppies, or finding a subreddit devoted solely to Olivia Wilde.

Or maybe happiness really is just a penis, nothing more, nothing less.

I forgot how funny Orson was.

This song has been stuck in my head all morning. Coworkers are probably tired of me humming it.

The last four hours were spent head-down in REAMDE. My rating? 4 out of 5 stars. It’s no “Cryptonomicon”, but it’s also not “The Baroque Cycle”. With all due respect to Stephenson, in this book he got some things right, but quite a number of things wrong.

I saw some semi-clear plot holes, something that I couldn’t even begin to utter about “Cryptonomicon”. The end of the book stretched out forever. Or maybe it was just my desire to be done with it. The characters weren’t as good as his previous work and there was too much storyline that was covered, only to be forgotten and never returned to. (Contrary to the tangents in “Cryptonomicon” or “Diamond Age”, which had an actual purpose.) The MMORPG parts were good, but the interface that was described was not realistic and we didn’t spend enough time in that world. A virtual war of factions was mentioned, and apparently helped some real characters, but Stephenson didn’t delve into it too deeply. The writing was good, but not exemplary: whereas his other books were littered with insightful, quotable and hilarious passages (I literally crack open “Cryptonomicon” in random spots and enjoy the material), REAMDE was lackluster. I had trouble finding a handful of clever quotes, or concepts that made me stop and reconsider some taken-for-granted part of reality.

With REAMDE, Stephenson does something strange: he writes an actual ending. If you’ve read anything else by him, you know that a Stephenson ending is something akin to a wall, sneaking up on a nice, speeding Porsche right in the middle of the road. Something like a Roadrunner cartoon and about as welcome as a tsunami. REAMDE, however, has an actual end, something that attempts to wrap up all of those disjointed story-lines with a satisfying, Hollywood-esque finale. And I said attempts. Because, in my opinion, the story isn’t really wrapped up. Just… finalized. Not as suddenly as “Snow Crash”, for instance… for who could forget a pop-up ad?… but rushed nonetheless.

I keep coming back to this, but it’s true: REAMDE just isn’t as good as Stephenson’s earlier work. Does this mean that the master has lost his touch? I certainly hope not. Maybe it was just the side-effect of working in the action-thriller genre. Who knows.

The book does have the feeling of being a great source for a TV miniseries. Action-filled and usually not dull, I can easily see the plot being something similar to “24″. And at least partially in the same format: about 200 pages (of 920 total) are devoted to a single, hair-raising day. A great chapter. Though, sadly, it is followed up by 50-100 pages of boredom.

I could go on for a bit more, but it’s getting late. Read the book. It’s more “mainstream” than his other works, so maybe that’ll appeal to some. For me, I wish Stephenson would get back to the sci-fi, tech-novels that I fell in love with.

That being said, this book is an exercise in pushing the limits of my emotional response to its two extremes: indescribable joy/amazement/thrill, and almost mind-numbing boredom. Of Stephenson novels I’ve read, this is only the second time I’ve experienced this. “The Baroque Cycle” also had periods of boredom, most likely brought on by discussions of 17th century economics, politics or theology. REAMDE does sometime fall into a gratefully-short sprint of semi-boring happenings. But this is punctuated by amazingly awesome, action-filled sections that propel the story at supersonic speeds.

As is common with Stephenson novels, it’s hard to describe the novel in a sentence or two. At least, without spoiling the entire story. So I won’t try to. I will mention that there are quite a few overt references to Stephenson’s earlier work, like “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”. I giggle every time I notice one of these little gems.

The only other thing I’ll say is that if you’ve any interest in computer gaming (MMORPG experience is helpful, but not a requirement: I have never played WoW or anything of the sort), action thrillers, espionage, info-dumps or just good writing, REAMDE is more than capable of holding your interest.

A few curious excerpts (with spoilers removed minimized but still present) from the novel. These are only from the last two hundred pages or so, or since the last time my book crashed. A bit more on that later.

Except for the part about [SPOILER], this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true – the way small children experienced things – precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with [women] had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wondering around [his company's MMORPG] via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

I’d love to add some more, but… ready for another rant on e-books?

My Sony Reader – PRS-500, to be exact, the first of the line and one of the earliest “true” e-ink consumer ebook readers – has an annoying tendency to crash every so often, and to take the history of the past few weeks with it. Like the history of the books I’ve read and the bookmarks I’ve placed. In the case of Stephenson work, that’s about a bookmark every few pages.

Last time the Reader crashed, I was apparently on page 520, out of 920. So that means that all those little segments that I wanted to mark as interesting in the first 520 pages of the book… all those pointers to all those interesting tidbits are now lost to oblivion. How wonderful.

I’m pre-ordering the Kindle Touch right now. Fuck this shit, I’m tired of my Reader not holding much of a charge and deleting information that I consider important. It’s time for an upgrade, anyway.

I would have loved to add some more quotes to this post, if not for the fact that (a) my bookmarks have been erased and (b) I got a headache typing in the above quote.

So, the mini-rant on e-books: copy-pasting. You can’t do it! (At least with the Sony Reader.) The text is there, I can see it, I can read it, I can transcribe it, I can even highlight and add notes to it. But I can’t. Fucking. Copy it.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Sony and the publishers were having a laugh, that they were making an ironic reference to the Wooden Table “meme”: to get the digital text that already exists on my computer, I have to read it and type it up in notepad, or take a screenshot and run OCR on it. It’s a joke, right? I mean, do the publishers want me to crack the DRM on the book as soon as I download it? Because copy-pasting already digital text seems like an idea that anyone would want to take advantage of. Like, students, for instance. Or people that want to quote a book in their blog. Or people who want to copy-paste the entire book into a Word document, print it out, and share the entire book with their neighbor. Ummm, I mean… who the fuck would be doing that? Is that really a concern?

Apparently the publishers aren’t getting it through their heads, so I’ll type it out in bold: the people who want to steal a book, WILL. It takes 5 minutes to rip the DRM, and that includes the time to Google for that information and for a non-technical person to use it. The only thing your draconian measures are doing is pissing off the legitimate users.

Shit, because I got pissed off enough at this concept, I paused before writing the last paragraph, and it did take me 5 minutes to crack REAMDE. (As mentioned above, that’s how long it took me to find the tools online, download and use them.) It wasn’t a hassle at all. Ripping the DRM off a book is a two-step process. And it takes the same 2 steps to batch-convert a thousand books.

Fuck you, publishers. Just… fuck you.

So… read on, after the jump.

This might be a long post. Mainly because I’ve got a fair number of opinions on the topic. Which is why it took so long to write it, ’cause all those thoughts needed organizing. They’ve been on the back burner since almost immediately after I got my Sony Reader, some 3 or 4 years ago.

First off, I love ebooks. I love my Reader. I take it everywhere. It’s easy to use, allows me to read virtually anywhere without carrying around a bulky book (REAMDE is 3lb) and doesn’t strain the eyes. That last one is particularly important and an argument I present to anyone who tells me to get a tablet (iPad, of course) and read on that. The reason I use an ebook reader is so I don’t have to constantly STARE AT A LIGHTBULB. Didn’t think that needed to be said, but… I already look at a computer monitor most of the day, don’t need to do it while enjoying some good sci-fi.

Second, I hate ebook publishers. Yeah, actually hate them. And why? Well, there are a number of reasons for that:

Low-quality product

A fair number of ebooks that I’ve read are of inferior quality. Sometimes there are text alignment issues. Once in a while,  some paragraphs are (for instance) center-aligned, while the rest is not. Sometimes, the text crawls off the screen and isn’t visible, no matter what font size or screen orientation I use.

But most of the time, what really gets to me is OCR. Yes, Optical Character Recognition. Why do I bring it up? Because apparently, that’s the way publishers are creating a fair number of ebooks. They take an existing dead-tree copy of the book in question, run it through a scanner, run the images through an OCR application and ship the result as-is.

I’d just finished “Startide Rising” and was appalled not at all surprised by constant OCR errors. Out-of-context appearances of words is a common give-away: “tune” instead of “time”. (Squint a bit and you’ll see how those two can be confused.) Dropped periods. Characters meshed together. And this is incredibly common. Classics like “1984″ and “Flatland” are formatted similarly. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every 2nd or 3rd book I read has blatant OCR errors. OCR errors that could have been caught by running the book through MS Word.

I ranted about this nonsense in 2007 on MobileRead forums. And was horrified by what I found out:

The big publishing firms are so wedded to their ‘traditional’ methods that many of them still have word-processors who’s whole job is to convert the submitted (*IF* they bother to accept electronic submissions) electronic manuscripts into paper and thence typed back into Quark. And does everyone understand that once the MMPB, TPB or HC layout has been finalized, the galleys have been approved by the author and the print runs set up, those Quark files are trashed!?! Yep. That’s right. That means many a popular HC title must be *RE*-entered into Quark to be reformatted to MMPB or TPB format for the *next* release!

Publishers DON’T KEEP DIGITAL COPIES OF THEIR BOOKS, and instead enter them manually for every release. It’s not surprising that scanning old editions to create ebooks is actually a faster approach. Actually, the surprising thing is that they’re even that high-tech. But, then again, maybe they see the OCR as the low-budget approach that is, reserved for the “untested” territory of digital publishing. Maybe they reserve the Good Stuff™ – where said Good Stuff™ entails manual re-re-re-entry of a manuscript – for the “Real” publishing.

Ridiculously expensive product

Publishers must be taking their cues from the video-game-store industry: sit on your hands and make money at the same time. Gamestop does it wonderfully: they sell a brand-new game for 60$, buy it back two weeks later for a fraction of the cost (or slightly more if you’re accepting store credit instead of cash), sell it again for 50$, buy it back two weeks later for even less than the first time, again sell it for 50$. Repeat ad nauseam. The perfect business! Resell your inventory time and time again! (God, I hope the restaurant business doesn’t get into this any time soon…)

Uhh, back to ebooks? Right, right.

Ebook publishers commonly charge the price of a physical book, minus about 10%.  Sometimes, the ebook version actually costs the same as the physical book: Nicholas Sparks’ “The Best of Me” is 12.99$, for the hard-cover, Kindle and Sony versions. But the ebook costs nothing to print, distribute, store, redistribute, etc. After the ebook is created – which is one-time cost, and it’s probably fairly cheap; I mean, how much are they paying that intern to scan a book? – the cost of selling ten digital copies is the same as selling one hundred thousand.

And this situation hasn’t changed. Ebooks have been around for a while. The New York Times Best Seller list includes ebooks in their counts. And still nothing. We’re still being gouged for virtual books, books that we can’t lend friends (Amazon supports lending of books, but the limit is 14 days and the publisher decides if a book is “lendable”), books that we can’t photocopy, crappy books that we can’t use as door stops, books that we can’t resell.

How does this make sense?! Why the hell are we paying (almost) the same price for an inferior product that doesn’t cost the publishers anything?!

As I said, ebooks have been around for a while. Why aren’t there more “features” to them. As mentioned, some books can be lended, but that’s still only supported by few sellers and the publisher has the final say on whether or not a book can be lended at all. A serious discount on ebooks, of say 50%, is not unreasonable, considering the limitations. Or how about following the movie industry and allowing me to download an ebook with the purchase of a physical book? (Nevermind the fact that those Digital Copy movie versions are more expensive as a result and the codes to get the digital version of the film expire fairly soon after the release.) The last point is kind of important. In the words of a coworker: “I’m not paying twice for the same content.”

Why?

Why are ebooks and the consumers treated like second-class citizens? I haven’t read an official explanation, so this is conjecture, but it does remind me of the widespread use of mp3 encoding in the late 1990′s to share music. At first, the technology (the encoding algorithms, portable mp3 players and later file-sharing applications like Napster) was hailed as a danger to the music industry. Words like “piracy” and “royalties” were thrown around, without people actually realizing what they meant. Then followed slow acceptance, which grew over the years, albeit with heavy DRM policies, until now, where most of the legally available online music is sold in the un-protected MP3 format. On some levels, it looks like ebooks are in for the same battle.

But, once again, why?

With music, the “fear” was that digital music was too easy to pirate and would cause CD sales to plummet. Of course, that didn’t happen. People didn’t toss out their existing CD collections in favor of MP3′s. Piles of CD players didn’t dominate garbage dumps as everyone upgraded to MP3 players. There was a minimum entry-level to music piracy: a computer, an internet connection, some technical know-how. The “infrastructure” didn’t appear overnight.

And there was the moral aspect that prevented most people from doing something “illegal”.

But the music execs didn’t factor any of this in. They’d made stupid assumptions, filed idiotic lawsuits and stirred up a storm in a teacup. They didn’t understand that the barrier to pirating music was still relatively high. That those people who were going to steal music probably weren’t the people who were going to buy their CDs in the first place.

The same is happening, I think, with ebooks. The publishers are dinosaurs (see section about entering books in by hand), not wanting or unable to change. They’ve got the same fears of digital, DRM-free books being pirated by every human being (even the ones who don’t read!) and the sale of physical books will hit zero overnight.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. People love books. The smell, the feel of the pages, the nice stacks of the in their home libraries, the piles that dominate every open surface, etc. Ebooks won’t replace an entire culture of books. Maybe because not everyone wants an e-reader. Maybe because people want to read a dead-tree book and not worry (too much) about spilling water on it, dropping it in the tub, forgetting it on the plane or even tossing it aside without shattering the damn thing. Maybe because people want to actually own a physical book. (I’m not one of these.)

Sometimes a physical book is more useful than an ebook: in the case of a technical reference or a magazine, I’d prefer something “real”; in the case of an Ann Coulter book, a physical copy would burn a lot better; I gotta figure the hard-cover edition of “Cryptonomicon” would serve as a pretty good melee weapon during the Zombie Apocalypse. Physical books have this curious property that if you’re reading one book, there’s no reason why someone else in your household can’t read a different book that you own.

The Authors

This fear isn’t just localized to the publishers. Authors also fear the coming of the ebook age. (Not all, quite a large proportion actually embrace it, and those guy rock!) Some argue from the piracy point of view (“everyone is stealing my books!”), some claim that aspiring writers will not be able to make ends meet under the ebook model. There are even arguments that the ebook format will make it too easy for “just anyone” to publish a “book”, thus filling the market with fodder. (Of course, I happen to think the market is already full of crap, but that’s a different story.)

There are counter-arguments to each of those points, of course.

A friend re-tweeted a link to a blog post by an author bemoaning piracy. The post was an interesting read, but I think I was in the minority of the readers: most commented that they were sorry to hear about the author’s predicament, while I thought she was making a mistake. Here’s a quote from the post:

[My book is] going out of print in hardcover because demand for it has dwindled to 10 or so copies a month. This means I will never get a royalty check for this book. By all appearances, nobody wants it anymore.

But those appearances are deceiving. According to one download site’s stats, people are downloading SHADOWED SUMMER at a rate of 800 copies a week. When the book first came out, it topped out at 3000+ downloads a week.

If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list.

[I have no idea where she's getting the download statistics, but let's assume they're accurate for a second.] Is it just me, or is this author being blind? For every person who buys her book in a store, 80 people download a copy online. Do you need a business degree to see that there’s a market here that’s being ignored?!

Of course, people who were going to steal the book anyway are still going to steal it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a book that has an official digital version. If it’s popular enough, someone will digitize the damn thing. The problem is that by trying to fight the “pirates”, you’re putting off your actual target demographic. It’s the people who like your writing, want to follow your story, but want a choice in the format of their books. Or, like the post above mentioned, maybe they’re in a region where your book isn’t published. (The arguments against that horse-shit will be in a future blog post.)

OK, so that counters the “piracy” argument. Now to address the issue of lower royalties and lower-quality books.

A price-winning author claims that “e-books threaten livelihoods of aspiring writer”. To quote his main argument:

“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can’t make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”

Which, of course, is shit. Your argument can’t be that an author who gives up will “leave potentially great stories unwritten”. There are countless great stories to be told. Walk up to a homeless man on the street and he’ll tell you a fascinating story. Seriously. Everyone has a story to be told, and they’re all interesting and human and important. That doesn’t mean we have to cherish each and every one of them. But, that’s just me arguing with how the prize-winning author presented his point. Let’s get back on track.

If the author is good, their work will be highly rated and will become popular. Success, respect and a reputation will follow. As the article goes on to mention, authors of ebooks can successfully compete with paperback authors by skipping the middle-men (publishers and agents) and asking for only a fraction of the price of the competition. Already this is proving a successful tactic as ebooks overtook the “printed” printed word on Amazon.com.

Of course, another problem is that with such a lowered entry bar for publishing a book, there is going to be a lot of crap out there. Who will “separate the wheat from the chaff”? Why, the market, of course. While you might agonize less about spending 2$ vs 10$ on a book, you’re not just thinking about money. You have to consider the time spent on this book and not on a different book. The money is different, but the time is the same. In this sense, a Neal Stephenson Michael Crichton book is the same as a book by a first-timer. We’ll simply use different criteria for choosing the next novel to read. Instead of picking from the New York Best Seller list, we’ll be picking from the “highest rated ebook on Amazon” list. Similar concept. We’re already accustomed to seeing star ratings next to items online, so this’ll be very easy.

What now?

Actually, this is me wondering how to wrap up this too-long post. Maybe some comment on how ebook progress should hurry up and move through its inevitable stages. Perhaps a comparison to rock and its tumultuous history, ranging from its counter-culture prominence to wide-spread popularity and current god-like status. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

Or perhaps I will just do what I usually do: link a Pink Floyd YouTube video and call it a day night.

• The Quran says something about praying five times a day in a specific direction
• There’s the whole infuriating business of Catholics not having meat on Fridays (infuriating because the cafe in college and again at Microsoft would serve fish on Fridays, and I’m not a fan of fish)
• Shabbat elevators. ’nuff said.
• Scientology (cult, religion, what’s the difference?) has something against therapy
• Hinduism has the whole cow fetish
• Every religion seems to hate pigs

But something was forwarded to me this morning that simply takes the micromanaging religious cake: What is the optimal Jewish toenail cutting algorithm?

…there is a tradition about not trimming toenails in sequential order.

There seems to be dissenting opinion on the precise application of this tradition, but we think that the following rules are sufficient to accomodate people whose religious practices prohibit cutting toenails in order:

• No two adjacent toenails should be cut consecutively
• The cutting sequence on the left foot should not match the sequence on the right foot
• The cutting sequence on two consecutive runs should not be the same. The sequences shouldn’t be easily predictable, so hardcoding an alternating sequence does not work.

What. The. Fuck.

And no, I’m not making this up. There seems to be actual language in the Torah about the order of cutting nails, which days it’s not OK to cut nails on, and the disposal of cut nails and what happens to pregnant women who walk on cut nails. (Spoiler: it’s a miscarriage.)

Gaahh!