Sunday Morning Book Thread 07-08-2012 [OregonMuse]

Good morning morons and moronettes. Even now, I am still depressed about the Obamacare decision and Roberts' disastrous betrayal. This photoshop perfectly captures my mood. It's like the country is sliding into an abyss, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop it.

Question: If the United States goes with full-on socialist health care, where are the people who are seeking medical care because they've been screwed by their own country's socialist health system care going to go?

Anyway...

I should have been able to take some time yesterday composing this week's witty and urbane book thread, but NOOOOOOOOOOOO, I made the mistake of thinking that this was an excellent time to install the copy of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 that I bought at an absurdly low price from my company's "Buy Big-Ass Sofware At An Absurdly Low Price" program. What could go wrong, I thought? Heh. I spent pretty much the better part of day trying to debug some sort of glitch that completely stopped the install (which doesn't happen until about 10 minutes into the install) but told me nothing as to why except for a pop-up window that said "Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Setup has encountered an error".

I finally got around the glitch by downloading the trial version install package and using my product key with that rather than the executable I got at the time of purchase. But the process sucked up all the time so now I'm behind on the book thread.

I know some of you will suggest that I ditch MS Office and go with something like OpenOffice. Meh. I've tried OO and it's clunky and kludgey, so no thanks, I'll stick with Microsoft, warts and all.

Book plug

Moron commenter spongeworthy has asked me to mention his buddy Tim O'Mara, who has gotten his first book published on a MacMillan label. This is a very big deal because big boy publshers like MacMillan don't pick up new authors unless they've hit a home run. You can read more about it on Tim's site.

Kindle spying on you?

Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books.

But they also know how quickly people read books, how long people wait between buying a title before they actually read it, which kinds of titles people are likely to buy and/or read after
finishing that book, and even things like which sections of a book are most frequently highlighted.

E-book sellers and publishers both stress that the information being shared is not tied to any individual reader. Rather, it's much like the data available to publishers of websites, who can see which pages, topics, headlines and layouts drive the most traffic and retain the most readers.

Quote mentions Nook but it applies to Kindle as well.

Thanks to moron Arthur for sending me this.

Personally, I don't see anything particularly sinister about this. My own company does something similar with its product and the idea is to make a better product, not to spy on people. Besides, you can always turn off the wireless access in your eReader, which is what I have done with my Nook, whose internet interface is pretty crappy, anyway, so I'm not missing anything. This is not the case with the newer tablets, but if this sort of thing gets to be a real concern, I've no doubt someone will develop a tablet app that functions as an alternate to the Kindle and Nook apps that keeps your reading habits private.

As always, book thread tips may be sent to aoshqbookthread@gmail.com

Hopefully, you all have been reading some good stuff this week.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:17 AM

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