The types of bestselling free Kindle books

Periodically I go on binges where I browse the Kindle bestsellers list and download most of the top 100 free books, more or less indiscriminately, without consideration for quality. I mean, what the hell, it's free and my Kindle 2 still has over 1.2GB of free storage (out of 1.4GB user space). Even the worst piece of formulaic pulp trash might be funny in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way; or at least there may be some anthropological interest (oh, so this is what women fantasize about?). Most of the stuff goes totally unread of course — I don't have time to even glance at a tenth of it — but I suppose I like having the option.

Anyway, it's interesting to note that as of January 2011, the top 100 free Kindle ebooks list consists of the following:

Count	Type	Example	Notes
50	Gutenberg ebooks	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Kindle conversions of public domain etexts from Project Gutenberg; mostly classics.
7	Games	Every Word	IMO Amazon should segregate these in their own section.
5	Thriller/Mystery	The Perfect Woman	Mostly in the gruesome-crimes subgenre, not the sleuthing subgenre.
8	Erotica/Romance	Rough Cut	Romance readers might claim that these are two categories but I defy you to draw the line among these titles.
2	ChickLit	Stuck in the Middle (Sister-to-Sister Book 1)	Apologies for the derogatory label but what do you want me to do with a cover and title like that?
11	Christian Fiction	Fools Rush In (Weddings By Bella, Book 1)	Often disguises itself quite stealthily as other genre fiction.
6	Other Fantasy	Don't Die, Dragonfly	Mostly spirits-and-vampires stuff, not Heroic Medieval Fantasy Product.
8	Alleged Nonfiction	The Winners Manual	Includes many crappy cookbooks and the Bible.
3	Other Fiction	The Stolen Crown	Arguably the bravest authors here, as non-series non-genre fiction has the least "author stickiness" of any fiction. Which isn't to say the writing's any good necessarily.

Email, instant messaging, immediacy, and productivity

Krugman's response to this NY Times trend article on the alleged death of email and triumph of instant messaging reminds me of Donald Knuth's explanation of why he doesn't use email:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

As it turns out, even email is insufficiently immediate for many people these days. And nobody can reasonably dispute that when you're out and about, coordinating real-world social activity, it's sometimes better to have instant messaging — "[I'm] down the street, be there in a minute, stay put" is not a useful message to receive a couple of minutes late, nor do email's strengths offer much benefit in this context.

But you choose your communications medium based, to some extent, on the type of person that you want to be. If you want to be like Krugman or Knuth, then you need long periods of uninterrupted concentration, and you must favor asynchronous communication. If you want to be like a teenager gossiping about his/her classmates, then instant messaging is probably good enough. So, the question: do you want to be more like Don Knuth or more like... well, millions of people whom you've never heard of because they never accomplished anything great? Most of us settle for something in between, of course, but this is a question of aspirations, and anyway in practice the true issue is about modifying one's behavior at the margin and not about absolute positioning.

On the other hand, it is possible to take enforced inaccessibility too far. It is worth quoting a bit from Richard Hamming's classic essay:

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

eMusic: Pay again for music you've already bought

One of the major advantages of eMusic in the past was that, after paying for a track, they'd remember that you'd paid for it and allow you to download it again if you ever lost the file. No more. So long, eMusic, it's been fun. In your continuing quest to court clueless businessmen at the major record labels, you've been steadily making your service worse and worse for some time now, and now I'm done with you. Amazon mp3 for me from now on.

Two steps to freeing yourself from operating system zealotry

First, repeat the following mantra to yourself until you really, really believe it:

Other people's needs, habits, and experiences with software differ dramatically from mine, and are just as legitimate.

Your platform of choice may seem to satisfy your needs exactly. It may ring every single chime in the halls of your heart. But if you sincerely believe that every user who wants something different is simply mistaken, then you're presuming to a knowledge that you do not possess: namely, the knowledge of how every other user behaves.

Second, pay close attention when you're using your preferred computing device, and make a mental note every time you end up staring, slack-jawed or pissed-off or confused, while your computer does something other than what you just asked it to do. (This includes while you're waiting for some indicator to stop spinning, or when you need to stab the "Cancel" or "Back" button.) If you believe that this never happens to you, then you are not paying close enough attention, and in fact you should be frightened, because you have become so habituated to your platform of choice that you've learned to automatically edit these moments out of your consciousness. The inescapable truth is that all computing platforms suck in different ways, including yours. And until you realize this, you will not have achieved enlightenment.

Once these two conclusions sink in, you will shortly see that all OS zealotry is the futile worship of invented gods — cruel, greedy, capricious, and temporary gods to boot. Arguing with people on the Internet about the superiority of your computing bauble will seem to you like a species of insanity.

But who am I kidding. Most OS zealots are fractally wrong and it's a fool's errand to dissuade them. But maybe you, dear reader, can be saved...

Golden Promise and The Macallan

Attention conservation notice: Several hundred words on whisky.

One of the signature qualities of The Macallan whisky has traditionally been its use of Golden Promise barley. It is sometimes claimed that Macallan uses 100% Golden Promise. However, in Raw Spirit (2003)*, Scottish author Iain Banks (yes, that one) writes:

Macallan uses Golden Promise barley, a variety which is out of favour with farmers these days because it produces much less yield than more recent, more productive but less tasty forms. As a result, Golden Promise has become hard to get hold of over the years and even Macallan has had to resort to other varieties, using only about 30 per cent Golden Promise since 1994. It'll be interesting to see whether the 10-year-old Macallan bottled in 2004 tastes appreciably different compared to the year before.

For all my Google-fu, I am unable to find concrete numbers on the precise barley composition of Macallan's maltings prior to 1994. It's possible that they used 100% Golden Promise before then. Certainly, the implication of the passage above is that a much larger proportion of Golden Promise was once used.

Macallan themselves seem evasive on the point. The current notes on their website avoid mentioning Golden Promise entirely, opting instead to claim that they have always been at war with Eastasia "The Macallan uses a proportion of Minstrel barley, a variety grown exclusively for The Macallan . . . to ensure the rich, oily character of the Macallan new make spirit". This evasiveness is understandable, given the extent to which whisky drinkers (like gourmands of other types) tend to be irrationally influenced in their judgment by untasteable qualities, such as strict adherence to tradition.

And, after all, whisky gains most of its flavor from subjecting barley to various extraordinarily refined and artificial practices — artificial not in the sense of false or disingenuous but simply in the sense of artifice as calculated construction — including malting, milling, mashing, fermentation, distillation, and barrel-aging. And therefore, it is especially irrational to develop an attachment to an exact source barley per se. In the hands of skilled distillers, one can trust that the new expression will share many characteristics of the old, and may even be indistinguishable when imbibed, even if it's not chemically identical down to the last molecule.

Nevertheless, I offer the following friendly note to anyone out there who likes a nice Speyside. If Macallan last used its original ratio of Golden Promise barley in 1993, then this year's bottling (2010) is the last 17-year Macallan made with that ratio. Likewise, 2011's bottling will be the last 18-year expression made from the same. As older Macallan tends to be an especially finely balanced whisky, and as whiskies older than 18 years tend to be exorbitantly priced**, you may wish to buy a bottle of Macallan 18 sometime in the next year to save for a special occasion. If nothing else, you will be able to impress*** your friends by telling them that this exact Macallan cannot be had any longer at any price.

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*By the way, Raw Spirit is almost impossible to read from cover to cover. It may be the most self-indulgent, meandering thing Banks has ever written. On the other hand, it's entertaining to dip randomly into short passages, including some nice bits on Scotland and sundry. In many ways, the writing suffers from being incarnate as a bound codex. A whisky blog written by Banks would be a lot more fun to read. Anyway, by leafing through the book and sticking labeled Post-Its on the pages where each distillery appears, I was able to transform it into a decent introductory reference guide to Scotch, and one that's far less stuffy and pretentious than that sort of thing would normally be.

**While I'm dispensing unsolicited advice, here's some on whisky and age (this will be obvious to any serious whisky drinker, but it may be news to some readers of this blog). Some people assume that older whiskies are strictly better than younger ones. This notion is supported by the exceptionally high price of old whisky, and also pop culture artifacts like that West Wing episode when Leo rhapsodizes on the age of Johnnie Walker Blue. In fact, age changes the taste of whisky, but whether that change is an improvement is entirely a subjective matter. Younger whiskies retain more of the character of the original malting and distillation process, whereas older whiskies take on more of the character of the barrel in which they are aged. As a rule of thumb, the barrel exerts a gentling, sweetening influence. Thus some qualities, like intense peatiness, which are especially beloved of the most insufferable whisky nerds, are more commonly found in younger spirits.

***Or, more likely, annoy.