Books

Borders seems to be near bankruptcy; it's delaying more payments to vendors and landlords to preserve cash. In the meantime, ebooks for the Kindle outsold paperbacks for the first time:

How the phone book changed America:

This book sounded so intriguing I had to download it to my Kindle:

Remember the Catch-22 in the book of the same title? To get out of a combat mission, you had to be delcared insane, but you had to ask for the evaluation. But asking for the evaluation was proof you wanted out of the mission, which is the sane thing to want, so you couldn't get out get out of the mission. The perfect gotcha.

Bad news on the bookstore front. Borders has just posted a second-quarter loss of $46.7 million, the fifth loss in six quarters, and the chain is closing stores and selling more non-book items. Things aren't so hot at Barnes & Noble, either.

There's a new edition of Robert Heinlin's "The Puppet Masters" out (via Instapundit), and I may have to pick it up. This isn't the 1951 version of only 60,000 words. It's the 1990 version in which Heinlein was able to return the 36,000 words cut by the original publisher.

Mr. Early Adopter gets burned again:

Kindle is our #1 bestselling item for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon. Now it's even better.

The increase in e-book sales continues, but don't write the obit for the dead-tree version quite yet:

 Amazon says its Kindle e-book sales are three times larger than they were last year, and it sells 43 percent more Kindle e-books than hardcover books on average. It's pretty clear that people are adopting Kindle Books, and e-books in general, at a faster rate than any other book format.

[. . .]

How to find interesting, thought-provoking stuff online:

Tony Dungy was back in Indy this week to work on one of his favorite causes, trying to keep kids on the straight and narrow:

Dungy, in partnership with Indiana Project Safe Neighborhoods, narrates a video called "There's Not Always a Second Chance," focused on the stories of young men who made choices that changed their lives forever, 6News' Jennifer Carmack reported.

Anybody want to buy a few hundred cookbooks? I'm not much of a collector, but I began buying cookbooks about 25 years ago when I took a baking class at Ivy Tech and started spending a lot more time in the kitchen. But, as I may have mentioned before, I hardly ever use them. They're still fun to browse through, but it's pain to actually find a recipe you want to make in them. If you want a good bean soup recipe, for example, you can spend a couple of hours looking through the books to find one that interests you.