I've seen where "helpful" people have put in notes saying "Don't read this part!" before a sex scene--or simply got out a marker and crossed out the offending passage. And then they blithely return the book, probably filled with satisfaction at having improved the world.

My favorite was reading a "Jane Austen" mystery from the library where someone had scribbled "Jane Austen is probably turning in her grave!" I agreed with the sentiment since I really didn't like Jane Austen as detective, but thought that Jane would probably hate someone writing in library books more.

Well, yeah, library books. I somehow missed that part of the "writing in books" complaint. A burning offense, for sure, with a publicly-owned book.

So, I get a Kindle for a work project, through May at least, and it arrived today! Hit me with your top 10 Kindle tips. This is the wifi-only, cheap-ass one - I am working with an English professor and he is going to have all the texts for his class on the Kindle, and every student gets one (on loan).

I don't have any tips. I just read read read read. I can't explain the phenomena of why books sat gathering dust on my nightstand, but I tear through them on the Kindle.

There was a fellow paperback mystery reader at my old library branch who would copy edit books -- in pencil, but sometimes wrongly.

Go here and roll around in the freebie goodness (left column). Also, if you want to convert stuff easily to mobi format (from epub, lit, pdf, etc) download a program called Calibre. Then just copy files to your kindle!

In amusing Kindle news, the Kindle store thinks I live in the UK and no amount of resetting my address or transferring my account to amazon.com will convince it otherwise. Because one time about 2.5 years ago I bought some books for a friend living in England who had a baby, and had the books shipped directly.

I just finished Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It was completely different from the sort of stuff I usually read, but a really good time. I'll let its TV Tropes page sum it up for me:

"Possibly the best known book by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash is basically the tale of a sword-slinging hacker who teams up with a badass Kourier in a post-Cyper Punk, disincorporated USA to fight "Snow Crash" - a computer virus for the brain. Oh, and there's a badass biker with glass knives and a nuclear bomb strapped to his motorbike, too."

That about sums it up. The book was apparently the inspiration for both Second Life and Google Earth, and was the first thing to use the term 'avatar' in a computer-related sense. So that's neat.

There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
software
high-speed pizza delivery