"Caro had long opposed an e-book version, worried that it would diminish the reading experience, but about a year ago, he was finally persuaded that it could would expand the book’s reach."

From "Robert Caro Reflects on 'The Power Broker' and Its Legacy at 50/Caro’s book on Robert Moses, a city planner who reshaped New York, is also a reflection on 'the dangers of unchecked power,' and remains more resonant and relevant than ever" (NYT).

The Kindle version of the book becomes available on September 16th. Here's the Amazon link (commission earned). There's an audio version too. But note that you can stream the audio at no extra cost — here — if you have a premium Spotify subscription.

From the NYT article:

Squunched.

In last night's Snow Walk Café, I wrote:

I love trying to read a book in Kindle — after hours of reading this and that on the web — and arriving at a word — in this case “squunched” — clicking on it and, via Google, escaping back onto the web, going here and there, liberated by “squunched,” defying the order of things once again, not reading a book, unless you call that reading a book. But I will squunch myself back in there, in that Kindle book, just playing at trying to read until I see the sign for the next off ramp.

What I was reading was — as mentioned yesterday — "The Suffering Channel" (found in this collection):

They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade.

When you take the off ramp marked Squunch, you get to a discussion of another sentence by the same author, and I have that other book in Kindle too and can tell you "squunch" comes up in 3 sentences. Taking a gander at the first of the 3 sentences should give you a feeling for why I read fiction looking for off ramps.

"These are neat? I guess? In that someone made effort and put something that I can kind of identify with on the web."

Says a Metafilter participant, reacting to "Extremely Accurate Charts for Book Nerds." The commenter continues:

[T]he older I get, the less I identify with books being cool for their own sake. This may be a function of hyperabundance, both of texts of any sort (Kindle, magazines, www, &c.) and of actual books--books, which are harder and harder to unload at used bookstores or even Goodwill because of that same hyperabundance. I live in a small place, our home library has something close to a book-in, book-out policy.

I love to read, I can't not read, but I guess I don't care as much about the substrate as I used to.

"Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book..."

"... which persists when you’ve finished it. It is a monument to the activity of reading. It makes this imaginary activity entirely substantial. But the quiddity of e-reading is that it effaces itself.... There is a disproportionate magic in the way black marks on white paper — or their pixilated facsimiles — stir us into reverie and revise our consciousness. Still, we require proof that it has happened. And that proof is what the books on my shelves continue to offer."

From "Books to Have and to Hold," by the delightfully named Verlyn Klinkenborg, published in the NYT in 2013. I'm reading that today as a consequence of becoming fascinated by the word "quiddity" which I encountered while researching the word "entity," which is illustrated in the OED by a phrase written by the philosopher George Berkeley in 1710: "The positive abstract idea of quiddity, entity, or existence."

We were talking about the word "entity" in the midst of a discussion of Hillary Clinton's use of the word "person":

Hillary Clinton faced criticism from both sides of the abortion debate on Monday after she waded into the fraught argument about when life begins by describing the unborn as a “person.”

Mrs. Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, made the comment during an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after she was asked about abortion restrictions and the rights of the unborn.

“The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Why did she say "person"? Was it purely a gaffe or did she mean to wink a subtle "I care" at those who are unsettled or anguished at killing the unborn? It's hard, in conversation, to restrict yourself to "the unborn," which is neutral, but formal. Talking about that with Meade, I said that when I teach the abortion cases in law school, I say "the unborn entity." I apologize for the strangeness of the term, which I don't mean to sound humorous or alienating. I genuinely think it's the right word for me — the law-professor person — to use to conduct a professional, balanced examination of the judicial opinions. But I did want to check my perception by looking up the word just now.

I wrote "the law-professor person" in what was, really, a private joke aimed at Meade. He had observed — talking about Hillary's gaffe/non-gaffe — that it's become a tic of modern language to add "person" to moderate a perceived harshness in using a noun to designate someone as a member of a group. Thus, we might think we shouldn't refer to someone as "a white," so we say "a white person." The noun seems to distance and "otherize," but if you plunk "person" after it, it's a milder descriptive — a kinder, gentler adjective. The Chinese becomes a Chinese person. (I guessed that it all started with "Jewish person.") Meade theorized that Hillary had become so used to this linguistic etiquette that it naturally and inconveniently happened to "unborn."

After this high-level observation of a limitation in Kindle, maybe Amazon will finally help out people like me who do research like this.

The first paragraph of the review of "Gone Girl" in The New Yorker:

The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.

The reviewer Elif Batuman — whose name is an anagram for Mutable Naif and Tubal Famine — turned Kindle's limitation into a neat, context-specific joke. But jokes like this get tired, and the need to count the occurrences of a word in an ebook rages on. Ebook is one of the few words, other than ebola, that begin with "ebo-," and all the others range around ebon — meaning black — ebon, ebony, ebonies, ebonize, ebonized, ebonies, ebonics.

So, now, what? How are you hoping this blog post will unfold?

1. I wish it were over already.

2. I hope Althouse finishes reading Elif Batuman's review of "Gone Girl" and probes the intriguing concept "wives are people who disappear."

3. I want closure based on the post title, with a strong, clear message to Amazon that it needs to get its Kindle search tool working beyond 100 hits on a search word.

4. I'd like to see Althouse explore the racial concepts within and around words that begin "ebo-," including the fear of ebola as a fear of black people and this current issue about ebonics and "talking white."

5. I'd like to see Althouse drift into the etymology of "ebon" and use the Oxford English Dictionary to cherry-pick historical iterations like Shakespeare's "Deaths ebon dart" and Longfellow's "From out its ebon case his violin the minstrel drew." She could look for the earliest use of "ebonics" and find it in the NYT in 1973: "Professor Ernie Smith,  a linguistics professor from the University of California... suggested the study of 'ebonics,' which he said viewed the speech patterns of black Americans as they relate to Caribbean and African blacks rather than to white Americans." And she could find the first use of "ebola" and see that it too was in the NYT. The year was 1976, and it was only a brief notation — "The virus responsible for the recent epidemic of green monkey fever that claimed several hundred lives will be known as the Ebola Virus, after a river in the north [of Zaire]" — a virus-small thing next to a huge ad with a white lady laughing in a "cascading" silk gown as an off-frame hand pours champagne into her glass. Oh! The accidental incongruities... and how they seem to amplify the message.

Using Amazon's "Popular Highlights" feature to see whether the books people bought are actually getting read.

"Every book's Kindle page lists the 5 passages most highlighted by readers," notes Jordan Ellenberg in The Wall Street Journal. If the highlights come from all over the book or near the end, it suggests people are actually reading it. When the highlights all come from the beginning, they probably are not.

Ellenberg — who's a UW-Madison math prof — does some calculations and declares that the most unread book of the summer is Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century":

Mr. Piketty's book is almost 700 pages long, and the last of the top five popular highlights appears on page 26.

I've never read "Atlas Shrugged," but after all these years, I'm adding it to my Kindle.

I'll explain this to you, but could you please, if you need a Kindle, use this linkto check out the spiffy new Kindle Fire? Or go in through the Althouse Amazon portal and buy whatever you want, including a copy of "Atlas Shrugged," if you, like me, have some use for it. Or do you already have it on your shelf? I know at least one of my readers kept 2 copies of "Atlas Shrugged" on his shelf, and perhaps he systematically handed off copies of it to people who wandered into his lair and said, "Why do you have 2 copies of 'Atlas Shrugged'?"

I hope you enjoyed the quality of my commercial effort, above, and feel inclined to show your appreciation by using those links, or just by continuing to read this. You've wandered into my lair, and maybe you're saying "Yeah, why would anyone after resisting 'Atlas Shrugged' all those years finally relent?"

And it is many years. I'm quite old! I don't need any philosophical-ideological mental nourishment to power me forth in this life. It's not breakfast time chez Althouse. When I was young, a classmate — this was high school — chided me for not reading anything that wasn't assigned by teachers. That wasn't quite true — though I did apply myself assiduously to consuming whatever the government indoctrinators put on my plate — but I was quite sensitive to insinuations that I was in any way not a good person. And I read the book this teenage boy insisted on giving me: "Anthem." Sorry, old man who was once that boy, but it didn't change my life, it's still the only Ayn Rand book I ever read, and I don't remember anything about it, other than that it might have been science fiction.

The reason I'm downloading "Atlas Shrugged" into my Kindle this morning is the reason I buy most of the ebooks I buy: I want to be able to do searches, find the context of quotes, and cut and paste text into this blog. I happen to need "Atlas Shrugged" right now, because Ted Cruz — the filibustering Ted Cruz — was quoting from "Atlas Shrugged," and I was using a quote on the blog, in the previous post, and I have a lot more to say about the quote, and I can't do it without the context.

Bezos and the WaPo paywall.

"Last March, the Washington Post put up a metered paywall, charging readers who access more than 20 articles a month," but Jeff Bezos, who just bought WaPo, has said, "On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change." So what's going to happen?

"For this reason, 'This Town' contains no index; bold-face Washingtonians can’t just find their pages, see how they’re depicted, and read no more."

WaPo doesn't seem to understand that in a world of ebooks and "search inside the book" Amazon pages, you don't need to look names up in an index to see whether and where they appear in a book.

I suspect that if there's no index in this book, it's to save printing expenses and because they wouldn't want anyone to assume that if a particular name isn't in the index, it isn't in the book. Now, you might say, but maybe Amazon won't have "search inside the book" for this particular book, and if people want to do a search within an ebook, they'll have to buy the ebook, so more books will be sold. But that assumes there are cheapskates — among the super-busy Washingtonians — who would go to a physical bookstore, find the actual paper version of this book, and look up names in an index. Anyone who cares that much would just download the damned Kindle edition from Amazon, which would take about 10 seconds. The search would be accomplished in well under a minute. Even if it's overpriced at $12.74, what is your time worth? And by "you," I mean some Washington entity who is important enough to imagine he'd get mentioned in a gossipy book by a NYT reporter, and yet not important enough not to care.

"The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight."

Publishers Weekly has put out a $1.99 ebook.

Little did Apple know when it introduced the iPad in 2010 that it would be setting itself up to land in federal court on price-fixing charges. This blow-by-blow account charts how five of America’s six largest publishers, afraid that bookselling powerhouse Amazon's $9.99 price for Kindle e-books would undermine the industry, spent a few frantic weeks in early 2010 deep in negotiations with Apple to introduce a new business model for e-books, just in time for the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore.

ADDED: I was dreaming when I wrote this/Forgive me if it goes astray/But when I woke up this morning/Coulda sworn it was judgment day/The sky was all purple/There were people running everywhere/Trying 2 run from the destruction/You know I didn't even care/They say two thousand one zero party over/Oops out of time/So tonight I'm gonna read like it's nine point ninety-nine...

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

Purchase of the day.

From the March 8, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Obama Care Survival Guide: The Affordable Care Act and What It Means for You and Your Healthcare" [Kindle Edition] Nick Tate (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.58)

... and 35 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Thanks for caring.

Purchases of the days.

From the February 19 and 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

(13 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.06)

(11 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $10.19)

... and 164 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — all of which convey the quiet, contemplative, good-listener message to the blogger that... shhh... shhh... shhh...

Thank you.

Electronic devices on planes are dangerous...

... but not for the reason the FAA seems to want you to believe.

If progress [toward changing the rules] is slow, there will eventually be an episode on a plane in which someone is seriously harmed as a result of a device being on during takeoff. But it won’t be because the device is interfering with the plane’s systems. Instead, it will be because one passenger harms another, believing they are protecting the plane from a Kindle, which produces fewer electromagnetic emissions than a calculator.

The ultimate reason to switch to ebooks.

Bedbugs!!

That's hot news in the NYT, but of course, insects have been enjoying the nourishment of books for a long long time, and book-readers love to use the metaphor of insects-feeding-on-books for themselves. What do you think a bookworm is?

Bookworm is a popular generalization for any insect which supposedly bores through books. Actual book-borers are uncommon....

A major book-feeding insect is the book or paper louse (aka booklouse or paperlouse).... It is not actually a true louse.

Many other insects, like the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) or cockroach (various Blattodea), will consume these molds and also degraded paper or the starch-based binding pastes – warmth and moisture or high humidity are prerequisites, so damage is more common in the tropics. Modern glues and paper are less attractive to insects....

Even less attractive: iPad, Nook, and Kindle.

"Listen, I like stopping by Althouse, but let's get real. Althouse and Meade are living a high-income, privileged life that many of us can only dream about."

Rants Jeffrey in my "time to stop talking about the election and have our lives be about love and beauty" post.

It takes a day like today to put all of that into focus. Cultivate your garden?! I've seen the photos of where she and Meade live. C'mon. Many of us would love to live surrounded by all those expensive toys and have the summer off to order a pile of books for the Kindle and take a few leisurely vacations.

The class (and income) issue rarely comes up here. I think it's about time we hashed this out.

As others have pointed out above, Ann's cavalier, gather-ye-rosebuds response is predicated on being financially stable for the rest of her life. She has the good life NOW and will have it till the day she dies (or almost).

Let me repeat, though. I generally enjoy Ann's blog, but today seems like a good time for people to discuss this issue.

I'd said "cultivate your garden" in a comment in that thread. It's a reference to Voltaire's advice in "Candide" — damn, I typo'd "candidate"! — where it's not just advice for the comfortably affluent. Here, you can put it in your Kindle — in English — for $0.00 — absolutely free. You can read the greatest books ever written and never run out of reading material — all free. 

And I have the summer off because I choose not to teach during the summer. I choose not to make more money. As for Meade's economic choices, you don't know what they are, and I choose not to invade our privacy by explaining the structure of the economic unit that is our household. But we do, in many ways, choose noncommercial activities over moneymaking things, and we take advantage of the wealth that we have built up in our lives by enjoying our home and the natural beauty of our state and our country. We buy a state park sticker for our car every year and county ski and bike trail passes, and we never run out of incredibly cheap things to do.

If Meade and I were starting our lives together and in our 20s — a topic we've discussed many times — we would put a premium on love and beauty and on maximizing our free time... and our freedom generally. But that isn't where we happened to meet. You may be somewhere else, and if you are, use your brain. Figure out what your values really are and what you should be doing with your life. You are not your job. You are not a slave. Think! Pay attention! Do something with what you have. Don't pester your mind with envy. It's perfectly idiotic to wait for the world to change into a form you like.

That's what Voltaire was talking about when he had his long-suffering character Candide say:

"I know... that we must cultivate our garden."

"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

"Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

"Marc, Soren and I are at home with candles, kindles and canned food!"

"Any must-read recommendations for waiting out a storm?"

It's Chelsea Clinton, tweeting from the dark zone of New York City. Nice that she's using Kindle. I hope she enters through the Althouse portal. I'm enjoying the new Camille Paglia book. Check that out!  Art, culture, miscellanea. A good distraction, with some glossy pictures.

"Amazon Confirms It Makes No Profit On Kindles."

"We sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break-even on the hardware."

"What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle,” said [Jeff] Bezos.... “But they don’t stop buying paper books. Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.”

It's to their advantage, and maybe to your advantage. May I recommend: Kindle Paperwhite.

"A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame..."

Wrote Sinclair Lewis at Kindle Locations 3099-3100 in "Elmer Gantry," which I downloaded yesterday, after David Axelrod, on "Face the Nation," said that poor Obama "was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance" from Romney.

Skimming the book, I happened to see "the icy mitt," and thought it was funny — Sinclair Lewis's humorous reference to a perfunctory handshake (put in the mouth of his Gantry character).

Elmer disposed of Cecil Aylston: "To hell with him! There's a fellow we'll get rid of! A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame that's probably saved already, that you, by golly, couldn't unsave with a carload of gin! That'll do you, my young friend!..." 

Yeah, I know: Doesn't sound the least bit like Romney. But, as I say, it amused me to run across The Icy Mitt. And that piqued my curiosity. Did "mitt" appear elsewhere in the book? This is the careless, intuitive way I have of looking for bloggable material. But Kindle, come on! I do a search for "mitt" in the Kindle app, and I get 74 matches, because Kindle won't look for "mitt" as a separate word, only as a set of 4 letters, so I get every "admitted," "permitted," "omitted, and "committee." It's sometimes interesting to discover the way a word is present within a word. It can give you ideas for jokes in the "putting the X in Y" form — putting the mitt in omitted — but it really undermines the value of having searchable text.

Elmer stopped pumping, glared, rubbed his mittened hands on his thighs, and spoke steadily:

"I've been waiting for this! I'm impulsive  — sure; I make bad mistakes — every red-blooded man does. But what about you? I don't know how far you've gone with your hellish doubts, but I've been listening to the hedging way you answer questions in Sunday School, and I know you're beginning to wabble. Pretty soon you'll be an out-and-out liberal. God! Plotting to weaken the Christian religion, to steal away from weak groping souls their only hope of salvation! The worst murderer that ever lived isn't a criminal like you!" 

Kindle Locations 2449-2460.

"Here is a lesson in creative writing."

That's the heading for a short bit of text by Kurt Vonnegut in "A Man Without a Country," which I just downloaded in Kindle because we were talking about punctuation in the comments to the "phony balance" post and I half-remembered something he said about semi-colons. The short bit under the heading goes like this: