The Luckiest Man in the World

Heh! Hat tip to Powerline. Twenty years ago I laughed when I heard the joke about Dan Quayle being the luckiest man on earth. Dan's now at number two.

Website of the Hour: LibraryThing

I've been a (paid) member of LibraryThing.com since 2006 and it has been a lot of fun. The idea is that you list the books in your personal library or the books you've read and, when comparing your collection to similar collections of others, you get good ideas about what to read next. Perhaps you've noticed the array of book covers and titles running down the right-hand margin of this blog page. That's produced using a LibraryThing widget, which randomly selects books from my collection and shows off what I've read, am reading, or intend to read. Here's a link to my personal page in LibraryThing.com to see more. This is a different kind of social internet and, IMHO, much more interesting than a facebook or myspace page. (But maybe that's because I'm approaching middle age. :-)

Kindle Watch

Time magazine is reporting that sales of Kindle editions of books now total 12% of total sales at Amazon for those titles. That is, in the universe made up exclusively of the 140,000 titles with Kindle editions available, 12% of sales of those titles by Amazon are in the e-book format. This is double the percentage quoted by Jeff Bezos a couple of months ago. I bought my Kindle in February and love it. I carried a library of books on a single device on my recent vacation trip to California. I did not read them all, of course, but I often keep several books going at once. And when I feel like I still have nothing to read, I can browse the Kindle store wirelessly. I don't own Amazon stock. Wish I did! :-)