Amazon Sez . . .

Amazon has announced that it's now selling more Kindle e-books than hardbacks, and that this is a huge milestone in the history of publishing.

Several grains of salt need to be taken with this message. No raw numbers are provided, only a percentage (143 Kindle sales for every 100 hardback sales). It's not clear how many of the Kindle sales replace hardback sales, and how many replace paperback sales. A great many Kindle books are out-of-copyright classics on sale for 99 cents or for free. (I just downloaded the six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for my Kindle, and it cost me less than buck.)

And of course, Amazon's figures have always been notoriously slippery, as any author who has tried to track his own Amazon sales will tell you.

So the barricades have not yet been stormed, and the revolution, whatever it is, has not triumphed.

Still, this probably means something or other. Your guess is as good as mine as to what.

One Lonely Star

I am rarely delighted by my one-star Amazon reviews. Especially when I'm taken to task for making up dumb stuff, when in fact I did scrupulous research and the reviewer didn't bother to simply google the topic and find that out. (Okay, that one still rankles.)

But at least I'm in good company. Jeanette Demain over at Salon has been brooding over one-star reviews of the classics.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte:

Endless, pointless description. DESCRIPTION, DESCRIPTION, DESCRIPTION!!! The entire book is written in stupid metaphors. The few places where there is actually any dialogue bore the reader to tears. Honestly, i think that this is dubbed a classic simply because it is older than sand.

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White, Garth Williams, and Rosemary Wells:

Absolutely pointless book to read. I felt no feelings towards any of the characters. I really didn't care that Wilbur won first prize. And how in the world does a pig and a spider become friends? It's beyond me.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith:

This book is 3 words over and over again: MY LIFE IS BAD. 500 pages and that's all it says. It's exactly the same as any other book about a poor family with an irresponsible father and a child who manages to be alright (Angela's Ashes, Black Boy, Riding in Cars With Boys) the only difference is - THIS ONE IS FICTION.

1984 by George Orwell:

At first I did like the book. Then it just started to suck right around the time when Winston was getting sexually involved with his girl friend. I hated the book so much that I forgot her name. The first hundred or so pages i liked, then it just got really boring. So II highly reccomend that you DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. And please for the love of God don't read that "Brave New World" book by Hoxley. It is twice as worse as 1984. To put it bluntly, DON'T READ ANY GEORGE ORWELL. Your just waisting your time.

Diary of Anne Frank

I didn't like this book because it was boring. That's all that needs to be said. It was very very very very very very very very very very very boring. If you have to read this book shoot yourself first.

The Holy Bible:

Man, this book is boring. All this weird stuff happens and it's harder to get into than Lord of the Rings. And what's up with the red writing and the LORD says stuff. All caps = rude, peter paul and mark, whoever the heck you are. And this is just badly written. James Patterson could do better. These apostles need to get a clue and hire a ghost writer. Even Miley Cyrus's manager was smart enough to do that. Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ, indeed.

Well all right, I rather suspect that last one may just be a hoax. But the tone is somehow right--- obviously it's produced by someone who's studied his fellow reviewers closely.

Okay, I feel better now.

[via kenneth]

Crazed Victorian Explorer Finds Lost Civilization in Amazon

In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured into the Amazon, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. He was searching for an ancient civilization, which he had named, simply, the City of Z . . .

Fawcett had warned that no one should follow in his wake due to the danger, but scores of scientists, explorers, and adventurers plunged into the wilderness, determined to recover the Fawcett party, alive or dead, and to return with proof of Z. In February 1955, the New York Times claimed that Fawcett's disappearance had set off more searches "than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous El Dorado." Some were wiped out by starvation and disease, or retreated in despair; others were murdered by tribesmen firing arrows dipped in poison. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, like him, simply disappeared in the forests that travelers had long ago christened the "green hell."

. . . Yet in recent years archeologists have begun to find evidence of what Fawcett had always claimed: ancient ruins buried deep in the Amazon, in places ranging from the Bolivian flood plains to the Brazilian forests. These ruins include enormous man-made earth mounds, plazas, geometrically aligned causeways, bridges, elaborately engineered canal systems, and even an apparent astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks that has been dubbed "the Stonehenge of the Amazon."

Much more here.