my3books

My friend Junita has posted a loving tribute to cookbooks and the art of learning to cook without the cookbook at her foodie blog, Stack of Cookbooks.

After years of dutifully following recipes, I now realize that what I treasure the most is pulling off a dish with no recipe. When I can cook something by heart.

Do you know someone who cooks everything this way? Who moves around the kitchen like a cyclone, tasting and seasoning, throwing together a salad while they're braising the entree, with not a cookbook in sight? I am so not this person. This improvisational phenom is like a musician who can play a catalog of songs on five different instruments. I can't even play Chopsticks on the piano.

My cookbook-free victories are few and far between. But when the stars align, and I'm able to throw together a tasty dinner with what I have on hand, it's more satisfying than cooking from the most complicated recipe. I love the thrill of a new recipe. But for me, the real joy comes from sharing a simple improvisational meal with friends.

Click through, read the whole post, and you'll come away with Junita's take on Pasta Genovese, a perfectly summery dish that features fresh green beans and potatoes and lots of basil in the pesto, all tossed together with fettucine.

[Stack of Cookbooks: A Culinary Victory]

Found tonight on Boing Boing (and via Flavorwire), a gallery of hilarious print ads for Pilot's Extrafine pens. (Nearly as hilarious to my eyes: the sharp-eyed blog commenters chiming in to call "fake!" and "photoshopped!" Because, well, duh.  These are Lego minifigs we're talking about.  Obviously they're not tattooed.  The best commenter was here on Boing Boing, running the numbers down.)

Here are my three favorites:

Harley Dude

 Sumo Dude
Tramp Stamp

Kevin Guilfoile writes:

...so I fanned the pages, and as I did, a small piece of pink cardboard, attached to a string, fell to the floor.

I picked it up and turned it over, and as I read the words on it, I couldn't believe what I was holding--an almost perfectly conserved press pass to Game 2 of the 1929 "World's Series" at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The Chicago Cubs vs. the Philadelphia A's. 

You should read the whole story at the blog home of The Outfit, a group home for wayward Chicago mystery writers, including Guilfoile, Sean Chercover (who I still need to start reading), Libby Fischer Hellmann, and David Ellis (a neighborhood kid I knew growing up, who's gone on to great things prosecutorial and authorial).

(Via the must-read Daring Fireball.)

In today's PWxyz post about Kindle 3 being announced, the Amazon VP of Kindle Content (ie, the guy who holds the publishers' hands) was quoted.

“The market is even bigger than we thought,” said Russ Grandinetti, v-p of Kindle content about the size of the e-reader audience. He reiterated statements made by Amazon last week that since the company lowered the price of the Kindle to $189 sales have accelerated.

This feels a bit to me like Dave Bowman's famous last line from 2001, "... and oh my God – it's full of stars!"

Amazon has seemingly discovered the hollow star of the eBook market: get the price low enough and you discover a vast pocket universe of people who wouldn't have bought an eBook reader at twice the price.  But really, if you get it down low enough, you'll discover that even people who wouldn't have paid full price for a paperback screed by Glenn Beck with a blurb from George W. Bush and a metallic-embossed American flag on the cover at the checkout at Wal-mart will buy an ereader.  But then what?

The question is really not just about vast numbers of people buying low-priced ereaders equating to vast numbers of people buying books and buying more books after that.  Because at a super low price, the ereader isn't the same as buying a lot of books.  It's like buying a super-low-priced book cover that you can then put other books into.  You still have to go ahead and buy the books to put on the Kindle (or other gadget).

Will all those super-low-price buyers go nuts with their credit cards and become rabid ebook-edition buyers?  Have we really discovered a magical world full of customers who were just waiting for the GADGET that would enable them to start buying books? A magical world full of customers who seem to have been unaware of the wonder of books when they were merely printed on paper?  

Or have we just found a world of people who will buy the next hot gadget made in China, no matter what it is, so long as it's super-low-priced?  ("Dude - it's like a Nintendo DS for words!!")

It seems more likely that the universe of dedicated readers of books – no matter what the format might be – is a finite one.  There are only so many of us out there.  That's why the book business has been cheering so hard for young fans of JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.  THOSE new readers who got hooked on books are the future generation of book readers and we certainly want them to keep on buying and loving books.  But for the rest of us?  Our habits are set in stone.  We're already book buyers or we aren't.

A shiny new Kindle or iPad or Kobo or Nook won't convert a non-book buyer into a rabid book buyer.  It might give us some incremental growth.  But not revolutionary growth.   The market isn't bigger than we thought.  It's exactly the size we were afraid it might be.  eBook readers aren't a panacea for our business.  They're a bandaid.  A shiny new bandaid.

Publishing folks like to point at the music industry and say, "We saw what happened with the death of CDs and the rise of the mp3 and we don't want to make that mistake.  Look how hard we're working to make ebook purchasing friendly and simple.  We're not going to lose business to piracy."

But, to judge from the quote I opened with, we've forgotten the lesson the music business learned BEFORE the death of CDs: the death of the LP.  The music business hopped onto CDs with both feet and surfed a happy wave of massive sales as customers started replacing one format of recorded music with another.  But soon enough, even that wave petered out.

This massive acquisition of ebook readers in 2010 may make for a bright and shiny holiday season for ebook retailers.  And it might even contribute to a gloomy holiday season for bookstores that still specialize in the "books printed on paper" category.  But I'll be waiting and watching for statistics that come out in the next months that report on just how many actual paid ebooks are bought by all those owners of new ebook readers.  Then we'll see just how big this market really is.

Maybe it's been sheer laziness on my part (maybe?? hell yes, it's laziness...), but I've been putting more little clicky bits and things to read up on Facebook because it's just so darn easy, and I've been putting less and less up on my3books this year.  It's not that I'm reading less, or have fewer cool books to talk about, or have fewer opinions.

But the sheer ease-of-use with which you can post stuff on Facebook makes it a simpler path to choose. (Simpler only in terms of how simple it is to share things with my network of "friends" there on Facebook, not necessarily more simple when it comes to global clicky hegemony by our overlords at Facebook et al.)  They've just got those little "Share" buttons all over the web.  Who wouldn't click them?

I've been pondering this for a couple of weeks, reading all those articles about Facebook's privacy settings hell and their 500 million users.  The final straw was this terrific post by Teresa Nielson Hayden on Making Light about posting videos and required cross-linking between YouTube and Gmail and Facebook: 

I said no. I especially and particularly said no to your happy plan to take that crosslinked pair of accounts and propagate god-knows-what information from them to Facebook. For my benefit, you said. So my friends can find me, and see what I’m doing, and I can see what they’re doing. Which is utter codswallop, because it’s really about you and Facebook getting to track who my friends are and what information I share with them, the better to market to us all

So I'm going to try slogging uphill a bit more often and make the conscious choice to put more of those things that I would otherwise share on Facebook up on my3books.com instead.  It's time to work harder at maintaining my corner of the larger Web - I guess I would really rather build my web out in the open instead of contributing more links to a very over-built web inside the box that Facebook has constructed.