Bismuth

So, amazon.com has a new feature (to me at least, as I do my buying at .co.uk). They tell you which book you are likely to buy after viewing the book you are viewing. I was looking at The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster when the new feature caught my eye. So what do people buy after looking at it?

The second book on the list seems reasonable, but after that… um…
It seems people interested in pastafarianism are in search of their own preferences in more areas than just religion .

I just finished reading the first e-book I ever bought: A Transcontinental Odyssey to the Dysfunctional Appendage of North America: Cowboy Gasoline in the Eye of the Storm.
The title says it all really, the writer has to (or at least decides he has to..) drive from somewhere in Arizona to the south of Florida and encounters a hurricane (and it’s eye) on the way. It is written by an anonymous writer friend of Mark Frauenfelder, one of the editors of BoingBoing
At 39 pages it’s almost more a long short story than a book, and a nice read for an afternoon. On the page linked above a short excerpt from the book is printed for the interested. I find the style of the writing very pleasant. My only gripe is that the author is a bit on the negative side when other people and their actions are concerned.

However, the important point here is that this is the first intangible book I bought. I can’t mark it with the cool personal blind tooling clamp I got for my birthday, and I can’t stack it on the cool self referential shelf I recently installed. Somehow a folder called “bookcase” on a desktop just isn’t as cool.