-You don’t want to hang out with the person who wrote it/said it if you’re looking for a real conversation
-Your interaction can only get worse from here

The worst part though, of this insidious-when-abbreviated pronoun, is that it complete fails to offer you a real response. For example:
“Hey, which movie do you want to go to, The Curse of Benjamin Button or Slumdog Millionaire?”
“Whatev.”
“Well, I heard they’re both good, but which one are you more interested in?”
“Whatevs.”

This is not helpful.

Let’s try another example:
“You bought all your textbooks from the bookstore? I thought you were trying to save money…”
“Whatevs.”
“But you could’ve saved a bunch of money on betterworld.com!”
“…whatev.”

What does one say to that?

This inexplicably used term doesn’t just involve shortening the word, but instead shortening the whole conversation by offering nowhere to go. That is totes ridic (doh!)

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can’t catch up. And for the third year in a row, I’ll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It’s about books. It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest. [...]At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World. [...] A glutton for punishment, Mr. Bush insisted on another rematch in 2008. But it will be a three-peat for me: as of today, his total is 40 volumes to my 64.

So the suggestion is that the leader of the free world was reading almost 2 books a week in 2006.  I’m not commenting on Bush’s education in any way, that is not a question here, my question is merely this, should the President have enough time to be reading two books a week, in addition to spending time with his family, reading the paper (or whatever a president does to stay up to date) and, you know, running the country?  (To be clear, I would be more than a little bit concerned if Obama were claiming to have done the same thing so this has nothing to do with politics).

As a full time social media/brand writing professional who works for a book company I don’t have enough time to read two books a week and I’m a pretty quick reader… so how does GWB pull it off? Especially during a war? I don’t know, reader, I just don’t know.

On the plus side, we saw history being made left and right: Barack Obama elected as the first black president of the United States.  There’s nothing I can write about this that hasn’t been said already, but wow, what a spectacular event that was.  It’s nice to see that your fellow citizens have the ability to surprise.

Before that Michael Phelps (yes he has a book) was on TV 24/7 as he dominated swimming in a way I haven’t seen since Flipper.  And on the plus side his voice was MUCH less annoying.  But seriously, the Olympics came and captured us like no other event really can, with everything from table tennis, to archery, to US gold in basketball, to the ever spectacular running (Usain Bolt anyone?  Have you ever seen anything like that?!)

In the middle we had a “super collider” to help us figure out black holes, which didn’t work (and didn’t destroy the world as some suspected).  I don’t know how to feel about this, but the pictures are AMAZING.

But 2008 wasn’t all wine and roses.  We had a cyclone in Myanmar take 100,000, an earthquake in China with a toll of 60,000, terrorism in Mumbai and the fighting in Gaza raging on. The literary community also felt the loss of such luminaries as Randy Pausch (Last Lecture writer), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (exposer of the Gulag in Russia), Michael Crichton (writer/producer), Tim Russert (TV personality), Bobby Fischer (chess star), Sir Edmund Hillary (first climber of Everest) and Bill Melendez (Peanuts animator).

Don’t get down reader.  Let’s talk numbers.  We have officially raised over $5.2 million for global literacy.  We’ve sent 1.4 million books to non-profit literacy programs (including over 1 mil to Africa).  We’ve saved over 8,100 TONS of paper from landfills.  And all this was possible by having 200+ of the smartest and hardest working folks in the land as employees.

2008 will be remember by many as a year of new beginnings–huge changes in business and huge changes in government–but may it be remember by all as a year where we all did what we could to make it better.  And it’s only going to get better in 2009.

Totes in this context does not appear to be related to the umbrella company.

10. Feeling Connected – Through the wonders of Facebook it’s so easy to know what’s going on in the company. At 200+ people we’re right on the fringe, but it’s still like middle school where you know everyone–or at least have heard a slightly incriminating story about them–and thus are comfortable wishing anyone a happy birthday (even at the UK office!), new birth (to Casey and Justin’s newborn!), marriage (way to go Dustin!), or holidays (everyone!).

9. The Employee Discount – I would be bankrupt if it weren’t for the sweet discount that we get for being the loyal horde that is BWB employees. It’s just that simple.

8. Customer Service – Have you ever had a problem with an order? If you’re one of the few who have you’ve encountered our studly team of CS rockstars, you know that they’re a rare kind. They don’t just want to talk to you, they won’t rest until your problem is sorted. Don’t believe me? Ask them sometime for the feedback the get every week; it’s unbelievable. The head of CS and I once got very lost, very late on a Saturday night and tried to wander back to where I was staying for probably two hours. You know what we talked about? What he wanted to do to make his division better. Seriously. For two hours. This was at probably 3am on side streets in South Bend, IN. That’s devotion. And maybe insanity.

7. Account Reps – These are the folks that actually get the books in the door and allow us to be the extraordinary machine that we are. I once was an “account rep” of sorts (as a somewhat prehistoric “Regional Director”) and my fondest memories and most ridiculous stories are from this time. The ATL office is full of incredible people holding it down for BWB and everyday surpassing what we thought was possible when I was trying to coordinate NY, CT and Ontario. Also, together we locked down a karaoke bar in Goshen, IN in a legendary group effort where “The Online Bookstore with a Soul” became “The Online Bookstore with Soul.”

6. Leadership – I like the leadership at this company so much that I’m not going to make a joke about Notre Dame football (that’s love right there). But in all honesty when you have 2 cofounders who play ultimate, a CEO like David “D-Murph” Murphy, Xavier/Frank “my carbon footprint is smaller than yours” Helgesen and Kreece “Christopher” Fuchs (as if Chris is his real name), and now the funniest accountant in all of Georgia, CFO Paul Sansone, you wake up everyday a little more comfortable with the company is being run. Does your company have a “thinking disc” to throw whilst making important decisions? Yeah.

5. The Green House – The warehouse is a surreal collection of bibliophiles, Fightin Irish, and all quality individuals. You should see what the scanners have to do everyday. They never get the credit they deserve, scanning in hundreds of books every hour(!) Sadly, us out of towners only get 1-2 times in the Green House each year, but it’s a pleasure watching the heart of this company beat on a given day. It’s amazing. Seriously. On this note, the first time I went to the warehouse, Casey taught me how to scan in books, at the entry level in the company, and now she’s the head of the pricing team. Isn’t that so cool?

4. The San Francisco Office – The grandest office of them all. Better World Books would just be a warehouse full of books in Indiana if it weren’t for this group getting people to know we exist and buy books from us. Sure, we get a bad rap for a bunch of things, including the fact that people have no idea what I actually do on a daily basis (it’s not just write on the blog, naysayers) and other reasons that I’m not at freedom to mention, but it’s a simple fact, the SF office is making it happen. Don’t believe me? Did you see what betterworld.com looked like before (note: it was like a undergrad CS project trying to make the Google website using giant print)?

3. Our Literacy Partners – Books for Africa, Room to Read, the NCFL, Worldfund and Invisible Children, have you seen these folks? And now, we see a great opportunity, invite Invisible Children to the warehouse, watch the video, vote on partnering with them, undergo a vetting process on their books and BOOM we have a fantastic new partner. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting people from each group, organizing bookdrives for each group, and publicizing them whenever possible, and I can say without any delay that these are some of the most dedicated and hard-working people in the biz. We could all learn from the hustle that each of these groups put in everyday.

2. The Mission – What can I say? This one gets me up in the morning and puts me to sleep with a smile at night. We’ve given over $5.2 mil to literacy groups, we’re saved thousands of tons of paper from landfills, and we’ve done all this while providing over 200 people with benefits and the money to pay their rent.

1. The People – You’ll notice there’s a common thread in all my responses: the people. The worst part about this job is that I only get to see the other offices 1-2 times per year. Every summer at the company meeting, we all get together and what occurs is a weeklong explosion of high-powered brainstorming, fast paced numbers, previews of all the fantastic new plans and a collage of kickball, tossing the disc, going out to the pool hall and rocking the ‘Backer/someone’s house/backyard/the Jameson (or whatever it’s called now) all hours.

I’ve had a bunch of jobs before this one, and you can say whatever you want, but I’d without question put up our worst times together against anyone else’s best. If I want a smile, I can just open up my address book, look through at who is doing what and be amazed about the collection of talent we have in every position. It’s like the ‘96 Bulls over here. The starters won’t let you get anything and the bench is still better than your squad.

What other company could I send out Top 10 lists for people to vote on and get a colorful debate from different parts of the country all over my email? In what other company could I not embarrassedly admit that I’m a literary misfit in comparison to some of my coworkers (I’d hate to take a literary pub quiz against ARC)? And this doesn’t even mention our savvy book arbitrage, the downright sexy Goshen store (and the fact that we have more fans on facebook than Barnes & Noble or Powell’s means other people must like us too).

If you got all the way down here, then you know how blessed I am, and truly all of us at Better World Books are. Have a fantastic holiday season and let’s see what we can make happen in 2009.

Join Dana for a chat with French journalist Hervé Kempf about his book How the Rich are Destroying the Earth. Since 1988 Mr. Kemp has specialized in environmental and ecological reporting. He created the environmental magazine Reporterre, and has written for scientific and economic newspapers. He is the Environmental Editor at Le Monde, the most influential French newspaper, where and covers ecological topics, notably climate change and biodiversity. Le Monde now has an entire section devoted to environment and science. Traveling worldwide for his reporting, Kempf makes his home in Paris.

His previous books are La Guerre secréte des OGM (The Secret War of GMOs, 2003), which tells the history of transgenic research and development, and the rebellion against it in Europe, and Gaza, la Vie en Cage (with photos from Jérome Equer, 2005), which tells the daily life of inhabitants of the Gaza strip—it has been translated and published in the U.S. as Gaza, Life in a Cage (Algora, 2006).

On her site, Stephanie admits that the manuscript, Midnight Sun, is an incomplete version of her next project. This book tells the same story as Twilight (the first book) but from the perspective of the vampire, Edward.

Stephanie goes on to say:

I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being. As the author of the Twilight Saga, I control the copyright and it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide when the books should be made public; this is the same for musicians and filmmakers. Just because someone buys a book or movie or song, or gets a download off the Internet, doesn’t mean that they own the right to reproduce and distribute it. Unfortunately, with the Internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control.

(I guess that will teach her a harsh lesson… giving that manuscript out will turn out to be a million dollar mistake. Speaking of which, how exactly do publishers think they’re going to beat the system that has plagued music and movies when eReaders become popular…? Good night and good luck!)

However, Meyer also posts a link to part of the draft in the same post. I’m not going to tell you where to find the full version–if you want it you’ll find it easily–but now you know the facts.

An excerpt for your reading pleasure:

CHOMSKY: Or pathways deprived of giant spiders. And what is Gandalf’s long-term solution to the crisis of the divided peoples of Middle Earth? To install a puppet king of questionable provenance while the Elves continue their slow withdrawal back to the West? Meanwhile, a couple of drunkard Hobbits stagger toward a volcano while carrying a worthless ring. Gandalf is venal, he is calculating, he is ruthless, but he is not stupid.

[or this section...]

ZINN: It’s true. One shiny trinket is tossed into these creatures’ lives and immediately you see the malodorous aftereffects of economic inequality, which is enacted here on a disturbingly intimate scale.

CHOMSKY: If the story ended here after Sméagol strangles Déagol, I think we’d have a really brilliant—almost Dreiserian—economic critique.

ZINN: As Sméagol’s degeneration into Gollum is shown, we should note that it is never really established that the ringis causing this collapse into baldness, tooth loss, and green skin.

CHOMSKY: Yes. There is a lacuna between Sméagol’s first spell of invisibility and the montage of him weeping on the rocks. What really happened between those moments? What unchronicled sufferings did Gollum undergo during the time before Bilbo Baggins arrived at the Misty Mountains, cheated him in a patently unfair riddle game, stole his ring, and left him utterly defenseless? What happened before he became an unwitting pawn in the Great Game of Middle Earth? We don’t know.

ZINN: Now we flash forward to Sam and Frodo, deeply embarked upon their journey toward Mount Doom. What do they do? They sleep an extraordinary amount, and when they’re not sleeping they stagger about with the glazed and dissipated stare of recovering addicts. Clearly they’re struggling with pipe-weed and mead withdrawal. Where exactly are they now? 
 
CHOMSKY: Mordor, the “dark land.” Which you correctly pointed out before we began should be properly known as Orcistan.

ZINN: Naturally, seeing that it’s Men who trapped the Orcs within its borders and started referring to these lands as “Mordor.” Orcs, of course, used to live throughout Middle Earth, before they were corralled—in a heartbreaking Orcish “Trail of Tears”—into this inhospitable, seismically active land.

CHOMSKY: Note later the beautiful, fertile fields between Minas Tirith and the mountains that encircle Mordor. Neither Men nor Orcs cultivate them, and clearly the purpose of the garrison at Osgiliath is to keep Orcs away from valuable farmland. 
 
(cont’d here)

Hmmm… gotta add this to my Christmas list…

I sauntered over to the wasteland of casual verbiage that is Urban Dictionary to find this:

[I'm not even going to touch "totes," that curious mixture of hipster/Hilton speak that I can't get away from in SF].  Now mind you I understand the concept–contextually it’s fairly easy to glean–but does anyone else think “beasties” when they see that?  Is this one of those things that just works better in voice than in writing?

In honor of that we have the REK Bookcase, which can contract or expand as you need more or less space, eliminating the need for additional shelving or wasted negative space.  Blahblahblah, you just want to see the photos, right?

Images courtesy of Gizmodo

The Pulitzer Prize, the prestigious award for excellence in print journalism, is being expanded to include online-only publications.

Since 2006 the award committee has accepted submissions from stories appearing on the websites of newspapers, like say – The New York Times – but the new guidelines would seemingly open up the prize to online-only outlets like, you know, Mashable (lol).

According to a statement issued today, the basic criteria for qualifying organizations are that they “publish at least weekly … are primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories … and adhere to the highest journalistic principles.” Video, however, is still off-limits.

Somewhat ironically, the news comes on the same day that The Tribune Company, one of America’s biggest newspaper companies, filed for bankruptcy. Way to go, Internet.

Across the pond, Two Ravens Press weighs in on the book industry these days:

The further demise of the book review is predicted by Robert McCrum in The Observer today.  “The book world is in full-blown transition,’ he says. ‘Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading. Books (and book reviewing) have been pushed to the margin. It doesn’t help that in a global recession publishing is also feeling the pinch.”

It’s an interesting question, whether blogs really are supplanting professional critical reviewing. I’m a big fan of really good serious literary blogs, which take the level of discussion about books to a place that a typical review, no matter how well done, can’t. A blog enables you to have a debate about books: what worked for you as a reader and what didn’t, and that’s a very valuable thing.

I agree with the value of book blogs (natch!) but would contest that there will always be a place for good writers.  I would go so far as to suggest that this is could become the Age of the Great Writer, not the demise of their kind.  In a world where Google has introduced grading of search results and the Digg/Web 2.0 model takes over, good content, not just high paid searches, will reign.  And at the end of the day, good content is a product of its author and their understanding of the crazy world of Social Media.  While before, a great writer in Chicago could never do better than the Chicago Tribune, or a great writer in small town could never write for the biggest beats in the biggest towns, now writing is without location and it won’t be an issue of “I read the New York Times for arts and the WSJ for business,” it will become “I read Maureen Dowd for politics, Thomas Friedman for economics, I listen to Amy Goodman for further political discussion and I love so and so’s articles about…”  I would find it incredibly refreshing for the best authors in journalism to get more respect as personalities and marketable skilled writers rather than just a feature of a behemoth newspaper.

I spoke to a writer (off the record) from the San Francisco Chronicle the other evening and he said “Newspapers saw radio and did nothing.  They saw TV and they did nothing.  Why would they think the internet would be any different?  They saw the web and did nothing–that had won all these battles before–but now they’re underwater, hopelessly behind with print and web still being treated as two different products while the other industries, who potentially don’t stand to gain as much as newspapers, move with the tide.”  Great writers will always have a place, but they’re going to have to embrace the tremendous sea change that has occured.  You moved away from your typewriter, you can make this shift too.

It goes further to describe the demise of the non high profile author, which is a well noted and a rather sad part of the industry today.  Neil Simon once said of show business that “You can make a killing but you can’t make a living” and it appears that we are headed that way in books.  I only hope that something will change to give promising authors a chance.  I’m sure plenty of people are anxiously awaiting the next Danielle Steele or the next Twilight edition, but for my  purposes you can throw all that stuff out the window.  I just pray that the next David Eggers, David Foster Wallace or “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” doesn’t get buried under the incredible hubris of bestsellers and Oprah’s Book Club selections, regardless of the industries fledgling numbers.  I hate watching the book world turn into late 90’s music where the major question was not “Is it good?” but “Will it make us money?”  Sigh.

For autumn:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away–
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like Perfidy–
A Quietness distilled,
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon–
The Dusk drew earlier in–
The Morning foreign shone–
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest who would be gone–

And thus, without a Wing,
Or service of a Keel,
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

–Emily Dickenson

For winter:

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him — at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; — and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man — one man — can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

–Robert Frost

In the commercial the people could not believe they were eating pasta they could have delivered to their front door for a mere 12 bucks. They had no idea that their meal had been a ruse. I think that they should have had a clue when the fancy restaurant had macaroni and cheese with bacon on the menu. “What varietal of wine do you suggest I have with the macaroni and cheese with bacon?”

I once took a girl to a fancy restaurant and she broke the rule of expensive dining: You don’t complain until you get to the car.

Here is why:

1) It is expensive so you have to at least pretend to enjoy it, it’s called a sunk cost effect.

2) You never know, it may be a ruse and you could end up on TV if you say you like the food.

Also in the issue is a new feature called GOOD Business. The GOOD Business section was done in partnership with B-Corporation. (Of which Better World Books is a founding B-Corp). The most interesting article for me was “What Nau?” about what went wrong with the clothing start-up Nau. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Nau had gambled naively without a backup plan. But the company had come close to turning a corner. The clothes, the webfronts, the giving program, the bylaws—they all worked. The fundraising and the timing hadn’t. The irony, of course, is that a company so committed to sustainability was ultimately unsustainable. But not because of its principles. Rather, the mundane problems that plague most startups—lack of money and poor execution—had undermined Nau. Still, the brand had an impact in its short life span, accelerating the greening of the apparel industry and creating a new genre of outdoor clothing.”

You know what else is really cool about GOOD? Their graphic design and sense of humor. Check out the graphic below with regards to Nau.

It is tough to see a company like Nau with such great intentions fail. Nau’s investor essentially pulled their funding rug out from them due to the investor’s holdings in sub-prime mortgage securities. As the probability of a recession sets in, what will be the future for other triple bottom line companies? Will they stick to their guns—living wages, environmental responsibility, and social impact—or will they cave? Will investment in innovation dry up or will a lack of natural capital lead to radical resource productivity? Only time will tell.

Along the same lines–after I finish State by State, I plan to pick up Thomas Friedman’s Hot Flat and Crowded.

Crichton’s works focused primarily on technology, medicine and the potential for dystopian futures resulting from these fields.  His focus sprouted naturally from Crichton’s past as he graudated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University, tutored in anthropology at Cambridge University in England, and eventually received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School while writing award winning novels under two different pen names (John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson).

Crichton’s fingerprints can be found in more than just the huge literary success he achieved, having sold over 150 million books, as he delved deep into the world of moving pictures as well.  Jurassic Park was groundbreaking in its effects, and 1973’s Westworld and 1976’s Futureworld were the first two movies to use 2D and 3D Computer Generated Images (CGI), respectively.

Additionally, Crichton wrote “Twister” and was the original writer and producer of the fabulously successful TV hospital drama “ER.”

As a result of his myriad projects, in December of 1994 Crichton achieved a never before seen feat, holding the prize for #1 Movie (Jurassic Park), #1 TV Show (ER) and #1 Book (Disclosure) simultaneously.

He was 66.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton)
(http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5092860.ece)

Some facts about the event:

• There are over 500 NaNoWriMo Chapters around the world.
• 366 K-12 schools participated in 2007.
• Over a billion words were written by WriMos in 2007…
• Sara Gruen author of the famous Water for Elephants, wrote two novels during NaNoWriMo including Water for Elephants in 2006 and Flying Changes in 2004.

A quick calculation tells me that 50,000 words in 30 days is 1,666.67 words a day. For me that is the frightening thought… Happy Halloween!

In the meantime, expect a podcast and some more book reviews coming your way as next week the blog gets regular posts from other employees including:
-CEO and President, David Murphy
-Co-founder, Xavier Helgesen
-Queen of all things Green, Kelly Franco
-The (interviewing) Voice of the Blog, Dana Barrett
-Resident Storyteller (and side splitter) Chip Boyes
and…
-The awesome group that is our Antiquarian, Rare and Collectable Division, headed by the enigmatic Rudy Reyes

“… [this] nails the emerging meme that early adopters are overrated and hurt the companies that woo them. It’s no secret, of course, that I am one of these early adopters, or “passionates,” who eagerly embrace new tools and evangelize for our favorites. But leave me out of it. This idea that the tech industry should focus on the larger group of “nonpassionates” to the exclusion of passionates is ridiculous.

What’s so dangerous about dismissing passionates is that it suggests that tech companies are actually hurting themselves by listening to them. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has sold an estimated 240,000 units in its first nine months. Passionates are the ones who will buy an almost $400 gadget sight unseen. But Amazon is using its Kindlemaniacs to win the masses…

…Consider how much the world has changed in the past decade. When I started writing my blog back in 2000, professional athletes didn’t blog to communicate with their fans. Millions around the world didn’t post pictures on Flickr, because it didn’t exist. New tools are getting adopted faster than ever. YouTube turns 3 in December, and Twitter, just 2 ½, has already attracted firefighters and members of Congress to use the service. We’re finding more ways to express ourselves, more content to enjoy, and more ways to connect with friends. All of a sudden, we need FriendFeed to put these tools in one place. And that’s the power of the passionate.”

I embrace the power of the passionate–nowhere is it more evident than on the Better World Books fan page– but is passion going to outweigh the numerous flaws in the design of the Kindle or the outrageous expense of the more developed versions?

We shall see…

Last week, we asked readers to e-mail us their text-message versions of great works of literature. We couldn’t quite decipher all the entries we received, despite consulting individuals half our age, but there were a number of laudable efforts. Among our favorites was this distillation of Herman Melville’s tale of the proto-slacker Bartleby the scrivener, penned—er, thumbed?—by Kate Laubach, of upstate New York. Note the woeful exclamation points:

Bartleby prfrs nt 2. B frm DedLetrOfice. !B! !Humanity!

Will (no last name proffered), of Brooklyn, while noting that his usual text messages were “in full sentences and take about twenty minutes to write,” entered the fray with this supremely abbreviated “Waiting for Godot”:

W8ing 4 GDot
2 erly 4 mtg… …what mtgâ WTFá LOL…

And then brought to heel the mammoth “Ulysses”:

UlisEs
IRl& 6-16-04:
DDlus@home, @wrk, @sea.
LBlum: 1dering ju, crzy odSE 2.
MBlum: yes

CliffNotes, en garde.

First of all, just say it to yourself: “Biblioburro.”  Fantastic, right?  Now for the meaning…

From the New York Times:

LA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

Article continued here

Alfa and Beto!  Isn’t that the cutest thing in the world?  Donkeys carrying books, sigh… awesome.

Who will fully appreciate the brilliance of this book?  It’s not until someone says that right thing at that right time that it strikes me. You would appreciate this book. You have proven yourself worthy.  You deserve my book.

When I hear a guy go on about a girl, song, and movie in one breath, I know he deserves to read High Fidelity.  When some Dude says “I feel like the only manly thing I do is open jars and replace the water cooler jug in the office,” I say you deserve to read Fight Club.

Some people appreciate geysers. Some people are fascinated by geysers. I spent a summer working in Yellowstone National Park and I saw Old Faithful.  Watching Old Faithful erupt is like watching water shoot out of the ground.  It just didn’t appreciate the science and the reliability of the matter.

I had more fun watching the people watching Old Faithful, some people were amazed, some were texting their friends, and some were making out.  Later that summer a friend offered me his book on geysers. Based on actually seeing a geyser, I wasn’t sure about the book, but he insisted so I took it from him. Reading the book was as rewarding as reading a book about hot water coming out of the ground.  I didn’t deserve that book.

Two weeks later I had a cute friend come and visit me.  She was so cute I bought her a cute 700 dollar ticket for her to come visit me. At that altitude you don’t care about money.  As I took my cute friend to see Old Faithful I remembered those two making out as Old Faithful did his thing.  As I went in to kiss my cute friend she didn’t even notice; she was too amazed at this hot water coming out of the ground. I nearly fell in love with her as I watched her study the geyser.  I had a book she deserved.

Another friend of mine believed she was psychic.  She let me borrow a Silvia Brown book.  If you do not know already, Silvia Brown is one of the most successful psychics out there.  I accidentally left the book at the airport. When I told my psychic friend I lost her book she seemed surprised. Perhaps she isn’t a psychic.

It doesn’t take a psychic to see that Better World Book is going to continue to realize the value of used books and erase illiteracy one book at a time. Better World Books is like that friend that deserves books.