Jack The Scribbler

All these marked-down books went for less than a thousand pesos.

Dear National Bookstore, Booksale, Bestsellers, and all the bookstores I’ve visited:

It’s over.
I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you anymore — which means you won’t be seeing too much of me either. Or at least until next year.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make.
For the past two or three months or so, all I did was to spend time at your branches and chill out.
That includes the time I went to Cebu.
I think I checked out more books than I did Cebuanas, inside and outside the National Bookstore branch on Mango Avenue. As a result, I was able to buy a hardbound copy of Roger Lowenstein’s While America Aged at ninety percent off.
Although it was a steal, I paid dearly for it.
I was unable to hang out with the few but nevertheless pretty Cebuanas I met.
I guess you could say I could take a tip or two from Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect.
Wright appears to have enjoyed more than the company of one female partner, a fictionalized account of which has been written and published by novelist and fictionist T. C. Boyle in a book called The Women.
As it happens, I have a trade paperback edition of the book which I got for P50 at National Bookstore in Shangri-La.
That branch has been particularly good to me.
It was where I found and bought a trade paperback copy of Spanking The Donkey: Dispatches from a Dumb Season without even knowing who Matt Taibbi was.
But at its price — P30 — it was worth the gamble.

This early I can say that the book is one of the best I’ve read this year. Taibbi, who wrote he was the lovechild of Rupert Murdoch and Imelda Marcos, is like an angry P. J. O’ Rourke but with a progressive agenda.
In a piece entitled “On The Campaign Trail, No One Can Hear You Scream,” Taibbi wrote about reporters who worked for large media conglomerates:

“[Jim] Loftus, incidentally, is [US Presidential candidate John] Kerry’s best advertisement for the presidency. He is that rarest of creatures in politics: a political operative with a personality. He reminded me a little of some nightclub owners I’ve known in the Third World — always had a story, never surprised by anything, gets a kick out of it all. You could have an unguarded conversation with him at any time of day, which for a reporter on the [2004] campaign trail is like having an adult who’s always around to buy for you at the liquor store.
“Okay, everyone,” he said, clearing his throat. “Okay. Now, all of us here work for big, evil corporations. We all know that. But not all of us here can really aspire to being big and evil. Some of us really have to content ourselves with being little and evil.”
He gestured to the departing journalist. “And I think that [he named him] here really exemplifies that quality: small, and evil.”
He raised his glass.
“Let’s drink to the small, evil people,” he said.
I raised my beer. Hear, hear.”

If that previous 184-word clip isn’t worth P30, you give too much value to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ favorite currency.
During this same period, at nearby Bestsellers in Robinson’s Galleria, I also struck gold.
I got a hardbound copy of Quirkology by Richard Wiseman for a third of its price.
The book was a page-turner, helping readers how to test a person whether s/he is a good liar or not.
Roughly a week or so later, Bestseller’s charms worked on me again.
I got Taylor Clark’s Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture.
At P150, the trade paperback edition of Starbucked represents the pinnacle of my bookhunting skills.
As of this writing, I’m only on page 28 but I’ve already read enough factoids about coffee and Starbucks. (Did you know that the first two branches of Starbucks were just fifteen yards apart from each other? And that in 1998, waters around the Boston harbor were discovered to contain a significant amount of caffeine? Yes. And that’s only in the introduction.)
But let’s not get carried away and forget Booksale, that book hunter’s mecca.
In its Megamall branch, I once had a conversation about online stock trading with an absolute stranger because of a book he planned to buy.
And we talked about something geeky: which among online stock trading companies in the Philippines provided the best GUI for its customers?
That discussion, however interesting, didn’t get in the way of my goal.
As soon as the conversation ended, I bought a large, trade paperback copy of Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow for P160 during the time National Bookstore was selling it at roughly ten times that price.
On another occasion, I bought Inventing The Truth, edited by William Zinsser, who also wrote On Writing Well, one of the better written books on the subject.
Another Booksale branch, this time in Philcoa, has allowed me to buy More Mirth of a Nation for P45.
With this haul — and many more unmentioned finds — what can I say for myself?
I guess I need a break.
Instead of book hunting, meandering between the aisles looking for a discount, I think I should spend more time reading.
At any rate, avoiding bookstores altogether would also prevent me from whittling away at what I laughably call my savings.
So I guess its goodbye for now.
Until next year.

JTS

N. B. If I win the lotto, I might just change my mind.

Woman: "Sorry but I dig guys with Kindles."

Calm down, Kindle 3 freaks.
This will not delve into the great big Apple iPad-Amazon Kindle dialectic.
Both have their upsides and their setbacks, not to mention their respective users who swear that their gadgets can establish world peace, make a cocktail, and hunt down Osama Bin Laden while fixing Grandpa’s diapers.
But one thing is as certain as President Noynoy Aquino’s alopecia.
The Kindle is far superior to the iPad as far as reading eBooks is concerned. The secret is in its eInk technology, eliminating eye strain that usually accompanies extended reading on color monitors. (Of course, reading comic books and graphic novels is another matter altogether.)
Despite this upside, the Kindle — and the digital environment that accompanies it — does have features that could be improved, and possibly even integrated into the Kindle 4 (or whatever Jeff Bezos or his marketing guys may wish to call it).
So if you haven’t got a Kindle yet, quit reading this and go get yourself one. That way you know what all this quibbling is about. [See: Five reasons why Filipinos should get a K3, Five more things to like about the K3]

1) Limited screensaver pictures

Enough said.

The K3 enables a screensaver every time you turn it off.
Except that a couple of the pictures may not appeal to certain segments of the reading population.
Take myself.
After a hard day at “work” — quotes supplied — I usually look forward to reading anything that’s been loaded onto my K3 (a volume of Calvin and Hobbes, a novel by Martin Amis, a book by Michael Lewis, a text file of the latest piece by Lewis Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly).
However, a screensaver pic, including but not limited to, Harriet Beecher Stowe — with all due apologies to her, her friends, fans and relatives — just doesn’t do it for me.
I would much prefer a picture of Joan Holloway and the two Mrs. Donald Drapers, the former and the current.
Which is to say that Amazon should allow users to change and/or customize their Kindle screensavers for enhanced user interaction.
But then again, that’s just me and the products of what arguably is my superficial mind.

2) The Zebra Effect

Now this is what I call a cool screensaver. Christina Hendricks as Mad Men's Joan Holloway

Or at least that’s what I call it.
It’s the bug that occasionally occurs when the text being highlighted continues onto the other page.
As the cursor — and the highlighting process — moves to the other page, the line under the first word in the next page disappears, thereby temporarily confusing users.
Fortunately, this doesn’t affect the file entitled “My Note,” a file where all highlighted text in the K3 is automatically saved. The same file can be copied once the K3 is plugged into a computer.
Now why did I call it the Zebra effect? It sounds cool for one thing.

3) Limited text status updates

January Jones as Betty Draper, ex-wife of Donald Draper, Mad Men's protagonist

Once a block of text is highlighted, it can be posted on a user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts using the K3 on a WiFi connection.
But if the text is two paragraphs long or more, then you can forget it.
Amazon will parse the text, thereby sometimes making it less understandable to Facebook friends and Twitter followers who bothered to read it.
This happened to me more than once while quoting Michael Lewis, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Louis Mencken, among others.
It definitely took the fun out of tweeting and Facebook status updating. Tsk.

4) The keyboard

Jessica Paré as Megan Calvet who becomes Donald Draper's fiance in Mad Men

Could a keyboard be any less ergonomic than the one fitted in the K3? Yes, it can be found in old typewriters made way before anyone thought of the word ergonomic.
But seriously, the K3’s keyboard could use some adjustments such as better spacing between letters.
Whenever I use it to post tweets, I have pressed the “N” instead of “M” and vice-versa for as long as I can remember.
A keyboard redesign may be called for, Jeff B.
But then again, that’s just me and the products of what arguably is my superficial mind.

iPod Nano 6G watch by MINIMAL, a design house (from The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Apple’s Macintosh, which used to have more than seventy separate computer chips, is now down to fewer than thirty. In two years, a Macintosh will have seven chips. Two years after that, the Mac will be two chips, and Apple won’t be a computer company anymore. By then Apple will be software company that sells operating systems and applications for single-chip computers made by Motorola. The MacMotorola chips themselves may be installed in desktops, in notebooks, in television sets, in cars, in the wiring of houses, even in wristwatches. Getting the PC out of the box will fuel the next stage of growth in computing. Your 1998 Macintosh may be built by Nissan and parked in the driveway, or maybe it will be a Swatch.

— from book published in 1992 entitled Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date by Robert X. Cringely [See: Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely]