Hardbacks and Paperbacks
From the department of we-can-get-away-with-it.
Once an author becomes famous or has written a best seller, his or her next book will be eagerly anticipated. When this new book arrives onto our bookstores’ shelves you find that it’s in hardback. Anyone can tell you that hardbacks cost a lot more than paperbacks. And if you want to wait for the paperback you could wait up to a year.
The more you think about it, the stranger it becomes. That’s two separate print runs, two separate sets of distribution and two separate marketing campaigns.
Doesn’t it seem odd that even though hardbacks are more expensive and makes the paperback product look less appealing to our everyday consumer it’s actually a way of squeezing more money out of people who just can’t wait to read these new books and that usually means more money for the book sellers, publishing houses and the authors.
Freedom!
Hurray democracy!
Aye to capitalism!
Yippee! The Berlin Wall collapsed!
Those guys who demolished our World Trade Center are having a fine time in Gitmo & Abu Ghraib if they’re not being baked by the Devil in Hell, already!
Only Communists and Totalitarian States censor the media, thank God Almighty that we, the God-chosen West, are free to say and do whatever we want, as long as Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the Free Market Economy and Freedom of Speech and our ‘National Interests‘ and ‘the Truth about 9/11 (i.e. it was them freedom-haters)’ are sacrosanct!
Yeehaa! God wants us to develop and prosper as a Nation, and to grow, we need oil, lots and lots of oil. Who cares Mr Bush, Cheney and Powell lied? They lied white lies! Our old friend turned traitor Saddam is now dead.
Our right to bear arms is preserved (School shooting? Them students don’t know they also have a right to bear bulletproof vests? God, what is happening to our Darwinism-poisoned educational system?) and our genius economists are doing their best (God bless ‘em… all of ‘em) in manipulating the interest rates so that we have enough money to pay our good old friend Halliburton to take even more oil from Iran (C’mon! They don’t need oil to make nukes! Why not give it to us? Everyone will be happy!).
Global warming? Our former Vice President won the Nobel Prize (the stinkin’ No Bell Prize, for God’s sakes!) for trying his very best to fight it, right? World hunger and poverty? Haven’t we been fighting a war against that with our celebrities as soldiers for as long as the sanctions-caused starvation of Iraqi children (which I’m sure was ‘worth it’!)?
We are virtually the center of the universe! The sun orbits around us while the Earth orbits around the sun! Everybody in the whole world cares about us (thanks to CNN, Fox News and the sometimes naughty YouTube) such that a 24-year old fool from Singapore with nothing to do cares to write about us!
So what’s the problem now? Everything’s gooooood!
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