I can’t make up my mind about “And Another Thing…,” Eoin Colfer’s book, which is the sixth Hitchhikers novel, the first not written by Douglas Adams.

On the one hand I wanted to give it a fair chance, try to judge it on its merits rather than simply as a H2G2 book not by Adams. On the other, it’s clearly not by Douglas Adams. It has the same characters. It’s clearly by someone who is a Hitchhiker fan and some things — like the names of places and things — feel spot on.

I want to like ebooks, I really do.

I like that the Kindle is smaller than a real paperback but can store dozens, hundreds even, of novels. I like that you can lose the hardware device and just download the books again. I like that I can read the same book on my iPhone as well as my iPad. It doesn’t even bother me that there’s no physical product. I’m not going to re-read most of my books yet they continue to take up the limited space in my London flat.

• Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant] – “Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year. Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.” Wholeheartedly agree with this post. Not knowing stuff is fine. Being proud of not knowing stuff? Not so much.
• Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market – “Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.”