Is this actually cost effective, I wonder?

There's a new service just arriving in the United States, based on one that exists already in Japan (we're so far behind!). 1DollarScan will convert your print material into PDFs and email the documents back to you as a file. And it only costs a dollar, as they claim (per chunk of material, mind you: War and Peace would not be a dollar scan.)  But I'm trying to figure out the point for most things. Your personal documents that you don't need print copies of but are too lazy to scan, yes, I understand the value. But your library? And that was why the service exists, because a Japanese businessman laboriously made digital versions of his large library and then thought that people would pay him for the service. Which, apparently, they will.

But look: you have to pay shipping. You don't get your materials back, unless you pay return shipping. And so I don't see how this works out to be at all useful or effective. But if it works in Japan, it's got to work here, right? I mean, sushi, Nintendo, nation wide public transit? Wait, strike that last one. That would actually be great. Instead we get book to PDF mail order. Sigh.

Whiter teeth and Russian porn

God bless the Internet.

No, seriously. Not just because it desperately needs it. Also: because you can apparently get from anywhere, to anywhere. Via tubes.

What am I smoking? More blog-stats! This time it's the "referring website" function, the one that tells us what webpage directed folks to get to the Kindling Press blog. Some of them are pretty obvious: Google Plus. FaceBook. The Write Cafe. But others... well, let's just say the title of this post should give you some vague idea as to the pure weirdness of where folks were browsing just before they were directed to this page.

I'm not here to judge; I'm only here to think gee, for serious? We don't really care how you found us. We're just happy you're here. Really. And for that, dear Internet, we salute you! Viva la Internet!