Just like the microwave. Do you remember the first ones which came out back in, what? The late seventies? They were big and bulky. They were incredibly expensive. And they'd make you sterile if you stood in front of them. Or, at the very least, make your heart explode, if you had a pace maker. Hence, teens would come into any Quickie Mart and stand in front of the microwave before a hot date on any given Saturday night. And old people would not be able to step in to get their smokes after reading the "Danger" sign on the Quickie Mart door.
The result? Teen pregnancies because there was serious misinformation about the sterility rumor. And, either medical science or microwave researchers got better about the whole pace maker thing so that old people can now buy their cigarettes without worrying about an exploding heart. That scenario does beg the question, are the cigarettes one mitigating factor in why the person needed a pace maker in the first place? Not to get on a soap box or anything, because my husband tells me since I've never smoked then I can't know how very difficult it is to quit smoking. That is true, certainly. But I also know of someone who has unofficially not smoked for about ten years now because of two heart attacks. Interestingly enough, I have found cigarette packs in this person's car every single time I look. Umm. Wonder why that cough isn't getting any better??!
And my point was....?
Oh. Right. I predict the electronic devices for reading books will become cheaper and more efficient. Some of the sites which sell electronic books (including The Jinx) are:
Fictionwise
and
Filament Books
and
KnowBetter.com
as well as
eReader.com
which claims to be "The world's largest ebook store."
So, on the first three of these sites, The Jinx has been rated. It is the same rated table, and it looks like this.
4 Reader Ratings:
 |  |  | |
| Great | Good | OK | Poor |
I'm not sure which web site the ratings came from, or how it is that these different sites get to share the rating table, but anyway when I first saw the table, there were only three ratings: 2 "Great" and 1 "Poor". Later, in just the last two days in fact, the 1 "good" was added.
Interesting. As I would expect from a purely statistical standpoint (and not the author of this incredible work of fiction) for the ratings to be closer together-the ideal "bell shaped curve", as Dr. Hollis used to love to talk about in my statistics class (this wasn't mathematical statistics; this was research statistic, which I think means we had more interesting examples to stastisticate-my word there, not really a word, but I like it).
I don't want to dwell too much on the "poor" as I choose to believe this rater was just having a bad day and that it had nothing to do with me or The Jinx. We just served as the dog who got kicked that day because someone's boss yelled at her at work. If the book truly is poor, what one would expect is that the other ratings would also be "poor" or perhaps, "OK", but "great"? Why the large deviation? It's been a long time since Dr. Hollis' class, but I do remember it is very difficult to get an accurate idea of the essence of the book from four ratings. Tentatively since three of those are at the upward end of the scale-and the author did not bribe these people or manipulate the results knowingly (though I'm not above that, as any of you know who voted for The Jinx to be "Book of the Week" and "Book of the Month" because I begged you to in an email)- the conclusion is that even with such a small pool of raters, the book is overall a very strong "good" or an almost "great."
That'll do very nicely.
