Do you find yourself spending too much time scrolling on Facebook past random nonsense? Does your inbox get clogged with emails of fresh posts from different online services? If so, here are a couple of strategies that might improve your online experience.
Facebook Friends Feed
Recently my default newsfeed on Facebook has been filled with stories from various groups that represent minor, sometimes very minor, interests of mine that the service has gleaned from untold number of cookies and signals across various services. Too many entries are written by artificial intelligence, with telltale signals in phrasing, wordy repetition of main points, and annoying punchy, upbeat summary paragraphs.
The best solution I’ve found is to switch to the Friends Feed as shown here for the mobile app or on the website with this link. (To find it on the web version, I had to click See more in the left sidebar, select Feeds, and then select Friends.) You’ll still get plenty of ads, but far less algorithmic content.
Avoid the default feed on Facebook; use the Friends Feed instead
A Substack Problem
Substack’s emails can have terrible formatting that fails to distinguish an excerpt from an earlier column
I don’t care for Substack’s website nor app interfaces, but it will gladly email me new posts from those columnists. I could use those to read the articles, but they tend to pile up in my inbox, and the emails I receive have the same drawback I’ve seen in some posts on their website and app.
In an attempt to promote traffic, Substack often inserts a headline, graphic, and initial paragraph from an earlier, related post by the same writer within each post. However, they stupidly (or connivingly) use the same identical formatting for those “previews” and the post I’m trying to read. If they would just color the background differently for the previews, I wouldn’t be so annoyed.
However, I found a solution, and it was an old one, in web terms: RSS.
RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a standardized web feed format that allows users to subscribe to and receive automatic updates from websites, blogs, and news sources. It acts as an efficient way to track new content, such as articles or podcast episodes, in one centralized “feed reader” without visiting each site individually. As Cory Doctorow pointed out, “This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.”
RSS was first introduced around 1999 by Netscape, if you even know what Netscape was. I once used RSS to populate one of the windows in my old iGoogle web browser default home page, a web portal that Google started offering in 2005 and discontinued in 2013 as part of its continual process of creating and then killing useful services.
I hadn’t consciously used an RSS feed in a decade or so, but Doctorow motivated me to seek out a new reader. As a Mac and iOS user, I chose the open source NetNewsWire. If I were still using Windows at home, I would check out some of Zapier’s recommendations, such as Feedly, which is free for up to 100 feeds.
The great news is that adding feeds to NetNewsWire is usually dead simple. I can often just visit a website of interest, highlight its web address URL and hit CTRL+C to copy that, click the + icon at the top of the sidebar in NetNewsWire, and hit CTRL+V to paste in the URL. For most sites, that is all it needs to figure out the RSS feed and create a new entry in my feeds group.
There are some sites that don’t work with RSS, while for others a web search for a RSS feed URL may get them working. For example, I could not get the feed for Oklahoma Voice to work using their default web address, but a Google search for “Oklahoma Voice RSS” told me https://oklahomavoice.com/feed/ would work. Being a persistent experimenter, I also discovered that https://oklahomavoice.com/category/education/feed/ would allow me to only see their education posts.
I quickly added feeds to my new RSS reader
I added the NetNewsWire app to my iPad and managed to turn on an iCloud group and shift my saved feeds into that to keep everything synced across my Mac and iPad. The program also allows one to create folders to group related feeds if you go hog wild or just have an organizational streak.
I was delighted to discover that reading Substack posts with the RSS reader stripped entries of the confusing inserts, and it is certainly easier to skim through and read articles of interest with NetNewsWire than opening individual emails.
I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t find useful RSS feeds for my Patreon accounts, as that platform’s user interfaces are abysmal. While Patreon can support audio-only podcast feeds, I wanted a feed of all posts for a given creator since I read Bloom County comics there, watch TechMoan‘s Video Oddcasts for patrons, and the like, but no dice.
So good old RSS can’t solve everything, but it can solve some things.
The mass market paperback is dead. Not all paperback books, mind you, for the larger and more expensive trade paperbacks are still with us. But it shook me to realize that the pocket paperback, which was so important in my life until 2008, is now extinct.
A story related by Smithsonian is that back in the mid-1930s, Allen Lane, chairman of the British publishing house Bodley Head, spent a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie. While in a train station, worrying about how to keep his business afloat amidst the Great Depression, he browsed for something to read, but struck out, only finding trendy and pulp magazines. That gave him an idea.
Sir Allen Lane of Penguin Books
Lane used his own capital to found the Penguin publishing house, acquired the rights to reprints of some literary titles, and worked to place his titles in places other than bookstores, with Woolworth’s an early customer. His paperbacks were cheap, costing the same as a pack of cigarettes, and their reduced size required fresh typesetting. Penguin started with 10 titles, and it had to sell 17,000 copies of each book to break even. That wasn’t a problem: in its first year, Penguin sold over three million books.
The U.S. adopted the model in 1938 with Pocket Books, starting out by selling Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth in Macy’s. World War II popularized pocket books with soldiers via Armed Services Editions, with nearly 123 million copies of 1,300 titles being distributed. That revived interest in The Great Gatsby, helping make it the great American novel. 1925’s Gatsby had sold fewer than 25,000 copies by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, but 155,000 copies of it were distributed during the war, and it is estimated that those copies were read and passed along an average of seven times each.
A rare surviving Armed Services Edition of Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel
Penguin’s pocket size books were 4 3/8 by 7 1/8 inches, while the US ones were often 4 1/4 by 6 7/8 inches with some variations in height, while the width remained stable to fit in the wire racks used to display their cover art. At one time, over 600 independent distributor wholesalers were delivering them to 100,000 outlets where magazines and newspapers were for sale, including newsstands, variety stores, gas stations, and supermarkets. School book fairs, book clubs, and bookmobiles also helped bring paperbacks to students and teachers, from a variety of publishers.
Trashy 1954 hillbilly noir
In 1950, Fawcett began publishing original fiction in mass-market paperback form, instead of just reprints. Cheap paperbacks followed with lurid covers for detective, romance, science, and western fiction printed on cheap, high-acid wood pulp paper. Such works were hurriedly written, fast paced, and often featured exploitative elements.
I have used Open Library to read some fun trash by the ‘King of the Pulps’ Harry Whittington, who churned out hardboiled crime, mystery, western, erotica, and slavesploitation for cheap paperbacks from the late 1940s into the 1980s. Whittington published over 200 novels under at least 17 pseudonyms as well as his own name, including 85 in a span of only a dozen years. He once managed to write seven novels in a month.
A slump in the science fiction market in 1959 led author Robert Silverberg to switch to other genres for awhile, writing two books per month for one publisher, another book each month for a second publisher, and churning out about 200 erotic novels under a pseudonym. Motivated by mortgage payments, he reportedly could write 250,000 words each month. When I was in junior high, one of the neighborhood kids snuck a couple of erotic mass market pulps out of his father’s den, and we pored over them for extracurricular education, as they were more explicit than my mother’s and my aunts’ Harlequin romance novels and far more exciting than the Life Cycle Library my parents had purchased for my edification and enculturation.
Most of the pulp magazines had collapsed in the late 1950s, done in by both pulp paperback novels as well as television, with only a few digest-sized science fiction and mystery mags hanging on.
I remember large racks of pocket-size mass market paperbacks in discount stores and airport shops. Their heyday was from the late 1960s into the mid 1990s. $657 million in sales in 1975 rose to $811 million in 1979, handily beating hardcovers and the newer trade paperback format.
In the US, unlike the mass market paperbacks which at least had a standard width, trade paperbacks came in a variety of sizes. Two of the more common ones were 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inch “digest” books and 6 by 9 inch “standard trade” editions. The trades featured better paper, thicker covers, and the same typesetting used in hardcover editions, and were once priced much higher than the cheap mass market pocket paperbacks.
By the late 1970s, if I couldn’t find what I wanted at the school or public libraries, I would spend allowance money on books at Tag Kimberling’s Henry Higgins bookstore in our neighborhood shopping center. That was my introduction to trade paperbacks, but they were too costly for me, with even the smaller mass market books having undergone outsize price inflation. Originally priced at a quarter, mass market paperbacks had risen to $1.50+ by the mid-1970s and by 1982 were costing $2-$4, whereas the consumer price index had only inflated $0.25 in 1950 to $1 by 1982.
Relatively cheap mass market paperbacks were crucial in nurturing and deepening my youthful obsession with Star Trek, from the glimpses into its production provided by The Making of Star Trek and The World of Star Trek to Alan Dean Foster’s adaptations of the animated series in his Star Trek Log series. I also collected 11 of James Blish’s 12 adaptations of the original series shows, but they were based on early scripts and thus differed so much from the broadcast versions that they were just works-in-progress curiosities to me.
1970s mass market paperbacks nurtured and deepened my love for Star Trek
Reading a mass market paperback often created creases in its spine, the acidic pulp paper gradually turned yellow-brown, and if there were photo inserts those played havoc on the book’s durability as the glue aged and cracked.
A 1975 Space:1999 Pocket paperback with telltale signs of age
These mass market reprints that I purchased and read in 7th grade changed my life
Despite the format’s limitations, three mass market paperbacks profoundly changed my life in seventh grade. They were reprints of Isaac Asimov’s Understanding Physics, and they set me on a path that led six years later to a couple of years of college physics courses and then 28 years of teaching high school physics.
I stuck with mass markets in my purchases until Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge science fiction novel came out in June 1982, almost 30 years after his original Foundation trilogy, itself formed from eight short stories and novellas originally published in the Astounding Science Fiction magazine from 1942 to 1950. The sequel was only available in hardcover, and while I loved the 1950s trilogy, I debated for weeks before coughing up $14.95 for the sequel, since that was as much as four or five mass market books. I didn’t see a mass market paperback edition of it until November 1983.
Someone growing up now with e-books would probably think it strange how more prestigious books were once released over many months in a sequence from high-priced hardcovers to trade paperbacks to mass market paperback reprints, similar to my surprise when I first learned about the serialized novels of Dickens and the subscription system for Mark Twain’s works.
Many of my purchases were Bantam books, which had been formed by Ian Ballantine in 1945. He convinced Bennett Cerf of Random House, John O’Connor of Grosset & Dunlap, Charles Scribner, and Meredith Wood of the Book of the Month Club to become Bantam’s Board of Directors and roll their hardcovers into Bantam paperback reprints. They required new typesetting for the reduced size, which likely worried some readers that they were abridged. I remember how the copyright pages always stated, “This low-priced Bantam Book contains the complete text of the original hard-cover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.”
The inevitable friction with the major publishers eventually led to Ballantine being fired from Bantam, and he and his wife, Betty, then formed their own publishing house. In addition to Bantam, I remember buying mass market paperbacks published by Ballantine, Dell, Del Rey, Pocket, and Signet.
Ace doubles were a fascinating variant
I was fascinated by the Ace doubles that one of my uncles had purchased and passed down to me. Those were tête-bêche format books published from 1952 to 1973. Each contained two novellas, with the front cover and interior of one novella rotated by 180 degrees and bound back-to-back with the front cover and interior of the other. Gardner’s Used Books in Tulsa once had a sizable collection of them.
Mass market paperbacks were once all the rage
Mass market paperbacks helped make Danielle Steel the fourth best-selling fiction author of all time
In 1987, 112 mass market titles sold more than one million copies each, led by Danielle Steel, who sold almost 12 million copies of three of her titles. However, by 1996 mass market sales were beginning to decline, although they still racked up $1.35 billion.
In 2001, eight mass market paperbacks sold more than two million copies each and another 39 sold over a million. However, the number of independent distributor wholesalers was collapsing, consolidating under Levy Home Entertainment, which became ReaderLink in 2011. By then, mass market paperback sales were plummeting, nearly matching the rising amount of e-book sales, and only six paperback titles sold more than a million copies each.
My first Kindle back in 2008, with a mix of hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and over a dozen mass market paperbacks visible on the shelves
Back in 2017, Publishers Weekly wasn’t sure if the mass market paperback was enduring an incredibly slow death or had begun to stabilize. Mass market titles were 13% of print sales in 2013, falling to 9% in 2016. That trend kept going, and mass market book sales dropped from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million by 2024, an 84% collapse.
They were displaced by e-books, smartphones, and more profitable trade paperbacks, and to make money on the falling sales, their cover prices kept inflating to what had once been trade paperback prices. In 2025, Hudson stopped carrying them in its airport stores, and ReaderLink, which grew to become the largest book distributor in the USA, stopped distributing mass market paperbacks at the end of 2025. The Guardian commented how that marked “the end of a format that once democratized reading for the working class”.
I was part of that change. Back in grade school, I always had a paperback on me to read when I finished my class work early, and for years I still had one on me, or a print magazine, when dining alone in restaurants, never being one to cook. However, in 2008 I started carrying a Kindle, and for several years wait staff and other customers would gawk and ask about it.
Most of my few surviving mass market paperbacks
In 2016 I donated 700 books, including hundreds of mass market science fiction paperbacks, to the local public library. Only a select few survived the culling, and now the very format they represent is extinct. That is a loss, given that even today’s teenagers reportedly have a strong preference for affordable paperbacks, but market forces have eliminated a once-inexpensive option. Thank goodness for used bookstores and library sales, where the fossils of the extinct format can still be dug up.
When reading book reviews and blurbs, I bear in mind the disclaimer I often heard in 1970s car commercials: your mileage may vary. A few weeks ago I read Gary Shteyngart’s May 2024 article in The Atlantic: “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever“. I enjoyed it, although it could not compete with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again“, which originated in a 1996 article for Harper’s titled “Shipping Out”. Wallace set the standard for writers forced to suffer through a boat cruise.
Looking for a new Kindle read, I noticed that I had Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story from 2010 marked as Read in my Kindle, although I had not logged it at LibraryThing or Goodreads. The character names seemed familiar, but the plot summary on Wikipedia did not, so maybe that was a Did Not Finish before I created such a list in Goodreads.
I decided to scout around for other Shteyngart novels and came upon Lake Success, which was a bestselling work with these incredibly abridged blurbs: “Spectacular.” -NPR, “Uproariously funny.” -The Boston Globe, “An artistic triumph.” -San Francisco Chronicle, “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.” -The Washington Post, “Shteyngart’s best book.” -The Seattle Times.
AND…it was named one of the best books of 2018 by Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air and The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, Mother Jones, Glamour, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, etc.
AND…it received a Salon Book Award, a Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and was one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month in August 2010. As for relative ranks, while composing this post I found it ranked as the 11,518th Greatest Book of All Time at The Greatest Books, with four of Shteyngart’s other novels ranked higher. Super Sad True Love Story was in the lead at 3,055th.
Well, okay, but Lake Success is about a multi-millionaire New York investment banker who goes on a road trip to escape a failing marriage and an approaching indictment. I knew that I, as an underpaid Oklahoma educator who is happily married and free of legal jeopardy, would not be likely to relate to the lead character, but the book was promoted as being funny, so…maybe?
I read the free Kindle sample and was gripped by the first part of the opening chapter, in which the unlikable banker struggles to get a ticket on a Greyhound bus out of New York as his odd way of fleeing the metropolis and his troubles. What I did not know was that in addition to his investment banking errors, he was fleeing from his wife and their young autistic son, nor that he would turn out to be a dim but successfully gregarious character who has some characteristics some might associate with autism.
Soon after I had purchased the book and read onward, the wife appeared in the story. She would pursue a relationship with a fake Latino writer who lived in the same garishly expensive Manhattan high rise, although he and his doctor wife’s third-floor apartment only cost $4.1 million in 2015, compared to the banker’s 4,000 square foot one up on the 21st floor which cost five times more. Let’s see…adjusting for inflation, that’s well over 100 Meador Manors.
What I soon noticed was that I did not like any of the main characters. They were all repulsive, engineered to empower various wry observations and parodic satires. I didn’t find anything “uproariously funny”, although before quitting the book 1/3 of the way in, I did highlight this paragraph about a Richmond restaurant:
The noisy restaurant the Hayeses had chosen looked like it had been tractor-trailered in from the part of Brooklyn where Seema’s funny Asian friend (Tina?) lived. There were gilded Victorian mirrors, drawings of horses, and a giant, pointless map of Latin America. Bearded bartenders were slinging tiki drinks, and the young clientele was in full possession of their looks.
The Did Not Finish killing blow was my going on a walk in a park on an unseasonably warm winter afternoon, listening to John Hodgman’s Vacationland. He essayed about a Maine summer home, repeatedly mentioning how a famous writer had once lived nearby:
That summer I thought about the famous writer in a new way. It won’t surprise you to know that he is white, and he wrote about the rhythms of his life in this white place. There is nothing wrong in this: all places and experiences deserve writing about. But what made the writer a greater hero to me in that moment was, unlike so many white men, he wasn’t braggy. He never suggested that his experience was heroic, or correct, or even unusual. In fact, it was profoundly usual, beautifully mundane, and merely his to offer. His offering was his insight into the small joys of his particular life, which by extension could help us recognize the small joys that exist everywhere, even outside of Maine. And he offered it humbly. You really should use your detective skills and find his work. He’s great.
Well, I had already deduced that Hodgman was referring to the co-author of The Elements of Style and the sole author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White. I’ve only read the story of the spider and “some pig”, and that was five decades ago in a school building that itself would perish thirty years later. Some day I’ll perish too, and might my limited time be better invested in some essays by E. B. White than in Shteyngart’s horrid characters?
I spent a whopping $2 on Essays of E. B. White, which he had compiled in 1977, sharing:
The arrangement of the book is by subject matter or by mood or by place, not by chronology. Some of the pieces in the book carry a dateline, some do not. Chronology enters into the scheme, but neither the book nor its sections are perfectly chronological. Sometimes the reader will find me in the city when he thinks I am in the country, and the other way round. This may cause a mild confusion; it is unavoidable and easily explained. I spent a large part of the first half of my life as a city dweller, a large part of the second half as a countryman. In between, there were periods when nobody, including myself, quite knew (or cared) where I was: I thrashed back and forth between Maine and New York for reasons that seemed compelling at the time. Money entered into it, affection for The New Yorker magazine entered in. And affection for the city.
I have finally come to rest.
That beckons to me, while I personally related to this part of his Foreward:
There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast. I like the essay, have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, attempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by putting them on paper. I early broke into print in the pages of St. Nicholas. I tend still to fall back on the essay form (or lack of form) when an idea strikes me, but I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century American letters—it stands a short distance down the line. The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence. (Dr. Johnson called the essay “an irregular, undigested piece”; this happy practitioner has no wish to quarrel with the good doctor’s characterization.)
Oh, what a blogger E. B. would have been. I laid aside the 11,518th Greatest Book of All Time in favor of the 976th. Even before reading a single essay in that book, I also ordered a rather thin used tome, from a Dallas bookstore, containing two of White’s other essays: “Farewell to Model T” and “From Sea to Shining Sea” about his 1922 trip, when he was just out of college and at loose ends, crossing America in a Ford Model T. Sorry, Shteyngart, there’s someone a short distance down the line I want to meet who has his own road stories to share.
For months I have been asked, “What are you going to do when you retire?” I usually answer flippantly, but an honest partial answer would be that I hope to whittle down my collection of unread books, including listening to audiobooks while doing more day hikes.
Since 1998, my book acquisition rate has been about one per week. Over the past 28 years, I purchased 533 physical books from Amazon and an indeterminate number from Barnes & Noble, eBay, and AbeBooks. I also acquired 553 Kindle e-books and 231 Audible audiobooks.
I had built up a library before I began using Amazon, and despite selling off 110 books back in 2010 and donating 700 to the public library in 2016, I still have about 350 physical books in my office, with maybe 75 of them waiting to be read. I also have a couple of hundred unread Kindle e-books and dozens of audiobooks I haven’t listened to. I track my reading on both LibraryThing and GoodReads, and I’ve been reading thirty-odd books a year while acquiring about fifty, and the imbalance has built up.
I already have plenty to read in retirement
I bought the first version of the Kindle e-ink reader back in 2008, and I am now on my eighth model, a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition in a custom case. I have been reading on my Kindle about 18 days per month, and currently I’m on a 33-week usage streak. In 2025, almost 3/4 of the books I completed were e-books, but I didn’t get them all from Amazon, and several of them were free.
Public Domain Books
Most often I download a sample e-book from Amazon and then complete the purchase if it grabs me. However, for works in the public domain that have fallen out of copyright, I have other options.
I have usually relied on Project Gutenberg, which has over 75,000 titles, for free public domain e-books. However, Gutenberg’s formatting is often clumsy, and beware that some public domain translations of classic world literature, especially of Jules Verne, are just trash, requiring some research to avoid clinkers. Getting Gutenberg’s books into my Kindle collection is fairly easy: I just download an EPUB version from them and then use Send to Kindle.
Standard Ebooks produces higher-quality and better-formatted versions of public domain e-books than Gutenberg, but their selection was limited to 1,374 titles in early 2026, and getting them onto my Kindle is more involved. Amazon deliberately creates friction in getting third-party books onto its devices, and while you can download an AZW3 version for Kindles from Standard Ebooks, I had to download that to my Mac, get a special program from Amazon to allow my Mac to interact with my Kindle’s file system, connect the two with a USB cable, and then copy the AZW3 file into the documents folder on the Kindle and a separate cover image file into its system > thumbnails folder. The resulting e-book was nicely formatted, but it was trapped on that device and not available in the Kindle apps on my iPhone, iPad, or Mac. So if you like to read the same Kindle e-book on a variety of devices, I would skip Standard Ebooks in favor of an EPUB from Project Gutenberg and Send to Kindle.
The friction with third-party books has manipulated me into sometimes paying a few bucks for a Kindle version directly from Amazon, particularly when I could cheaply get an author’s entire oeuvre in one enormous e-book. For example, I happily paid $1 for everything by Mark Twain and $3 for 36 translated Jules Verne books, after checking on the quality of a couple of the Verne translations. Oh dear, that means I technically have dozens more unread books…
Open Library
Some books, especially genre commercial titles from decades ago that are still under copyright, are not available as e-books. So on occasion, and particularly when doing research, I’ll try the Internet Archive’s Open Library. For a decade it provided free access to e-books, loaning them out to one user at a time, but during the pandemic it made a poor choice, lifting the cap on loaning e-books. That led to court battles which nearly bankrupted the Archive and resulted in over a half-million titles being stripped from its collection. The losses were mainly in-copyright commercial works, and thankfully the service still has over three million titles, although there are many near-duplicates of popular works in a multitude of different editions.
Public domain books in the Open Library tend to have downloadable PDF versions you can use in Apple’s Books app as well as EPUB files usable with Send to Kindle (which no longer supports the old MOBI file format), or you could try loading those books into the Cantook by Aldiko app. However, sometimes the text versions are lousy optical character recognition scans and you’re better off reading the actual scan of the physical book on Open Library in your web browser.
Other titles in the Open Library that are still under copyright are restricted to borrowing. Some reportedly can be borrowed for 14 days and might even be downloaded and read in the Cantook by Aldiko app, but lately the ones I have been interested in could only be borrowed for an hour at a time for reading in a web browser, although they could be borrowed again and again if they were not in demand.
When I can’t find an e-book, I am willing to pay for a used print version. I loved Keith Robertson’s Henry Reed books for children back when I was in elementary school, so during pandemic travel restrictions I sought out the six adult mysteries he authored under the pen name of Carlton Keith. At least half of them, Rich Uncle, The Crayfish Dinner, and Missing, Presumed Dead, are available at Open Library. However, I ordered physical copies of all six from used bookstores in Illinois, Ohio, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and even New Zealand via AbeBooks. I’ve read four of the six thus far, and my favorite was Rich Uncle, so I’m glad it is readily available for others to enjoy. I donated my copy of it to a Robertson collector.
Libby
It took multiple attempts to get access to Libby
An option I have far less experience with is Libby by OverDrive. It is available via many public libraries, including my Bartlesville Public Library account. However, it took a couple of attempts to get it working for me.
After childhood, I didn’t like the time pressure from two-week checkouts for books from the public library. So I’ve mostly used our local library for its extensive history room resources and its meeting spaces. Years ago, I would also stop in there or at one of the Tulsa libraries to read magazines, but such offerings gradually thinned and eventually disappeared.
Back in the early 21st century, I paid for access to the Tulsa public libraries
Fifteen years ago, I paid for an annual subscription to the Tulsa City-County Library system so that I could drive to the main library in downtown Tulsa and check out audiobooks on cassette tapes to listen to while driving on my dayhiking trips…audiobooks have always been quite pricey. Audible on my iPhone eventually made that unnecessary, so long as I was willing to pony up.
Late in 2025, I noticed that some of my Facebook friends who are avid readers utilize the Libby app, so I tried logging in. However, it said my Bartlesville Public Library card was invalid. A few weeks ago I was in the local library’s history room, using their microfilm reader to access a 90-year-old grade card in regards to a legal matter. On my way out, I stopped at the circulation desk and inquired about my account. They said it had been suspended for verification, due to lack of use, but they quickly re-activated it.
My old library card
However, a few weeks later I could not login with my account to the library website, could not reset my passcode, and the Libby service said my library card number was still invalid. I dropped in again at the library, and when I showed them my library account number, they immediately figured out the problem. When I added the number to my iPhone password manager years ago, three leading zeroes were dropped. Once I knew to add those back, I could reset my passcode and log in to the library’s online portal, and Libby also began recognizing my account. I should have taken the time to dig out my old library card, as the account number on the back included the leading zeroes!
The OK Virtual Library has 51,000 books and 18,000 audiobooks, including 41,000 Read With Kindle books. I tried a Kindle one out, and once I synchronized Libby with my Amazon account, it was a breeze to check out a book and then begin reading it on my Kindle…noticeably easier than loading public domain books from Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks, although Meador’s Law of the Conservation of Happiness holds true: Libby checkouts expire after two weeks.
I checked this e-book out from Libby for my test, having noticed that the author used a fictionalized version of Oklahoma City’s Chinese Underground in it
Since I was just testing out the app, I didn’t want to keep the book checked out to me for two weeks in case someone else would want to use that license. I didn’t find a way to check it back in from my Kindle or my Kindle apps, but when I selected Books in my Amazon Digital Content library, the checkout was shown with an option to return the book early.
While the Libby service can offer magazines, your local library has to pay for such access. Bartlesville doesn’t, but I found I could get access to over 100 magazines from our library’s partnership with Hoopla. That provides up to eight audiobook, movie, music, comic, e-book, television, or BingePass titles each month, and there is a 7-day BingePass for Hoopla Magazines, although I was disappointed, albeit not at all surprised, to find that world titles like Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinéma are not on offer.
I’m very glad to see that our library and others have made progress in adding electronic checkouts to their panoply of services. By the way, if you like video documentaries, there is a Curiosity Stream BingePass.
Read!
I’m told you can also find free e-books at BookBub and Manybooks, although I haven’t tried them. I already have hundreds of purchased books awaiting my time and interest, but it is nice to have options, especially the free ones I’ve shared here.
Regular adult reading provides significant cognitive, emotional, and physical health benefits, including reduced stress, slowed cognitive decline, improved empathy, and increased longevity. If you prefer audiobooks, Libby has 18,000 and this week over 11,000 of those were instantly available to me for free thanks to my public library. There are also free public domain audiobooks at LibriVox, and while Audible charges for most of its wares, like any good drug dealer it does have some free audiobooks.
As for e-books, even if you are unwilling to try out the Kindle app on your mobile device or buy a dedicated e-ink reader, check out the above free options you can use on any web browser.
The streaming age has marginalized physical media. I have no regrets for ridding myself of my analog music recordings and almost all of my compact discs back in 2010. However, I was less dismissive of my pre-recorded videos, and I still have all of my various DVDs and Blu-rays. The only digital video format I completely abandoned was HD-DVD back in 2008.
Nevertheless, for over a decade Wendy and I have mostly rented streaming movies from Amazon or Apple. Physical media has become a tiny niche market for enthusiasts. I have several DVDs (1997-), Blu-rays (2006-), and 4K UHD Blu-rays (2016-) awaiting my attention post-retirement, but for me they have been a dubious investment.
Samsung stopped making Blu-ray players in 2019 and LG stopped in 2024. That same year, Best Buy stopped selling physical media, and Target phased out DVDs and Blu-rays except for a very limited rotating selection. Sony, which invented the Blu-ray format, stopped producing recordable Blu-ray discs in February 2025, although as of early 2026 it still produces read-only discs and players. The only other remaining major producer of players is Panasonic.
There are still some valid reasons for buying Blu-rays: quality, features, and guaranteed availability. Streaming video runs at 15 to 25 megabits per second, while UHD Blu-ray typically runs at 90 to 144 megabits per second, providing less compression, richer colors, and superior detail in dark and fast-moving scenes. However, I’m not all that discerning, having rented many a movie on VHS back in the day. Most streaming looks fine to me.
More persuasive for me are features such as making-of or historical documentaries and audio commentaries that come with many discs. The Extended Editions of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies are exemplars of the added value that discs can provide. You can find some commentaries online, but their functionality pales in comparison to the ease of using a commentary audio track on a pre-recorded movie on optical disc.
The most ardent collectors are driven by fear that licensing changes could remove a movie from any streaming service, even if you supposedly “buy” it, since all you are buying is unlimited rentals while they have rights to stream it. If I were worried about that, I could purchase movies from Apple and download and store them on a solid state drive at home, but I don’t rewatch movies enough to worry about that.
Spinning vs. Streaming Treks
A review of my disc purchases over the past 15 years reveals that few of them were worthwhile to me. As a devoted old-school Trekkie, I enjoyed watching the high-definition broadcasts of the remastered original series of Star Trek from 2006-2009 using Meador Manor’s over-the-air reception antenna, and later I bought those remastered episodes on disc. However, I’ve watched very few of those discs.
The Next Generation series was remastered from 2012 to 2014, and I went ahead and bought the discs of those episodes in high-definition, but I’ve not bothered to watch them, despite my strong interest in and paid support for the reaction videos by Josh and Alex on the Target Audience YouTube channel, where they are watching all of the classic Trek series in broadcast order. As an avid Trekkie from 1972 to 2005, I was so familiar with the first three series (Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation) that I could just watch the Target Audience reaction excerpts, feeling no need to revisit the episodes themselves.
However, once Target Audience reached Deep Space Nine, I had a decision to make. I hadn’t seen those episodes since their original broadcasts from 1993 to 1999, so I did want to rewatch each one before watching the corresponding Target Audience reaction highlights and discussion. However, I was not at all tempted to purchase that series on disc to watch on the big television. Both it and the later Voyager series are currently only available in standard definition, with remastering not proving economically viable as of yet. So I was perfectly content to just purchase unlimited streaming rights to the 176 episodes of Deep Space Nine from Apple TV for $80 and rewatch them on my iPad.
Now, with Target Audience about to start Voyager, I have purchased unlimited streaming of its 172 episodes on Apple TV for another $80. Should Apple eventually lose its license to those shows, I won’t be shattered since I paid less than 50 cents per episode.
And no, I don’t plan to watch the post-Berman Star Trek series, for reasons thoroughly explained by Darrel William Moore. I did endure the first nine of ten episodes of the first season of Picard, and I suppose that I might eventually finish that series, since I hear its third season is redemptive, but I’m satisfied that my trek concluded over twenty years ago.
Other Series on Disc
I have a few other television series on disc. Like the two Trek series I own, those have sat unwatched for many years. My other favorite science fiction TV show was the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which was on cable TV from 2003-2009, and I bought it on Blu-ray when it concluded, but I’ve never rewatched the entire thing.
In 2010, I bought a box set of DVDs of The Six Million Dollar Man. That is the only series on disc I’ve systematically watched, but even after sixteen years, I’ve only finished two of the five seasons. However, I expect to eventually finish it, 50+ years after my childhood viewings. Currently, the only way to stream that old show would be to subscribe to Roku. I already pay for Amazon Prime, Apple One, and sponsor seven video creators on Patreon, so I have no interest in paying for more subscription services. I’m quite happy to have it on disc, especially given my fickle interest.
Only one of these box sets has been worthwhile to me thus far
A misfire was my purchase in 2015, before it was readily available on streaming, of the box set of the 1960s Batman television show on Blu-ray for $100. I have fond memories of enjoying reruns of it in the 1970s, but it has been over a decade since I bought those discs, and I’ve only watched the premiere episode. Nowadays you can get unlimited rentals of its three seasons on Apple TV for $70. I might watch some of the discs on some cold winter days after I retire…or I might not.
It should be no surprise, given my track record, that I haven’t bought any more television shows on disc in the past decade.
Spinning Up Some Movies
Over the past eight years, ten movies on disc have managed to build up at home, awaiting my retirement, including four old Miss Marple movies with Margaret Rutherford which I asked for Christmas one year.
Movies I have on disc that I plan to watch sometime after I retire
After I retire, in addition to catching up on my discs, I also expect to finally watch some major films that came out over the past few decades. However, I’d rather stream those, and search out commentaries and documentaries online, than acquire more discs for our living room shelves. We’ll see if the entertainment industry will oblige.
Meador Manor 