From the Science Blog:

“Extreme cherry pickers,” grocery shoppers who buy only sale items and nothing else, do not harm retailer profits significantly as generally is believed, according to a forthcoming study in the Journal of Marketing Research.

So feel free to keep checking the Consumerist and Dealhack; you’re not hurting anybody.

Stop being so worried about the kids lack of interest in reading. This complaining has been going on since the dawn of children’s television, yet, somehow, there are still lots of former children that read for pleasure. (Many of whom -gasp!- write litblogs!)

And by the way, who says that kids aren’t reading? What about Harry Potter? What about manga? What about things that aren’t even books?� Just because they aren’t carrying giant, hardcover editions of Thomas Hardy novels around, and just because they don’t bother to observe the rules of grammar and spelling in causual situations (like text messaging or the Internet), that’s no reason to think that everyone born between the years 1992 and1999 are illiterate morons. You want to know how to reach the “youth-market”? Fine. I’ll tell ‘ya.

But you won’t like it.

Releasing books in dual formats, like some have suggested, isn’t enough. You’ve got to think bigger. The words are the thing. Where they are isn’t all that important, because they should be everywhere.

Seriously. If someone wants to read a book on their cellphone, they should be able to. Or on the Internet. Or iPod. Or whatever — the books should be available as hell. Hardback, softback, electronic, audio, even Powerpoint slides if that’s what people want — once it becomes digital, format conversion is trivial. Or should be.

You know why there isn’t a good ebook reader? I don’t know. But I know what it would look like. It needs to be able to display any book from any publisher, and cost less that $100. That’s it.

Imagine it: buying an ebook reader that you know you can use for any book ever published, past, present and future, by any publisher in any language, no matter where you buy it from. At a hundred dollars, it would quickly become a must-have item for the avid reader.

But, no. Some ebook readers want to lock you into their own virtual store, or their own weird file format.� And some publishers can’t bear the thought of releasing their content into the world without chaining a three-ton safe to it. And some writers don’t want to be published digitally because only losers publish things digitally. Because when you release a novel to, say, 10,000 subscribers via cell-phone, you don’t get a smartly-bound hardcover volume that stands a good chance of out-living you.

And it’s not just an issue of formats. A lot of kids read things like fan-fiction. On the Internet, even! Because they care so much about the franchise universes they’ve glommed onto that they’re willing to burn their eyes out staring at a computer screen so they can read about television characters. That’s commitment right there, and instead of trying to figure out how to serve an under-served group of people, the rightful owners of the characters want to shut the servers down without even considering a replacement. Are you meeting a need with this fan fiction stuff? How about if I turn it off, and then refuse to consider some sort of money-making alternative that might satisfy us both?

Is any of this making sense?

No, no, of course not. No, you couldn’t possibly, no it’s all wrong, every last bit of it. For terribly good reasons, and everything, and you just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s fine.