Preacher was a pretty boring TV show in our opinion. It didn’t really capture the sense of joy in the comics.
But yes, you’d think someone would’ve done something with Sandman.
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So yesterday I received an e-mail from my local book store that my order would be ready for pick up … despite not having ordered any books for quite a while. On closer examination, turns out the order had been placed January 30th, 2016, and all but forgotten. (Back then, the book in question wasn’t available, but according to the publisher, a reprint was being prepared. Who could have thought it took them 3 years! Luckily, I hadn’t managed to find a used copy for a reasonable price; the few I’ve seen had been more expensive than the original retail price, so I passed.)
Anyway, quite unexpectedly, I’ve now completed my collection of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber 
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In other news, I finished The Green Pearl on Thursday night. Was pretty good overall. There are some passages that come close to the Cugel stories, and some that are decent in their own right. I can imagine that the German translation doesn’t do complete justice to Vance’s prose, which definitely impacted my overall impression a bit. I’ve now started the final part, Madouc. Build-up is slow, so not much to say about it yet.
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Some automated system in place? As a person you might want to give your customer a call if it’s more than a year later…
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It’s pretty much automated, I guess. You can fill out the order online, too. Though it seems they’re not really good with corner cases. I remember one time I had ordered a book they still had in the system, but probably wasn’t available any longer. Never got a cancellation, but when I enquired about it some months later, the order was gone from the system (as was the book). I thought surely the same must have happened in this case, hence my surprise.
Still, I prefer their somewhat rudimentary system over something like Amazon any day 
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@milanfahrnholz I prefer it also over libraries. Most of the times I rented something from a library, the late return fees were so high, I could have just bought it. Not to mention the incident with the coffee.
THE COFFEE INCIDENT???
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Okay, okay, I will mention it: that had been at the public library in Chemnitz. My not-yet wife had rented a couple books there, and one looked pretty bad, with whole pages soaked in coffee. But who cares, right? Well, seems upon returning, the clerk did care, because for some reason it had not been marked as damaged in their system. Luckily, there were two of us against one of them, and I made it very clear that it had not been our coffee, but it wasn’t a nice experience. Yelling at people is really not my thing.
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Oh dear, at least they backed down. This could have gone worse. At least you didn´t have to pay for damage you hadn´t done (I know what I´m talking about).
Not without putting up a fight.
Yeah, not being able to prove your innocence must be about one of the worst things to happen.
Now, in defence of public libraries, I still occasionally use their services (mostly for travel guides or non-fiction in general, where I do not necessarily want to own the book. DVDs too). A lot of libraries are also fantastic from an architectural point of view (Regensburg definitely, or Würzburg and now, to a lesser degree, Konstanz). I’ve been also pretty impressed with the one in Corvallis. No fees for the library card if you lived in town, and very, very cheap fines 
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I had a similar thing happen at my uni library once… I handed a book in ages before the due date, but they hadn’t registered it in the system, so a few weeks later said I had to pay a late fee… When I told them it was already handed in and was back on the shelf the guy then said that I could have just put it there that day to trick them and try to avoid the fee. At that point I was very close to exploding in rage and I think the guy sensed this and quickly backed down and erased the fee.
So I have some books where I need to be able to search inside them easily and copy and paste passages, BUT I couldn’t find them anywhere on Kindle or any kind of ebook (normally I would just buy another copy as an ebook for this purpose).
So I decided to try out a digitising service, I went with - digitisemybooks.co.uk
They did a really good job, got a fully searchable PDF back… (there is an option for non-destructive digitising where you get the physical book back, but I went with the cheaper destructive version)
I’m shocked! (Well, okay, I can imagine books and purposes for which such a violent format shifting might be in order, but I would not do it to any of those in my care).
But I guess there comes the time when sitting down with a paper book might be considered retro, if it isn’t already upon us.
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The topic about the CRPG book reminded me of this one (mostly of interest for fellow Germans):
It’s (obviously) about the history Pen & Paper RPGs (which normally interest me only in so far as they inspire many of the cRPGs I like), but the book was really a fun and informative read.
There’s also an accompanying volume, called “The Interviews” that contain exactly that, the various interviews the authors conducted with various figures of the RPG scene (most of those in English).
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It makes me sad seeing a book in the bin, though. I’m conflicted.
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Case in point.
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Fixed. 
I considered digging it out, but I already have a copy and that one is probably all grody now.
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Same here. I’ve got a few books I’d like to get rid of, but throwing them away never occurred to me.
I mean, I’ve a hard time throwing away magazines. Last time we moved, I threw away a meter high stack of old newspapers . Thought I’d still actually read them one day, but apparently not.
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Could recycle them - that’s what the people who digitised books for me did…
Then they get to be turned into new, different books.
Or, you know, toilet paper maybe.
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Now I’m picturing someone cutting out letters or words and re-arranging them into a new story.
Actually, the building I’m working in has an open bookshelf for people to deposit or pick up books. I’ve already abandoned a couple from my own stock on there (and they usually were gone within days, never to return) and even adopted a slim volume (Murakami, South of the border, West of the Sun). But I do not want to dump incomplete Fantasy series on there, where I am now wondering how I even managed to amass (much less read) the number of volumes I do own.
OTOH, last time I checked there were books printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina on there, in a language I couldn’t name without looking it up. So maybe some Terry Goodkind would not make things any worse …
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