In 2018, Addison-Wesley republished a massive Oak Ridge technical tome from 1958, Fluid Fuel Reactors, written by James Lane, a star engineer, and two others. I’d come across it many times but it is technically dense and, until 2018, its 616 pages were only available hardcopy. Where I live, that would have meant spending too long, for too little in all likelihood, in one of two public libraries. Now it is available as a Kindle ebook for US$3. How could I not snap it up?
Perhaps it’s just me but one of the factors that swung me in favor of purchase was an enthusiastic blurb (written by whom?) that included this incentive: “Used physical copies have sold online for well over $1,000.” But the most flabbergasting blurb words come at the very end:
60 years after FLUID FUEL REACTORS was first published, it can now, for the first time, be enjoyed on digital reading devices, in a manner that supports adjustable font sizes and easy-to-read formatting… as opposed to looking at a series of bitmap images of words, like an animal.