@Keter RE: "Oh, I was so tempted to stop reading right there. A word is not a who, it is a what."

Oh man, you just made my day! Excellent.

Oddly, I had the same experience with Alligator II: The Mutation.

Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials... it was one of my favorite books as a kid.

Looks pretty nifty but sadly doesn't fill any of my niches. What I'd really love is a text editor with a clean, low distraction front-end, support for multi-file projects, and the ability to concatenate and output to ePub and Mobi.

@SupaChupacabra - I dunno... the US theme song always sounded a bit too much like Whitney Houston's I'm Your Baby Tonight.

"Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, tried repeatedly to get post-apocalyptic shows off the ground."

@Faintdreams: You absolutely do not need an ISBN to publish using Amazon's DTP.

@wagedomain: Sorry to hear it. :(

@Cornflower: Ahhh, good to know. I've been outputting to HTML and then converting to ePub using Calibre, which doesn't make me a very happy camper. OpenOffice's HTML output is fairly messy, and I end up doing a lot of hand and script work to tune it afterward.

@hspevolved: I don't have any experience with digitallibre, so I can't really discuss that. Dealing with Amazon is fantastically more convenient than Smashwords in my experience, though.

@Jon Hoffman: It's pretty much as straight-forward as Amazon's DTP. Just head over to [pubit.barnesandnoble.com] and setup an account.

@Kate: I think he meant that this is what ChromeOS should be.

@Tamírki: Thank goodness, I'm not alone. I can hardly stand her, and am continually baffled by people's reaction to her.

@wickednick: Take a look at the current crop of ereaders. Virtually none of them are use illuminated screens. Rather, they use a technology called E-Ink which has similar reflective properties to paper.

@jesbelle: Sorry, but I'm pretty sure that's Jason Ritter, John Ritter's son.

@mostlysane: Making fun of a very deep wound? No, in this case they're quite clearly f***ing it.

@ijustwritebooks: Pardon me if I'm looking at this wrong, but you have an agent, so aren't you in effect paying someone 15% of your take to do the networking? You're right that it isn't about who you know, but it is most definitely about who your agent knows, and you're paying handsomely to tap into his connections.