I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:

Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.

I haven’t yet listened to more than the first 10 seconds, but that gave me the topic of “wholeness,” which rung a bell about some notes on that topic I have been meaning to gather in one place. A number of books I read recently have been describing problems with society’s reductionist thinking obsession over the last few centuries. “Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition,” “Awakenings,” “What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology” and probably others. I wanted to at least make a list of some of these ideas, and maybe do some thinking. But it takes a long time to read the books in the first place, and even longer to go back and reread parts. (“Longer” in the sense of fitting it into my schedule, of course.)

Anyway, I remembered a bit about the topic in the “Awakenings” chapter called “Perspectives.” I mentioned Oliver Sacks to Wei, who said he knew of Sacks, and Sacks was gay. This I did not know, so I googled “oliver sacks gay,” and found it was indeed true. I found the lovely article “Why Oliver Sacks Always Goes Too Far” in The Atlantic about Sacks’s autobiography, “On the Move: A Life,” which was just released a few months before Sacks died this year.

So I looked up the book on Amazon, intending to either order a used paperback if I found a cheap one, or buy it for Kindle.

The Kindle version is $12.99, which I think includes tax. The cheapest final price used one was $10.33 plus $3.99 shipping. The shipping is really overhead and shouldn’t be counted when thinking about production, I think, so I was thinking the Kindle price was quite high, being higher than the cheapest used copy, which of course needs raw materials, etc., to produce, and can be sold multiple times. And since the used one wasn’t significantly cheaper, I decided to get the Kindle one. But since I wasn’t going to be reading it immediately, I opted to just put the book on my wish list and actually purchase it once I got around to reading it.

This made me realize Amazon must lose out on many sales because people ordinarily would buy now, and read later, possibly never, but now people can just put the books on a list and only buy them when time has been made to read. So perhaps that’s why the Kindle prices are higher than I think they should be!