284,000 Stolen Books?

Sometimes I've offered a used book on Amazon at considerably less than the competing sellers simply in hopes of moving it off my shelf. All the same, one has to wonder when a book appears at price dramatically lower than other listings ... is it hot? Here's a story from Japan about $4-million in missing library books, and I imagine the stateside story would be far more astonishing.

Philip Jose Farmer, 91

The prolific Farmer irritated Kurt Vonnegut by appropriating Vonnegut's fictional failed science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, as "author" of his Venus on the Half Shell novel. Here is Farmer's NYT obituary. And here are his thoughts on immortality: 

“I can’t see any reason why such miserable, unhappy, vicious, stupid, conniving, greedy, narrow-minded, self-absorbed beings should have immortality." R-I-P.