I have changed my mind about this ABE Books thing. I have had 40 books up there for over a month and at this moment absolutely nothing has happened. I had to make the decision to either get much more involved and put in a few hundred books or to cut bait and not waste any more time on it. My goal was to break even on the subscription fee over the first 6 months. However, at this point I'm convinced that there is no way that could happen, even if I got every book I have to sell in the system. Rather than send good time after bad, I'm just pulling the plug. Our neighborhood is having a yard sale this Saturday and I'm putting them all up for sale there. Since it is away from the house, anything that doesn't get sold will get driven to either the library or to the Salvation Army. In some ways this irks me because some of these books are of reasonable value and it seems like their getting underutilized. On the other hand, it is cheaper for me to give them away and not have to spend lots of time on it.

What does bug me is that one of my dreams was to become a bookseller kind of guy, in person or on the internet or something. In retrospect that probably isn't ever going to be anything other than an expensive hobby. I hate to cut loose dreams, but for the forseeable future I have better things to do with my time than trying to peddle goods one by one. Que sera, so it goes. a "Requirement/spec bug." It's really unreasonable to expect to get back products that meet specifications that one is too fucking lazy or too fucking incompetent to express to anyone, but I see it happen every day. This unreasonability is never realized as a failing of management but always interpreted as a failure of engineering. In the cases where I have been on teams given clear requirements and cut loose, we have always turned out better product faster than when we are micromanaged. In the first case, we are on board and our goal is to achieve, in the second everything is fiat and our goal is to game the system to give the minimum that meets what weird input we get. Which case do you want your developers (ie, and your money) going towards?