 Whew, good morning Hank, it's Wednesday. Today I want to tell you the strange but revealing story of how I suddenly became a hit with old people. By the way, I'm breathless because I've just come from a workout in my Pizza John football jersey, keepin' dry with my Pizza John hand towel, and of course keepin' hydrated with my Pizza John Nalgene. All of this magic is available only at Pizzamas.com and only for the next 12 days. Okay, so this is a story of recommendation algorithms, Amazon books, and the future of publishing. So last May, my book The Anthropocene Review came out in hardcover, but not in paperback. Traditionally, hardcovers are published about a year before the paperback comes out. The hardcover is a little more sturdy and has some bells and whistles, like they have these nice bands on the spine. They may be imprinted with secret pictures of Tuatara, etc. And the idea is that hardcore fans will pay extra to read the book before the paperback comes out and also to have a beautiful object, and because it's more expensive, everybody, publishers, bookstores, authors, makes more money. Like, for context, with my novels, I make about twice as much per hardcover sale as I do per paperback one. But all of this, like so much of traditional publishing, is of course wildly antiquated, right? Maybe it made sense in 2005 when my first novel came out, but it certainly does not make sense today when people expect, with good reason, I think, to be able to read however they want, whether that's via e-book or audiobook or hardcover or paperback. But because of these antiquated publishing strategies, there is no paperback of The Anthropocene Reviewed. Unless you count the large print edition, which looks like this and is designed for people who want or need to read larger type. So some percentage of people who buy The Anthropocene Reviewed from Amazon just click paperback and accidentally buy the large print edition. And then also, because this is my first book for adults, I am lucky enough to have many older readers or other people who benefit from large print editions, and that's another percentage of the sales. But neither of those is the primary reason why I recently became one of America's leading large print edition authors. The reason, or at least the biggest reason, is that a while back the hardcover of The Anthropocene Reviewed went out of stock at Amazon because a bunch of people ordered it all at once for Sharon McMahon's book club. Like Amazon sold thousands of hardcovers in a single day, and then they didn't have any more, but they did have the large print edition, so the algorithm began marketing that as the primary edition of the book because it was the only print version they had for sale. And so people bought a lot of the large print edition. In fact, they ended up buying more of the large print edition than they had of the hardcover before it went out of stock. And somehow in that process, Amazon's algorithm convinced itself, people prefer the large print edition of this book of essays. That's the one they want, and so that's the one I'm gonna show them. And so for the last four months, whenever people search for The Anthropocene Reviewed on Amazon, they are disproportionately likely to be shown the large print edition. And that is the story of how The Large Print Edition of my book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, became a USA Today bestseller. But the story doesn't end there. Because the Amazon algorithm believes the large print edition is the canonical edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed, and because it therefore sells very well, Amazon also thinks that other people who mostly buy large print editions will love The Anthropocene Reviewed. And this results in more large print edition sales. The people who read those books tend to be elderly, and over the last couple months, I have seen a huge surge in fan mail from older people. Which has been so lovely. They're not reading the book because of my TikToks or the Fault in Our Stars. They've never heard of me, but they still like the book. Or at least if they don't like the book, they don't write me. The point is, a tiny algorithmic quirk has created a self-reinforcing cycle, a phenomenon needless to say also seen elsewhere on the internet. What's the lesson here? Well, first, publishers need to get with the times and publish both special editions for people who want them, and inexpensive paperbacks for people who want those. Also, two algorithms are human-directed and humans are algorithm-directed in ways we do not fully understand. Oh, and also three, get all your Pizzamas stuff before it's too late, pizzamas.com. Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.