10:23 – Science kit sales remain steady. Earlier this month we passed total 2013 revenue. November has been good and December is usually a pretty heavy month, so 2014 revenue should comfortably exceed 2013 revenue. I expect 2015 to be better still, especially once I have time to get some of our new kits available.
I’ve never seen anything like the prepping book phenomenon on Amazon. There are scores if not hundreds of titles available. KEbooks.com, the site I get a daily free-book email from, even has a prepping book of the day now. Almost without exception, these “books” are complete garbage. They remind me of a restaurant review I once read (or perhaps wrote): “The food was terrible and the portions were so small.”
These so-called books usually contain a few thousand words spread over 30 to 50 “pages” that are mostly white space. The text itself is often illiterate, and usually obviously stolen from various Internet sites, sometimes without even an attempt to file off the serial numbers. The advice is almost uniformly bad.
For example, I just downloaded a free copy of The Beginning Prepper’s Guide to Firearms, which is actually better than most of the garbage prepping books I’ve seen. At least it appears that the guy actually wrote it rather than just stealing stuff and pasting it into a “book”. But “better” is very much relative. This author, for example, recommends a shotgun as a home defense weapon. So far, so good. But he lost me when he recommended loading that shotgun with blanks. Seriously. He’s under the impression that blanks are as effective a load as buckshot at in-home distances. No, they’re not. It’s true that the wad in a blank shotshell can cause injury at very close range, but across the room it’ll be no more effective than a paint ball gun, if that.
Many of these garbage prepping books have mostly or all five-star reviews. Oddly, usually six of them. It’s pretty obvious that the “authors” are using one of those “five-stars-for-five-dollars” review services, and apparently $30 is their advertising/promotion limit. I can’t believe that Amazon.com hasn’t stomped all over this paid-review abuse.