Ruyi's World of Books & Stories

Joe sez:  This blog originally appeared in 2010. It's extremely prescient about the future of ebooks, but that isn't the reason I'm reposting it. I'm reposting because I got my very first DMCA Takedown notice. Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to "draft" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again. Apparently my infringement, according to the website Lumen, was including an Amazon link to auth...

So, I was thinking about enhanced ebooks and decided to try something that, AFAIK, hasn't ever been done before. I recently got hooked on playing Escape the Room games. Not just cell phone apps, where you solve point-and-click puzzles to advance the story, but board games that challenge you to follow the clues and get away before the time is up, real-life games where you go into a room with a group of people and a guide and actually tried to escape by following a carefully constructed scenario, and mail-order subscription games where every month you are snail-mailed a mysterious package that you have to figure out. And I thought: Could something like this be adapted to ebooks? I came up with a concept. A serial killer is emailing me, author J.A. Konrath, and taunting me to prevent his next crime. My first, grandiose way of doing this was to have the killer leave clues about the murder in his emails to me. Then readers could solve the mystery like the sleuth in a mystery novel. But...

Very often, this question has been asked by well-meaning Christians who are plagued by the torrents of appeal from churches for funds. Thrown into these appeals is the standard request to pay your tithes and offerings. Let me say from the very beginning that there is a distinct difference between giving to God and giving to "the church". Giving to God is a scriptural concept (Matt 22:21); Giving to "the church" could just be an emotional response to a well-orchestrated man-made appeal which is out of God's Will and God's Word. So it is important for us to study God's Word so that we are able to discern whether funds being solicited in a particular church are based on sound New Testament Scriptural principles. Prayer is the other means of helping to discern God's Will in a particular area of financial need (of such a church). LAW OF FIRST MENTION  It is important when attempting to derive spiritual principles from the Bible on a particular...