Bone-in Meat without the Meat: "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf

“Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another's inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?"

In “Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf”

Why wouldn't Amazon publish the ebook I wrote in 1986 on a ZX81 and posted to them saved on a cassette tape? On the other hand, I once (1988, I think) did the work for a non-linear dynamics paper on my Sinclair Spectrum, and produced the diagrams using the Spectrum's printer, which used sparks to burn dots in the silver coating of the paper, then photographing and enlarging them. It was submitted to the very snooty college journal. They accepted it but wondered if I couldn't make better diagrams. They published anyway when I said I couldn't. How I wish I could recover this. It’s in one of the floppy disk in my attic at home…I’ve still got several programming nuggets I developed at the time. One of them was a chess compiler in C. If I had the hardware to read that kind of media (I’ve still got the floppy disks, but I no longer have the drive that went along with them…), I could recover most of them too if I really set my mind to it. But I wouldn't regard it as worth the effort, so they'll eventually get lost without anyone ever knowing whether they are worth saving. Only me…A lot of forensics software aims to keep old formats readable - so incompatibility is the least of our worries. Books last for hundreds, even thousands of years. Modern storage media do not. 'Bit rot' is going to become a serious problem...

That might be part of the reason we have books like these. Or because of the people they were written for.

Back in the day when I was attending The British Council, I treated myself years to a copy of the great Oxford English Dictionary, the full 20 volume version (I know what you’re thinking…; but this took place in the 80s). If I sat down to look up a word I could be there an hour later, reading the etymology of a completely unrelated word that I possibly didn't even know existed until that point. Because of that, I learnt to keep my discoveries to myself, on the whole, having seen the look of panic on other people's faces should I start with an enthusiastic recital of my discoveries. Whilst Wikipedia (and other online reference sources) do have a certain amount of serendipity, the joy of reading the next entry in a print encyclopaedia is hard to match. Ah, the joys of dictionary leafing! Also reminds me that, as a youngster, some of the encyclopaedia sets at home were one of my favourite things. Later on I bought the German equivalent. Oh, what joy! I must have clocked years looking up all sorts of wonders, tracing diagrams and designs and just having myself a proper party! Nevertheless, if I lose a book and it's gone, given a couple of minutes of WIFI and a mobile phone I can download any one of millions of books for free anywhere in the word, with paid-for Kindle type services. Plus, they're closing all the libraries, where is one supposed to go to get all this information and look things up? Especially if the required lookup is needed in the middle of the night for instance. Sadly, we're reaching a point where if it isn't on the net, somewhere, and indexed by a search engine, it may as well not exist. There is a sense of sensibility in this day and age for printed matter, but, as with the stone tablets Maryanne Wolf writes about (cuneiform, etc.), this will pass and soon. I think, in less than a generation (I probably won’t leave to see it), books will only be boutique gifts. There will come a time, possibly within the lifetime of you now reading this, when there will simply be no more books published. Novels, yes; collections of short stories; poems; plays; all manner of nonfiction--but it will all be electronic. Everything will be photonic, and when it is photonic and the cloud is a quantum entangled swarm of particles in orbit of the sun which powers that internet iteration, there will be legions whinging about the sad loss of electronics, and they will sound just as pathetic.

But the problem is not that we moved on from the printed page. What will be an utter disgrace is that no one will read Proust anymore. Proust's sort of fun if you have the time and uninterrupted stamina: if you let a day go by without keeping up the momentum it abruptly just turns into gossip about people you'll never meet. That can be diverting, on a long bus journey (because otherwise the yammering of the people behind you becomes irritating noise, whereas making sense of it is at least a good mental exercise). A bit of concentration and the books resolve into exactly what people claim, a Great Work about time, loss and our attempts to make sense of it all, but then life gets in the way and it turns back into eavesdropping on “fin de siècle” Parisian random stuff (loved the quite right at the beginning of the book). What I didn’t like is the fact Wolf seems to be writing a book without the “science” to support it. Starting the book with a quote by Proust was a good touch, but it’s bone-in meat without the meat…

Amazon Cloud Drive Shutting Down Unlimited Storage: Outrage galore!

My own motto when it comes to security: "There are two kinds of bikers: those who already did fall and those who will."

I was outraged by the cut of the QUASI-FREE Amazon storage space. I checked how much data I had stored and I have used a whopping 4Tb. 

AND THEY WANT ME TO PAY 236 EUROS PER YEAR!! Outrage galore!

Nope. Not gonna happen.

Amazon offered "unlimited" storage to paying users then acted surprised when people started using it "creatively". They could have remedied that by implementing a 2TB limit or whatever for paying users and left everyone on the free tier with a 25GB limit, but they chose not to.

That's fine, it's their prerogative, but to make out that somehow Amazon hands were tied is somewhat misleading. Welcome to the world of money. Cloud storage was inevitably to hold its trusting customers to ransom one day...

People often say "you don't need to keep high res originals unless you're going to print large copies", but I think that's a bit misleading. Maybe I'm a geek, but there are times when I want to zoom in to, say, a street sign and work out where I took an old picture (non-GPS), or look at the time on someone's watch, or perhaps crop it to just a single face to print a portrait or use it as a profile image; and if I only have a low res copy, that can be difficult or impossible. I never know what use I might have for a photo in the future, so I always want to keep the full-size originals just in case. Having originals makes a big difference if you want to crop and edit photos. Also, screen resolutions are never going to go down. The days when your 640 x 480 pixel photo filled a screen have long gone....

I have paid great heed to Schofield's Law for many years: "It's not IF your hard drive fails, its WHEN...".

For people who don't know:

• Schofield's First Law of Computing states that you should never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out;
• Schofield's Second Law of Computing states that data doesn't really exist unless you have at least two copies of it, i.e., two copies that don't have changes automatically synced between them and aren't stored in the same physical location.
• Schofield's Third Law of Computing states that the easier it is for you to access your data, the easier it is for someone else to access your data.

NB: Roobags' addendum to Schofield's Laws: nothing exists without a link.

Personally I use a combination of local and cloud backup - best of both worlds. Sounds as if Amazon had an unsustainable business model. I work for a company which is (very) big in the area of Cloud services, and you need huge investment to provide the level of performance and resilience which customers expect these days. 

It amazes me that businesses are happy to entrust their most sensitive data to faceless corporations in other countries, where there is no way to verifying their integrity. The potential for industrial espionage and government snooping is vast and even more so after the Snowden revelations. May be ok for consumers, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near it for business. Sensitive data should be kept local to the company. Google Drive might be secure, but frankly I'd be surprised if they didn't harvest the data stored by its users, looking for some way to either make money from it or give the juicy bits to some US government agency. Folks should take a look at this tech conference showing exactly how the NSA and GCHQ are keeping track of your data. Just Google "30c3 To Protect and Infect" and follow the youtube link. If you think data is safe in the cloud or any data for that matter. You owe it to yourselves to educate yourself on what is really going on with your privacy and data safety.

And please, for the love of God, don't confuse backup with cloud storage. Cloud storage is great, but it's not a backup solution. Most of services listed are synchronisation solutions. Delete data from one place and its gone from all of them. More than twenty years of working IT (damn I feel old saying that!) tell me that most data loss is caused by user error, not hardware failure. You need a backup solution that lets you get to a file that was there yesterday, but has gone today (e.g. accidentally deleted by the kids) to protect your data (Schofield's Second Law of Computing). Cloud providers often don't explain clearly enough, is the difference between backup, archiving and sharing.

• Backup: keep an immutable copy of your data as it existed at a certain time, in such a way so to be safe from catastrophic errors in the original.

• Archiving: offload your data to somewhere safe, though possibly less convenient to use, in order to free space on your primary device.

• Sharing: enable access to your data from multiple devices, or from multiple users.

A lot of grief would be avoided if the various providers explained the differences, and how to achieve them. 

You're also entrusting your data to a third party, they can go bust, get taken over, change their terms and conditions at a whim, get hacked, decide what was once free will now cost you. If you must use the cloud, make sure the data is encrypted for transit and decrypted again locally, which gives at least some protection… Not only the privacy issue but the viability of these companies as a going concern. Many internet service companies do not make a profit and rely on venture capital, some do not even have a actual business model that makes sense. After all, growth of the user base alone does not magically make one a successful business if they are not paying customers.

If one's data is important then it simply does not make sense to entrust that data to a company that may not even exist in a year's time.

My Modus Operandi to solve all these issues follows with some comments to help you along.

Offline backups are essential. My worst experiences have been with creeping data corruption either by, say, a failing hard disk or by malware. Deleting a file or saving changes that you shouldn't have made permanently are also common problems if you are using a system that syncronises. At home, in terms of the most important reason for doing backups, i.e. data loss due either to disk failure or a cloud provider going bust, a NAS configured as RAID 1 is a backup because if one disk fails, there is another copy. If you then attach a USB hard drive (of the same disk size as the NAS RAID 1) to the NAS, then that is a further backup. I accept that this does not cover you in the event of a fire or theft.  For that I'll be using an offsite backup (I use ShadowProtect). I remember a few weeks after I had started working at a company many years ago one of my co-workers said:

"What does this message mean "Tape Full. Insert next tape." ? "

"How long have you been getting it?" I asked, innocently.

"Oh, months and months".

Human error is a bitch! (apply Schofield's Second Law of Computing when we want to prevent data corruption; One wrong byte and the file may not be readable).

The local backup of my NAS drive means I have instant access, but if there were ever a house fire or the drive(s) failed, I would still have the cloud as a fallback (cloud backups are also managed automatically by the NAS). Back in the day, I remember paing US$90 for two years worth of access to 2Tb (1Tb as backup space and 1Tb as a sync drive) via IDrive, which used fully encrypted storage and transfer. The biggest downside to cloud storage is not space, but the bandwidth needed to make it effective. Unless you are on a direct fibre connection, even fast broadband is way too slow for routine use of large cloud storage due to the woefully poor upload speeds you generally get, since ISPs seem to fixate on download speed only. Roll on the day when affordable direct fibre to the home was widely available. Hence, you really do need a local solution for day-to-day storage.

Don't forget that even if you are careful about not deleting files that are synced, they can be corrupted - and the corruption will then replace the data in the backup destination. This is particularly important if you are worried about the ransomware viruses that encrypt your data and then demand money to unlock them - if you only have 1 backup, then the chances are the encrypted files will be backed up and you won;t be able to give the hackers the finger.

NB: I've been a Synology aficionado for a long time, but beware. Simple NAS has a lot going for it if you want backups you don't have to plug in or remember to start. However you might need to read those drives if the device fails. One possible route out might be to mount the drive in a USB attached enclosure as I did when I had a blackout with my NAS, then tried accessing it as an external drive using a bootable USB stick running Linux. Another might be to try adding a file system driver to a windows PC, a utility that allows Windows to read Linux formatted drives.

Bottom-line: The primary market for Cloud storage is the large corporate market, not the individual. For companies, Cloud storage simply has to be attractively priced compared to the cost of provisioning and operating their own data centre. Storage is cheap now a days, If you are careless enough to leave your documents in the cloud, when the cloud disappears taking your docs with it, that's what you get for taking the easy/cheap way out. Clouds move, shift and disappear, whether in the sky or on the Web. If you want to rely on something that isn't guaranteed to stick around and not under YOUR control, then you deserve whatever you get!

Bottom-Line 2: After setting up a backup procedure, be sure to actually restore or recover some backed up files to be quite sure the procedure works. It's not enough simply to use the backup software's "verify" procedure. You don't need to do this every time unless the backup is mission-critical (e.g., no more backups have been made). I'm also not a fan of backing up only important files, what I'd describe as "intelligent backup"; a full image of everything is better if you can afford the space and time. Someone I was advising back in the day, decided to rationalise the full tape backup I recommended, doing it rarely. He set up an "intelligent" procedure to back up all files and directories he considered important. Then two drives failed simultaneously (power issues), and he discovered he had no backup, a combination of an "intelligent" backup procedure that didn't do everything expected, and lack of a full file system image. This was largely resolved, by sending the failed discs to a disc drive recovery company with a clean room, but it cost thousands and took several days.

Bottom-line 3: If you encrypt the data, make sure you have good backup for the key to unlock it.

Prescription:

• Starting downloading all the stuff from Amazon Clouddrive to a staging area:

(3 machines downloading my stuff)

• My new 3 Tb HDD

• My HDD disk (2 bays) with my new 3 Tb disk

• My Synology NAS hooked up to my HDD Caddy

If you don't want to follow-up the "prescriptions" above, you can back up all your work on clay tablets. You can't be too careful...

733bi/fo@@h732=|$dGGGHHH&+~52: "Think Like a Hacker - A Sysadmin's Guide to Cybersecurity" by Michael J. Melone

“Thinking like a hacker means studying the tooling that hackers use, attending hacker conferences such as DEFCON [and C-Days in Portugal], and practicing hacking and exploitation in a lab environment.”

In “Think like a Hacker: A Sysadmin’s Guide to Cybersecurity” by Michael J. Melone

What happens in real life passwords-wise? (I know what I’m talking about; back in the day I was in the trenches doing this for a living…)

The passwords are usually stored in a database with the username, when you enter your username and password one is checked vs another. Obviously if the database was stored "in the clear" anyone who stole it or looked at it would know your password. This can't work for anywhere where the user accounts must be secure - even from employees, which is basically everywhere. So, what is done is that the password is "hashed" which means that it is encoded using a one-way conversion formula. If I have the formula and the password I can reproduce the hash result, that's a match! I can open your account! That's what a website does when you enter the right password. But if you just have the hash then if you give that to the website it will apply the formula and create a different result and the system will say "no dice". So having the hashes is no use to a hacker.

Unless the hacker guesses the formula. And this is where the billions of attempts come in. If an employee or hacker steals the list of hashes and usernames they will use them to guess the formula. The bigger the list the more chances of a password being repeated in it, if the hacker spies two hashes that are the same (or with modern functions, hashes that are related with a regularity that clever math can show) then that might mean that the passwords used to generate them are the same, and if the said password is 12345678 then it's very likely Mr. hacker will guess the formula required, and at that point off we go to the races. If the hacker has the database on his own computer (and one can rent very big, very fast computers now for very little $$$) many billions of guesses and tries and tests on the hash function can be done every second.

Good web sites do three things, firstly they "salt" their passwords with a random string which is kept separately like "733bi/fo@@h732=|$dGGGHHH&+~52-" which means that all passwords have that added to them before hashing. Secondly, they use strong hash functions like not SHA-1. The final thing that it is easy to do is to stop users using any password in the top 5000 passwords lists, stop them using any dictionary word and insist that the password contains numbers, capitals, lowercases and symbols.

Unfortunately, such is the sophistication of password cracking software these days that even a long password is no guarantee of security and hardware is getting faster all the time so just a long password is no cast iron guarantee of security. Use very different passwords on online services and be careful about the links between different apps; these days you can use your Facebook ID to login to a range of different sites for example; if you do this consider the implications of what could be accessed if say your Facebook ID is compromised and the data that is shared between the 2 sites.

A password manager is a good way to go for remembering all these different passwords some of them will generate a random password of a specific length for you when you set up a new account and they are available as apps on smartphones, however choose a secure password to access it and ensure it is securely encrypted using something like AES and be careful where it's stored, remember the "Cloud" is just another computer hosted somewhere in the world, there is no guarantee cloud storage is secure; if you back up to these services then encrypt the backups (Companies like Apple offer this with just a check box and password field as an option in your back up settings).

I am extremely careful with LinkedIn these days, I once found all my information available online (legitimately) because they had changed their privacy options and data was open by default to certain LinkedIn partners who took it upon themselves to publish my CV publicly (thanks for the spam to the email accounts I used at that time guys!), they seem to have a very relaxed approach to privacy and peoples profiles often appear in straight Google searches, CV's by their nature tend to include a lot of personal information, and certainly a lot of contact info.

Most hacking attempts do not even use passwords; they exploit failings of the site's code itself. Meanwhile the 'password complexity' argument is based on being able to submit thousands of passwords a second to the same account. Any system which allows that is a dumb piece of design. The sensible answer is that you should not use a guessable password. The rest is basically a 'straw man' designed to shift attention away from the real security failings of the software industry.

Passwords are recognised as being extremely fallible and there is a big discussion going on as to how to replace them, biometrics are equally insecure and you can't change them if they are compromised, as for flaws in code allowing exploits, these will always exist, even the best programmers make mistakes and the sophistication of cracking tools is improving all the time. I view this as being a bit like home security, you can add all the window locks, security deadbolts and alarms that you like, it's never a guarantee that someone can't break in, and in the case of on-line data where government funded agencies are involved then all bets are off.

Personally, I try not to put anything important on the internet, my plans for world domination and my Mum's recipe for bread pudding I memorise, and keep in my head, they can't hack that......yet! :)

Bottom-line: Hackers don't try to guess passwords to get your account. They hack into the system, steal the encrypted data and then, outside of its secure ecosystem it is now vulnerable to brute force attacks. Once a reasonable number of passwords has been hacked, this can be sold onto the highest bidder who will then harvest your data. Often, they will use the same username-password combination on other common websites such as PayPal and Amazon where they can make online purchases or Facebook and Gmail/Hotmail where they will begin the process of identity theft or look through old messages for even more important passwords or bank account details. Remember that holiday you took with your mates and you instant messages them your bank details so they could pay you for the flights? Yep, that's still in your message box. So, change that Facebook password. Now!

A Xanax and a Shot of Whiskey: "Published. The Proven Path From Blank Page to Published Author" by Chandler Bolt

A few years ago an unknown girl from Belfast (the name eludes me at the moment) started writing a short parody of 50 Shades of Grey called 50 Shades of Red White and Blue as a joke for her friends on Facebook. After one week the word had spread and she had grown to a huge number of followers. During the second week she increased the number of followers. At the end of the second week she self-published an eBook on Amazon UK and sold a huge amount copies on the first day jumping to the top 10 in the paid Kindle store. I don’t know what number she sits at in the paid Kindle store now (many authors don't reach this even with a professional marketing campaign). All this came from a free Facebook account and a bit of “good writing”, this is the power of social media in the publishing world today.

I'm inherently skeptical of these "No. X in the Kindle Store" claims; simply making an initial impact in a crowded category is entirely possible through impulse purchases. True success, if one is reducing everything to financial terms, is in sustaining this success. To use generic terms - being a high-tier brand in the short term (No.5 in category within the first week, say) is no measure of long-term success or indeed any measure of success at all; category ranking only becomes interesting on timescales of quarters at the least or years. I know it's slightly different in terms of books and albums, but the theory is there; who cares if someone gets a bit of initial buzz? The proof of the pudding is whether that buzz and interest can be sustained. In consumer brand terms, strong single-year growth following a product launch is one thing. Sustained high growth, or just sustained high sales ahead of the competition, is a mark of success. I really find it hard to understand why "being more egalitarian and open to submissions" inherently has come to mean "being easier" - it's a complete misunderstanding of the results of openness. You're increasing competition which means you have to be even better to stand out. But as I believe and have said above, attitudes will change. Probably, many of the people going it alone will write it off as a failure and the bubble will fade - not the entire industry, just this inflated estimation of it. When realism sets in, what will probably occur is the expected outcome (reasonable choice, the best gaining widespread attention) since there is no longer the pressure for results that the media bubble is looking for. At the moment, selling the story of someone who did well is useful because it supports the belief that the system works. That said, here is a ridiculous idea that I'm sure will end in tears and Armageddon, but might make a few people happy in the meantime; a "what are you writing" thread to go alongside the "what are you reading" one. It would have to be strictly moderated just to keep it readable and reasonable; perhaps even to the extent of a recommended pro-forma post (something like "Title and Synopsis (25-150 words or so) - and most importantly, no direct referral links. Anyone who reads it would probably be savvy enough to subsequently search for the author online and find the place to buy the book. However, were this introduced, it should coincide with a moratorium on the part of aspiring authors on posting their referral links and synopses anywhere else! I've always imagined published authors standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a very small stage, trying not to fall off and occasionally holding out a hand to pull someone up and join them. Though I don't have statistics I think the stage for self-published authors is much smaller per capita, and a lot of them seem to just want to get onto the Amazon platform for the sake of it rather than give better stories to the world. That's called ego, and the fact that so much of it is based on plugging your work to "friends" and asking them to spread the word or even giving your books away as a promotional ploy, says enough about the process. As a writer friend of mine once said, "I don't read books that people give me." Nobody with any kind of personal or professional integrity would ever consider plugging their books constantly, whether in person, or through other media. It's vulgar and egotistical. Again on the platform thing, part of the problem is that 'being published' was elevated to mean a lot more than it should. The explosion of self-publishing, where everybody can be published, has blown that cachet out of the water (which I suspect is why it attracts a lot of scorn from already 'been published' writers). This is a good thing. The goal shouldn't merely be to be published, it should be to be read, to be remembered. Being published is just a delivery mechanism. The harsh truth is no one is automatically entitled to make a living as a writer, or a painter, or a musician. These are activities human beings have happily done for entertainment, without recompense, throughout history. It's hardly surprising only a very select few (and often not even the best) have been able to earn enough to make it their sole source of income. As for eBooks being a tech bubble, it’s a fallacy of sorts. A bubble is over-investment based on speculation. Self-publishing requires minimal investment, and the stock market and investors aren't required. There is nothing that can burst, so there is nothing that can be lost. There is only the gradual global acceptance of eBooks as Amazon and others move into more and more territories. This isn't a gold rush, with finite wealth to be attained. This is quite simply an easy way for writers to directly reach a worldwide audience. Not everyone will get rich. But good writers, who keep at it, have a long time to find that niche audience that will support them. EBooks are forever.

Bottom-line: Nobody cares. And twitter and Facebook is so flooded with self-marketers, you need a Xanax and a shot of whiskey just to check your twitter anymore. It's mind boggling .... I think I would rather write my books, buy them myself to make me feel better, and just read them over and over. Ah... the ultimate self-promotion. Plus, that whole "tell your family to go post good reviews to trigger Amazon sales" doesn't work when you write humorous erotica in the south. Old Aunt Bertha would have a heart attack if she knew I’d written a dirty book… Good luck to all other self-published authors, and as this posts suggests and implies... Don't quit your day job.

It Smells of Poo in the Reviewing Pit: "Kindle Publishing To Make $14K+ Per Month & Build Your Own Kindle Empire Without Having To Write One SINGLE Word" by Muhammad N. Sikandar

Let me lower myself into the reviewing pit... Dear Lord, this rope is slippery. Oooh, and it smells of poo down here… I dislike Amazon for its predatory ways (though I have a Kindle and buy old-fashioned books and novellas there: yes, I'm a hypocrite...). In recent years I've acquired a novella reading habit. I think with these shorter works authors can be experimental and still keep the quality very high across the whole piece. It's nice to see what a good author can do with a bit of freedom and the stories are widely available without you having to subscribe to every magazine going. If it weren’t for the Kindle I’d never have the chance to read all those delicious novellas, particularly of the SF kind. I wish Muhammad N. Sikandar well, though I'm not in his target audience and am unlikely to read more of his books. I don’t believe for a minute it’s possible to publish without writing a single word as Sikandar claims. When someone already has a large number of texts already written it’s a different case altogether. Probably Sikandar is filthy rich and is laughing all the way to the bank. On top of that, he’s writing for a very large potential audience, and in a genre that is currently probably the most popular - and therefore the most lucrative - in non-fiction: self-help books and cooking…We all need help once in a while and we also have to eat. What can I say?  Sikandar has the skills to perform all aspects of the task of bringing his books to the customer himself, but at the end of the day he must write!!! I’m also quite flabbergasted he is able to write new books at a speed that others will struggle to match. Alas, I’m not superman, not even wonder-woman. How does he do it? After all is said and done, this is only possible because Amazon made Sikandar's success possible.  But Sikandar is only a tiny outlier. There are enormous numbers of self-published authors on Amazon, and most of them sell pretty much nothing and make pretty much nothing. Successes in self-publishing are tiny compared to successes in traditional publishing. I'm not against self-publishing. I’ve done it myself. But I only managed that by writing lots of words...I think it's a great option for many people and many books. But too much is made of the very, very few successes, and too little is mentioned about the vast majority who don't ever come near to making what a newbie author would through traditional publishing. What I especially like about the Kindle is that it’s democratic. I’ve no longer to be bound by the nepotistic, backscratching and incestuous literary establishment but can go out and find talented authors for themselves. That’s why I bought myself a Kindle in 2009. It strikes me that the market will take over as the gatekeepers - books that the mass market decide are crap won't sell beyond the first few hundred or so, as there are customer reviews in most e-book stores. All hail crowd-sourcing. I've read plenty of dead tree books that may have been edited but should never have seen the light of day. Until the advent of smartphones you couldn't easily get other readers reviews whilst browsing in your local bookstore, so when buying a book by an unfamiliar author you were always taking a chance. And once an author does get established often their publishers will let them publish any crap they like (e.g., Tom Clancy, Lee Child).

SF = Speculative Fiction.