In my experience, United Airlines is shit, don't care if they're shit, will tell you point blank you shouldn't expect anything but shit, and would you like some more shit?
Under nominal and expected driving conditions...
And that's where everything goes wrong. You know, under "normal and expected conditions" there isn't any dogshit on the sidewalk, but guess what?
I'm aware that not every situation is deal... but a driver who's actually otherwise competent should be able to recognize those situations the instant that they arise..
Unless of course they're busy with whatever else they do under "normal and expected conditions." Switching attention takes time---there's a reason why sprinters are not chatting on the phone right up until they hear the starting gun.
The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.
No, it's not. People accepted physical book prices because they had no way to print them as nicely (yes, that does include the hard/soft-cover, dust-jacket, as well as actual binding, however shitty the glue-binding of current books), and they were willing to attribute some costs to transportation, shelf-stocking/presence, staff in the stores, and so forth. That was made books of value to your average consumer. E-books take that *all* away. The only thing left is a piddly bandwidth cost, and hard to quantify-or-appreciate, mysterious marketing/administration/editing costs. Whether that was actually the bulk of the cost or not doesn't matter---the price of actually printing a book is not the important part here, it's the perception of the price of a printed book. A physical object still seems inherently more valuable than a license to read a book on a device you have to buy separately.
Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.
*Correction, 5:20 p.m.: Some physicians have been successfully treating patients for C. difficile with ground-up, filtered fecal material inserted into the stomach with a tube, not via an enema.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.