Word: fried
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hours: 8:30-4 weekends; 9:00-4 midweek; Night Ski Fri./Sat...
...truth universally acknowledged that folks are motivated by desire and ease, rather than self-improvement or showiness, when it comes to the private act of actually turning the pages. Hence, a formula that indicates what percentage of books sold are really read. The Fully Read Index , (FRI) equals the Author Comfort Index (ACI) times the Simple Prose Coefficient...
Hawking, with an ACI of 1 and an SPC of 3, gets an FRI of 3; of every 100 people who bought A Brief History of Time, three finished it. Rushdie (ACI 1 X SPC 2) weighs in at a solid 2%. In the middle range, John le Carre has a fairly high ACI (8), thanks to his 25 years of best-sellerdom, along with a demanding style ameliorated somewhat by the propulsions of suspense (SPC 6). His FRI of 48% means that of the 530,280 copies of The Russia House sold, 254,534.4 consumers finished...
These results are subject to various interpretations. On the one hand, when they can find a respite from the demands and diversions of contemporary life, more people are reading more pap than ever before. On the other, Hawking's FRI rating of 3% amounts to a readership of some 30,000 for A Brief History of Time. Is that number shamefully low or encouragingly high? That probably depends on how it is read...