Good evening,
Tonight’s forecast calls for a night of patchy fog, with a low overnight temperature of sixty-eight.
Stage Sixteen of the Tour de France is over, and in that stage Contador and Schleck declared a temporary truce, and Armstrong couldn’t find the stage win for which he was hoping.
Meanwhile, there’s no relief from doping allegations, as
Alessandro Petacchi (Lampre-Farnese Vini) has been issued with formal notification that he is under investigation as part of a widespread inquiry into doping practices being carried out in Italy by Padova-based prosecutor Benedetto Roberti. According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, the current wearer of the green jersey was issued with the notification that he has been placed under investigation for “the use of forbidden substances and practices” before the start of this year’s Tour de France.
Amazon reports that it sold more e-books than hardcovers in the second quarter:
…selling 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the course of the second quarter. The rate is accelerating: For the past month, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers, and it sold three times as many e-books in the first six months of this year as it did in the first half of 2009.
Amazon’s Kindle bookstore now offers more than 630,000 books, Amazon says, plus 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright titles.
That’s merely hardcovers, rather than all print books, but it’s still impressive. A more skeptical assessment of Amazon’s announcement is available at CNET Reviews.
I don’t have a Kindle, but I have the Kindle app for my phone, and one for my desktop, and it’s an impressive service. (The two locations sync with each other, so what downloads to one location is available to be read at either location (with no additional charge for the synchronized copy).
I’ll end the day with Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train: