dave said:
>   What on earth is one fifth of a library?

first and foremost, it means porta-potties instead of rest-rooms.

other than that, it means we have all the books, but just up
through page 18 with each one, because statistics tell us that
that's only how far most people read in a book that they buy...

>   Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
>   http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm

many of you might know dan poynter, who collected all these
statistics from various places, as the guru of self-publishing...

michael, once you get past the frustration of poynter's statistics,
i'm positive you will find his web-page to be utterly fascinating...

here are a few samples, on publishers:
>   18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design
>   to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design.
>   Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000.
...
>   24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover.
>   25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process.
>   26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book.

really, michael, i look forward to a ton of new posts from you
based on the motivation you'll get from all of these statistics...       :+)

-bowerbird

p.s.  dave, actually it just means that i started out with 4,000
out of the (roughly) 20,000 e-texts in the p.g. library, so 1/5.
for some reason (i'm not sure why), model-builders have always
been fond of the 1/5 scale.  it's big enough to be "realistic", yet
still small enough to be a "model".  it makes things very cute, too.