Dr. Boli has famously made predictions about the future that have since come to pass exactly as he predicted. He is, however, candid enough to admit that not everything he predicts comes to pass. Sometimes, through no fault of his own, the world simply fails to see the inevitability of the course he has planned for it, and runs merrily off on a different track.

It seems a shame to waste a good prediction just because events have run their own course without it. One of Dr. Boli’s most reasonable and most certain predictions had to do with electronic books. More than a decade ago, he predicted that ebooks would become an important part of the publishing market only when the reading hardware had become so cheap that it was disposable. He envisioned a marketplace in which electronic versions of books were sold as dedicated units, book and reader, at roughly the same price as printed books.

Now, this was a very reasonable prediction. Today, one can walk into any store that carries electronics and walk out with an Android tablet for less than $50—about the cost of two hardcover books. A $50 tablet is anemic for browsing the Web and impossible for processor-hungry games, but as an ebook reader it works just fine. (Dr. Boli has read many books on just such a beast.) And some of the $50 cost comes from components that could be cut out in a dedicated reader—sound, capacitive touch screen, color display, card reader, and most of the internal flash memory, just to name a few. So the idea of technology improving to the point where an electronic reader cost no more to manufacture than a printed book was not at all outlandish; indeed, it seems to be vindicated by the event.

And what could be more plausible than to suppose that readers, accustomed to thinking of a book as a physical object that one owned, would continue to think that way? Ebooks would become popular when they no longer required a profound change in readers’ habits—when, in other words, it was not necessary to make buyers swallow an entirely new concept of “book.”

No matter how Dr. Boli looks at the question, he still comes to the same conclusion. Ebooks would not be popular until they could be bought in the same way books have always been bought since ancient times—as physical objects, in stores that specialize in books. If, therefore, history has taken a different course, it is history, not Dr. Boli’s prediction, that must be blamed for the discrepancy.

The number of novels published every year is so great that Dr. Boli cannot read most of them. Indeed, he often excuses himself from reading twenty-first-century fiction by saying that he has not caught up with the nineteenth century yet, which is strictly true.

Nevertheless, he will occasionally read a current novel. How, you may ask, does he decide whether a current novel is worth his time?

It may surprise you to hear that Dr. Boli can tell by the first three words of the book whether he will enjoy the rest of the novel. It is a very simple test: Are the first three words a character’s first and last name followed by a verb? If so, Dr. Boli will set the book aside unread.

Doubtless you will leap up to tell him how many great and inspiring works of fiction he has missed by applying this completely arbitrary standard. Probably you, the reader from whose ears cartoon jets of steam are erupting right now, have written a novel, perfect in every detail, whose first three words are “Zachary Mulligan turned,” and they are the only three words with which the story could possibly begin.

Dr. Boli will not contradict anyone who tells him that he has missed a number of very good books by applying his first-three-words test. He will only say that he has been spared an enormous number of very, very bad ones. When time for reading is limited, one must find a way of apportioning it, and Dr. Boli has found one that works well for him.