Filler

Beverage: cold Tom Yum soup. Bleagh!

Toast: know when to fold 'em

I was reading a book as a youth one time and got to wondering why there were like three blank pages at the beginning before the real book even started. I figured it was wasteful and frankly I was irritated at all that pointless page-turning.

So I asked my father about it. What's with these extra pages? He said, son every fool knows that all books have a total number of pages divisible by four. This was clearly a mad lie told for some inexplicable reason. Two pages I could understand but four made no sense. "If you don't believe me sport" my father said "why don't you count one yourself and see?" Then he ambled off leaving me staring at a mystery that could only be solved by more fruitless page-turning. I licked my finger and started in.

That takes me to this, or something like it.

This is filler and it's taking up a lot of time lately.

Filler is the publisher of a book adding content to meet some constraint or requirement. Like adding three blank pages to get to four. Except that in some contracts these days the sets comes in groups of eight or even twelve. Yes.

Thornier is content filler. This is commonly caused because you want to keep things together or apart. There is a war between the needs of the book and the cost of the paper. Each small change can save or cost millions of dollars.

But of course we've looked at all of this before and did all we could think of then. Now its done and the task is even harder.

So, I read through competitor's books and try once again to solve the mystery of the fruitless turning pages.

P.s: do not drink cold Tom Yom soup.

Posted with Blogsy