Enterprising or greedy?

Recently, I was talking to someone about the Bücherschränke - public bookcases. She mentioned that dealers now go to these glass cabinets dotted around the town to take the books and sell them. I thought, at the time, that this was enterprising.

However, yesterday, on the way to the gym, I saw a man holding his smartphone up to the book covers and I realised that he wasn't a dealer with a knowledge of books, he was just an ordinary man who had an app like Momox on his phone, who could hold the book under his phone and use the camera function to assess how much Momox would pay for the book.

I sold a few of my old books this way two summers ago. On my computer, I typed in the ISBN number and could then see how much  - if anything - Momox was willing to pay for each book. Once I had over ten euros worth of books, I could then send it to the company free of charge.

However, I somehow felt it was 'cheating', the way the man was doing it. He was using other people's books to make a 'quick buck' (as the Americans would say) and cheating poorer members of the general public of the chance to read interesting books. 

Binge-watch to your heart's content

One good thing about having a very diverse bunch of students in my three evening classes is that they come up with good recommendations.

One such student recommended this site to me: https://primewire.mx/

It's a site where you can watch all the episodes in all the series of your favourite US and UK TV series. 

Just search for the title of the series you want to watch, then click on the relevant result. When the next page opens up, look under the box where you see an image of the series and look for the words "Season 1". Click on the little black triangle pointing downwards and you will see all the series that have been uploaded to the site so far. Click on the season you want and then you will get a whole list of all the episodes on that page. Click on the episode you want to watch, click on the black screen and off you go.

A lot of the episodes are subtitled, so if you are still learning English, you can always use the left-pointing arrow on your keyboard to go back 10 seconds and listen to and read  what was said again. What a wonderful service.

US series I have really enjoyed over the years:

- NCIS

- Law & Order

- Bones

- Castle

- Lucifer (the Devil gets bored in Hell, so opens a night-club in Los Angeles - and helps the police)

Canadian series:

- Murdoch Mysteries

UK series:

- Vera

- Grantchester

- Endeavour

- The Good Karma Hospital (very cheesy, but it's set in southern India [and filmed on Sri Lanka] so it's very sunny)

- The Mallorca Files (filmed on Mallorca, it's another sunny escape from everyday life)

- Death in Paradise (filmed on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, yet another sunny escape from the mundane)

- Father Brown (not to everyone's taste, I know, but I like it)

If I had to choose only one from each country, it would be...

- Law & Order from the US (possibly the best series ever, what with its moral dilemmas)

- Vera (I admire her immensely. She accepts no nonsense from anyone)

- and The Murdoch Mysteries (obviously, as it's the only series from Canada, but I like the way it combines fact with fiction and involves real characters that actually existed).

If I had to choose just one... Vera. I have the hat already.