Here is the honest version of how any reading rewards program works, so you can decide how much attention to give yours. You earn points for things the program wants you to do more of, which is usually buying, reviewing, or showing up. The points are worth something specific, and that something is almost always less than the number makes it feel like. Find the conversion rate before you find the catalog. If a thousand points gets you four dollars off, then a point is four tenths of a cent, and you should never once change your reading in order to collect one.
Two practical rules. First, points expire, usually on a rolling window from your last activity, so if you are sitting on a balance you have been saving, spend it. Nobody has ever been rewarded for a large unspent balance. Second, redeem in the largest chunk the catalog allows, because the small redemptions are almost always priced worse than the big ones. That is the entire optimization. It takes about four minutes a year.
That is the general advice, and it is good advice, and I gave it because I was asked to give it before I got to the part I actually sat down for, which is our catalog. Ours is not priced in cents. I will explain what it is priced in.
My name is Doug. I founded this. It is going about as well as it is going.
I am dictating from beside the lake, which is where I do everything now, and I want to say plainly at the top that I do not know why so many of you have been arriving lately. I have been told the number and I did not like hearing it. People come in fast, looking at phones, and they ask about their points, and their balance, and their tier, and one young man asked about his streak, and I did not have the heart to tell him that nothing in this building streaks, it all just sits. Wherever it is you meant to go, you did not go there. You went here. I am not going to pretend that is a tragedy. I am going to give you the catalog.
Points here are earned in one way only. You get one point for every book you have finished and then thought about later, unprompted, while doing something else. Doing the dishes counts. Driving counts. Lying awake counts double, but we do not record the doubling anywhere, so it is on the honor system, which means it is on you.
There is no balance to check. You know your number. Everyone does. If you had to look it up it would not be your number.
Current as of this morning. Quantities are what they are. Items are listed in the order I can see them from memory, which is the order they sit on the shelf behind the front desk, left to right.
Not a specific chair. Any of them. You may sit in it as long as you like and nobody will approach you, sell you anything, or ask what brings you in. This is our most redeemed item by a wide margin and I have never once regretted the pricing. Unlimited stock, four chairs.
The chip is not a defect, it is the identifier. You get the mug that is chipped where your thumb wants to be, which we determine by handing you three and watching. Refills are free and unrecorded. In stock, eleven mugs, nine of them chipped correctly.
There is a draft off that window that has won two contests, and the light between about three and four in the afternoon is the best thing this company owns. You sit in it and you do not have to do anything. We ration it at ten minutes because when we did not ration it we had a situation in 2003. One redemption per person per day.
She will look at you for somewhere between four and ninety seconds and then say one title. She does not explain the title. She has been wrong four times in thirty years, and two of those, honestly, were the patron's fault. Availability depends on whether she is at the desk, which depends on nothing anyone has determined.
The Ledger is the large green book with the water stain. Your name goes in the third column, in ink, and it stays there, and nothing is ever done with it. No mailings. No follow up. No one will contact you. That is the entire product and it is the second most popular item we carry.
While you are at the page you will see, near the top of the fourth column, a small pencil drawing of a duck. Every single person asks. I do not know who drew it. I have owned this company since 1997 and I did not draw the duck and I have never met anyone who did. It is not for sale, it is not part of any tier, and I would ask you not to build a theory about it in the parking lot with the others. Two of them have a diagram now.
Leather, gone soft, initials on the back that are not mine. There is one. It has been redeemed nine times and returned nine times, which tells you something about it that I am not able to put better than that.
You take it, you go. The catch, if you want to call it one, is that you do not get to choose which shelf. It is that shelf. Whatever is on it. Randy restocks it out of a child's red wagon on no schedule I have ever worked out, and I have asked, and he reads a note and then says a name I do not know, and then he leaves.
The whole building. Every device in it, which is four devices. Total quiet for one hour, doors closed, sign flipped, and you in it alone with whatever you brought. This is what the points are for. Everything above this line is warm up. If you have a hundred points, and you do, spend them on this.
Listed for completeness. You cannot have it. I looked into whether it could be offered at a very high tier and the answer came back no, from me, after about a month of consideration, sitting right here. Some inventory is not inventory.
I said at the top that a large unspent balance has never rewarded anybody, and I meant it about points, and I mean it about the other thing too. There are people who have read four hundred books and are waiting to feel like a reader. There is no threshold. There is no tier that turns on. If you are looking for the moment it becomes official, this is it, this paragraph, at whatever number you are at right now. Take the chair.
If you came here about a balance you think we are holding, the desk keeps a running list of what has turned up and what nobody has come back for, and that is written up in the lost and found. If you arrived holding an actual card of some kind, that is a different procedure entirely and it is set out in how to redeem a gift card.
Buy a book. New, paper, from a shop, at the price on the back. No points involved. The person who wrote it is a fragile organism who checked a number this morning before they were fully awake and let it set the weather for the whole day, and no rewards program that has ever existed has put one dollar in that person's hand. I built a company that gives out chairs and quiet and I still think that is worth more than most of what is on offer out there, but it is not worth a sale, and I know the difference, and so do you.
That is the catalog. Turn that off now.
Wearily,
Booktrovert #482