News You Can Bruise for 2012 May 18

In the past year I've learned more about Amazon's ASIN product identifiers than... well, probably more than the median person wants to know, but not more than I want to know. One thing I've learned is that the ASIN for a print book is the same as its ISBN, but the ASIN for the Kindle edition of that same book is an Amazon-specific code. And where ISBNs are all numeric, non-ISBN ASINs tend to contain letters. Which means in theory you could have a Kindle book (or other Amazon product) whose product identifier was obscene.

Well, enough chitchat, let's look at some books whose ASINs end in five- or six-letter words! Courtesy of an Amazon site map and a word list:

• Most of these are just silly, but I feel sorry for Web Information Systems Engineering WISE 2007 Workshops and Prayers That Get Answered.
• If you're looking for a book on JQuery, prepare to be disappointed by Horatio Alger's The Young Musician; Or, Fighting His Way
• The only other author I recognized: Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles.
• Not for the squeamish: The Cognitive Electrophysiology of Mind and Brain
• The fourth dimension, for teenage girls.
• What's an asphaltene? Maybe you don't want to know.
• The secret to a good Christian life: regular injections.
• Porno interlude: Excuse me, I ordered the steak!
• There are thousands of ASINs that end in four-letter words, so here's just one: Marked by Moonlight. "She was a werewolf. He was some random dope."