It's been mentioned that the way Amazon is designed gets you to focus on them at the expense of other retailers, and I'm going to expand that observation to note that the same is true of Amazon's international operations--I can't look up my Amazon UK numbers, so I just don't give them much thought.

Until I was entering their payment into my checking software and realized that it was fully 50% of what Amazon US is paying me.

It turns out that, at the moment, Trang is in the top 10 of Amazon UK's free first contact books!

This pleases me very much, because in my opinion, British media tends to be very well-written. Of course there are many great American writers, but I've seen British trashy celebrity gossip crafted with a care that you would just never see here for that kind of story. I think we are much more of the mentality that there's high literature and then there's the everyday stuff that just needs to be simple and clear (really simple and really clear--we make zero assumptions about the literacy of our audience), while the British take more of the attitude that everything should be written as well as possible regardless of purpose. I really noticed that when I was collecting reviews for Serenity--American reviewers almost never noted that the movie was well-written, because that would be regarded as kind of off-putting ("this movie is hard, and you will not understand it"), while British reviewers almost always threw in a paragraph about how marvelous (and enjoyable!) the use of language was.