It is a very specific sort of book that I refer to here: feather-light, just slightly larger than a pocket-sized romance novel of the airport bookstore variety. Design-wise, covers are usually flimsy and garish, but painfully so. Type is often oversized and lazily set; the paper tends to be coarse and cheap, a couple of pounds heavier than newsprint. Generally priced in the $10-$18 range, this genre occupies its very own corner in a literary limbo reserved for weight loss plans, how-to guides, and Salt-Water Aquariums for Dummies (For Dummies, 2002)—information manuals collated, bound, and marketed slapdash for mass market appeal. The production value of these books (which undoubtedly correlates to their profit margins) belies a sense of apathy on the part of publishers desperate to maintain a degree of topical relevance by forcing a painful pas de deux between content and form.