Been meaning to read this for a long time because the premise sounds incredible, but man does the execution suck. This is like the therapy journal of a fantasy nerd/Silicon Valley fanboy desperately trying to reconcile his technophile side with his bibliophile side. "I love e-readers and wish I worked at Google but I'm still a book worm!", he yells as he conspicuously enters the hipster coffee shop with his Powell's totebag.

It's ok, we're all figuring out that e-readers and physical books can co-exist, you don't need to write a whole watered-down Dan Brown mystery about books and Google to convince us.

Where to start. The mystery is silly enough that it could have been great fun but it never really commits. The characters are caricatures that just happen to have the right specific sets of skills the main character needs at any given time. The author worships Google to such a degree he embodied it in the character of a perfect, young, beautiful, sexually available woman so that the protagonist could fuck it. Seriously.

For all that this book tries to examine the conflict between paper books and e-books, it never really says anything about either. Paper books smell nice. Cool. Kindles are great but books never run out of battery. Got it. While Google is mentioned and praised on every other page, Amazon only gets five mentions and only in passing. Kindle is mentioned a few more times but only to describe how shitty his second-hand, busted-battery one is. No commentary is ever made on Amazon itself. The economics of Kindle books and publishing is never acknowledged. Authors getting undercut on royalties is never mentioned. To what degree independent booksellers and Amazon are actually competing is never examined (Mr. Penumbra has outside subsidies for his 24-hour bookstore so any mention of competition with Amazon is neatly swept under the rug). Anything that is actually interesting about this topic is conveniently sidestepped. It's infuriating.

In summary: Poor execution of mystery. No examination of themes. Terrible female characters. Flat characters in general. Lazy ending. Overhyping of today's technology and Google in particular (if data visualisation and OCR were as fast as shown in this book I'd be finished two PhDs by now). No thank you.