More or less irrelevant.

AUS is 5.5%. Germany is 1.1%. CAN is 0.9%.

UK on the other hand is 14.8%.

As far as I can see, the CAN store has the same rank madness going on as the US store has, while the UK and AUS stores are madness free.

I had a professor who taught European history from the French Revolution to WWI.  The first day of class, he said we only had to remember 5 dates (and only the YEARS). 

1789, 1815, 1848, 1870, and 1914. 

And we'd better know in what section of that timeline events occurred.  It was a great class!

Excellent! As a history graduate this is my favourite era and I like his choice of dates.

What an interesting and wide-ranging discussion this has turned into. Sorry to be jumping in when it's progressed so far already. I just wanted to say something about home-schooling/hone education. I'm always interested to hear people's experience of it. I had to take one of my sons out of school when he was about 12 because he became so anxious about going that it was more or less a phobia, although in fact he didn't see it as a phobia but as a reasonable reaction to an impossible situation. The school authorities were unable to offer any solution so we were on our own.
Anyway, once we got past these initial stages of panic and disbelief, we just got on with it. I am not sure how feasible it would have been if he had been interested in science or engineering or anything practical, but he had always been a voracious reader (and still is) and interested in a kind of philosophical approach to things, i.e. he thinks a lot!. We took part in some group events, including a holiday, with a home education organisation, we wrote plays together for a youth drama group and he also acted in them, and in his later teens he took some exams at a local college. He was writing all the time too. He then went to university and graduated with 1st class honours in English, published a book, won some short film competitions with a group of friends, and now works in communications.
Although I happened to be a qualified history teacher, in this role I was more of a facilitator, searching out places we could visit, books to use, etc. He had to teach himself for a lot of the time as I was the sole earner in the family for some years and had to go to work. He is still quite an anxious person in certain situations but he has good friends and gets on well at work.
In some cases I suggested books for him to read (at last she gets to the point!) and in others he found them himself. I remember him doing a project on the works of Orwell for one of his exams, for instance, though generally he liked fantasy and grew up waiting for the next Harry Potter book. He and some friends run a book club now and I'm always surprised by their random choices of reading.

That's a nice success story, Cecilia.   

Thanks for these lovely comments. I am not generally an advocate of home schooling, and my son himself used to speculate about the education system and thought a network of smaller schools closer to home might work better tban the fewer, larger schools we have here..Of course then you get into the argument about economies of scale, ranges of subjects offered etc, though I suppose with online learning these might not loom so large. Certainly there must have been other schools where he might have settled down, but in Edinburgh it can be very hard to get into a school outside your designated area, particularly if it's a good / popular one. For balance I should say that my older son went right through the official school system and did at least as well as his brother though in a different field (he works in high performance computing in a university).

I'm not saying 6x9 books didn't exist before self-publishing; I'm just saying paperbacks that size I more closely associate with self-published books.

I would guess that most of the fiction books I have in paperback are mass market paperback size, except for ones that were self-published or POD which tend mostly to be 6x9.

Non-fiction paperbacks that I have seem to vary in size more widely.  Ditto for hardcovers.

I'm not actually sure how many books I own.  I started cataloging them years ago but never finished.  I also tried to catalog books as I read them, but then that got to be too much like work so I would not read the last page or paragraph of books so that technically I didn't finish them so that I didn't have to get the journal out and write down what book I finished reading.  And then I stopped doing that too and just read the book without recording when I finished it.