I Am Smarter Than Sherlock Holmes

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the new show Sherlock on Masterpiece. It's Sherlock Holmes in modern times, and is a really good show.

However, in the second episode, The Blind Banker, I realized that for one moment, one brief shining moment, I was smarter than Sherlock Holmes.

He was trying to break a smuggling code that involved books. The first part of the cipher tells you which page of the book, the second part tells you which word on that page. He was trying to find a book two victims both had. (Conveniently, they both had the same editions.) But none of the books they had in common were used for the code; "add" and "the" are hardly death threats.

So Sherlock tries to think of books that everyone would have in their house, and pulls down such items as the Bible and the dictionary.

I immediately said "No! Not everyone's going to have the same editions of those! Sherlock, how could you not know that?!"

Luckily for Sherlock, they didn't have death threats on the "right" page either. That could have ended horribly.

And now for a random(-ish) digital tie-in:

With e-readers and the elimination of mundane functions like "page numbers," will book codes go the way of the scroll? After all, imagine how complicated a cipher you'd need on an e-reader:

1. the book (same edition!)
2. the reader
3. the program to translate your DRM-book to your non-matching reader - hey, smugglers are criminals already
4. the font size
5. the window size
6. the word - finally!

After all, nobody would use print books. They're too simple. Gosh.

End tongue-in-cheek.