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As we reported during Coffee Week in April, coffee aficionados pay top dollar for single-origin roasts.

The professional prospectors working for specialty coffee companies will travel far and wide, Marco Polo-style, to discover that next champion bean.

But to the farmers who hope to be that next great discovery, the emergence of this new coffee aristocracy is less Marco Polo, more Cinderella: How do you get your coffee bean to the ball?

Consider this tale of impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers whose beans once sold for rock bottom prices:

The yellowed highlands around the city of Jimma in Ethiopia are where coffee was discovered in the 8th century. But by the end of the 20th century its reputation had become as shaky as a car ride on its mountain roads.

Carl Cervone, a coffee agronomist for the New York-based non-profit organization Technoserve, says most of the coffee here is labeled Jimma 5, because it has all five major defects that come from poor farming.

"The types of defects that you have include overripe beans, which are called foxies, and under-ripe beans, which are called quakers," says Cervone. There are also cracked beans, and beans chewed by insects.

"But the worst of them all which is called a stinker, which means that you've basically left a bean fermenting for much longer than you should and it becomes rotten and its basically like putting a rotten egg in an omelet it kind of ruins the entire cup," he says.

Jimma 5 was so bad it became the trade term for bad coffee in Ethiopia, according to Cervone.

And yet ask one of the farmers here, Haleuya Habagaro, she'll tell you her coffee isn't just not bad, it's exquisite.

"When I roast the coffee people come to ask where that strong fruity smell is coming from," says Habagaro. "It's like when you hold an orange."

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The age of the traditional landline telephone is in rapid decline, as NPR's Dan Bobkoff reports on today's All Things Considered.

"For nearly a century, the government has promoted universal access: the idea that anyone should be able to get a reliable home phone connection at a reasonable cost," Dan says. "But phone customers have been ditching traditional phone service. Some now get their home phone from the cable company. Others have gone completely wireless. Verizon has seen a 67 percent drop in the number of customers using copper landlines since 2000."

That statistic prompted us to look at how telephone use has changed around the world. The International Telecommunications Union maintains data about this. It's a U.N. body based in Geneva that, among other things, allocates global radio spectrum and satellite orbits.

Here's a snapshot of the data. Please note the numbers are regional, not country-based, so the figures for the Americas include both North and South America. The CIS refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet Union. (The * at 2012 and 2013 denotes estimates).

The death toll is climbing after two earthquakes that struck western China early Monday.

More than 70 people are dead and at last 400 others are injured, the BBC says. According to The Associated Press, China's state media say the death toll stands at 75.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the first temblor registered a strong 5.9 magnitude. It struck around 7:45 a.m., local time (Monday evening in the eastern U.S.). The second quake, with a magnitude of 5.6, was felt about an hour later.

The BBC adds that "at least 5,600 houses in the province's Zhangxian county are seriously damaged and 380 have collapsed, while some areas suffered from power cuts or mobile communications being disrupted, the earthquake administration added." The area is about 770 miles west of Beijing in Gansu province.

China's Global Times writes that "days of downpours and a series of aftershocks have added difficulties to rescue efforts. ... Aftershocks and minor landslides with falling rocks were seen in the mountainous region following the quake."

In the old days, when a book came out it just had to compete with other books. But these days a book has to compete not only with other books, but also with blog posts and tweets and tumblrs and everything else in written form. There's only so much that readers feel like reading, and as a result, every year many good books get lost under a tide of prose. How many times does a writer go to a party and someone asks, "When is your book coming out?" And the answer is, "Uh, six months ago." And then there's an awkward, horrible silence, and the person asking the question mutters something and rushes off to refresh his drink.

The publication of every good book should ideally be met with a triumphal, trumpet fanfare. But that doesn't always happen. I looked back over many of the books that have been published this year and selected five that deserve a little more fanfare.