>>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?"
I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local branch even has a Makerspace with 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, and other misc tools.
They are. Every single public resource is seen as a potential market opportunity being squandered away, or as competition other players do not want to see in play.
Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money.
If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
Sadly many people seem to think they are really showing the folks up there by retreating from any form of self-education once they are out of school. The opposite couldn't be more true.
The criticisms were telling though, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and many others claimed he had a rich mans agenda, seeking fame rather than improvement, paying for buildings and not books, maintaining segregation rather than open access, paying for bricks was "cheaper" than paying taxes, etc.
Not undercutting the role of libraries, just pointing out that philanthropy from the wealthy can be a mixed bag of indirect control and agenda pushing at times, wrapped up in tidy looking tax avoidance multi layered "charity" arrangements.
It's always fair to criticize, but it's also very plausible that Carnegie paid for buildings instead of books so that his charity would improve things for the longer term.
Also, as long as the outcomes are good, I personally don't care one iota whether a person is doing them for the wrong reasons.
Then he isn't rich, powerful and an unethical asshole.
People can be rich and try to do the right thing even if there seems to be no direct economic incentive to do so — and I applaud them if they do realize that money alone doesn't create a meaningful life. Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
> Yet I don't need to wonder whether a normal tax rate on billionaires would do even more for the libraries.
I agree that tax rates should be higher, but I have absolutely no faith that politicians will do a better job stewarding money toward good causes than a billionaire who cares about them (and/or wants to brag about their philanthropy for clout)
Reducing waste is a great option! I'm not of the opinion that raising taxes is some objectively correct solution or anything, my personal viewpoint is just that taxing more across the board to invest in infrastructure and long-term economic strengths is the way to go.
>If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
This smells like a half-baked conspiracy theory. It's not like the overwhelming majority of people want to get smarter in their free time. I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the world, but in American and all (individual) European cultures, most people don't pursue self-education. I would not be surprised if this applies to most other cultures as well
You might say that's how a lot of people on this website got their knowledge, but this website is statistically insignificant compared to the world population. Plus, it's not like every single member here pursues self-education. I'm willing to wager most people come on here just to be entertained
I didn't say rich, powerful and unethical people actively need to work against public libraries. They just don't need to support them, which is enough, given the fact that they often land in or near places of political power.
Just don't increase the funding while inflation increases and you're basically cutting funding. And then when things eventually start to look like shit tear them down. And these are not even things a rich, powerful and unethical person needs to do willingly or on purpose. It is just a thing that happens, because it isn't high on the priority list. And it isn't high on the priority list because it doesn't make them direct money.
Now if you're a politician that profits from your constituents being not too critical why should you actively support a thing that has the potential to make them more critical? Not that you actively have to be against it, it just isn't that high on your list of priorities..
This is how incentives work. And while there are people who will support measures which won't directly profit them short term, it seems to me they are an endangered species, at least in the US.
Public libraries are largely funded/supported locally. In my town, that mostly means out of a vote at town meeting, volunteer organizations, and an annual book sale. There is occasionally local political drama but it's mostly around people who earn some nominal salary that wouldn't persuade a lot of people on this site to get out of bed in the morning.
> I'm willing to wager most people come on here just to be entertained
To add to the conspiracy, endless entertainment is another way that the rich and powerful want to keep the population complacent. Add some unsubtle propaganda about how great and diverse the US is, too.
That said, the propaganda isn't as straightforward as it used to be, and foreign propaganda is sprinkled in as well with e.g. China funding and adding their section to big blockbuster films.
>It's not surprising that this push comes amid the understanding that the less educated one is, the more likely they are to vote R [2].
I saw the article, and it does indeed show this, however, I'm not sold that education is the only criterion when it comes to how someone votes... or does anything else, for that matter
It's far too simple of a cause-and-effect type of deal for this to be the only factor, or even, for this to be a factor at all, perhaps. The world is a bit more complex than chucking everything up to how someone does something based solely on their administered level of institutional education
I've been just a tiny bit more skeptical of all of these cause-and-effect type stories ever since I read Nassim Taleb
> however, I'm not sold that education is the only criterion when it comes to how someone votes... or does anything else, for that matter
It isn't, however if your education or world view is superficial, you're more susceptible to right-wing talking points, like a broad spectrum "fear of ones that are different to you". But when you're more educated, more worldly, less blinkered you won't be as afraid of the other and less susceptible to a politician that They are after your jobs and benefits, and more aware that the politicians and rich people are trying to keep you down for their own gains.
Sure, and superficially what you're saying does make sense... except that it's using deductive reasoning. There are plenty of cases where people with academic credentials vote for the same people you say dumb people do. Dumb people, of course, are people who have no academic credentials, because they're only for very smart people
I recommend giving Who Voted for Hitler? by Richard F. Hamilton a read. The world is infinitely much more complex than our story-making minds would have us believe
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You speak the truth.
We're experiencing this very same thing now in Alabama. Or one could simply look at Florida. Things aren't getting better here. The current GOP leadership is trying their best to be as regressive as possible.
I feel like I am doing my son an incredible disservice by raising him in Alabama, but my wife refuses to leave while her mother is still living here.
Show him some alternatives. I grew up in a backward place too.
The single most valuable thing I learned is what is really possible to do. I got to see that because I ended up helping people of means who took me aside and showed me a look outside the place I was living.
For many, and this is true of my peer group, just knowing what is possible really mattered.
Of course I left town, found work and married someone I thought highly of and got to work building a better life.
I plan on showing him alternatives so he doesn't have to learn about them they way that I did.
I moved out of my mother's home when I was 16 and I managed to graduate high school. But I left town two days after graduation and I've only been back three times in 24 years.
Had I not left Alabama, and the US, I would have likely ended up just as bigoted and close minded as most of my family. The ten years I spent outside of the US allowed me to learn a completely different perspective and finally made me realize that my mother and my other family were wrong about so many things.
My boy just turned five a few weeks ago and he's already travelled more than I did by the time I turned 21.
Mind sharing where you moved and how that prevented you from going to the road, from as you say: "just as bigoted and close minded as most of my family.", to whatever you became afterward? Do you think had you moved to another place in the US, a similar change would not have occurred, or did it have to be outside the US?
I moved to the Caribbean for 10 years. Then on to SF and later PDX. I also spent about 6 months in both NYC and Chicago in between SF and PDX. Living in the Caribbean introduced me to so many different cultures.
I ran a bar before I became a carpenter. My neighbors around my bar included people from India, Senegal, all over Europe, and Japan. I become close friends with a much older couple from Senegal and also an Indian family. They welcomed me into their homes and fed me and taught me about their music and food and such.
I likely would not have had those experiences if I remained on the mainland.
"Education", as you have used it, is a measure of collegiate accomplishment, not of merited learned-ness.
It correlates more with socio-economic class.
The same argument can easily be made about Democrats and their inability to repair trivial household items, or empathize with those outside of their privileged groups.
You just pick a characteristic and then label it "good" measure of [x]. Ironically the same thought process is too blame for "telling too many people to goto college"
The lack of self-agency, accountability, and ability to empathize on the left is astounding.
While there are a few fringe pockets where GOP influence isn't helping anyone, by and large, the "conspiracy theorists" and MAGA folks are attacking major news outlets, scientific journals, etc. strictly because they have been corrupted and influenced by highly partisan partnerships from the left, to bend narratives or outright lie about controversial issues and current events in their favor.
When citizen journalists on X (and other places) are putting corporate media to shame because they're willing to faithfully report what the corporates aren't, that's a clear sign there's something amiss. Breaking free of this one-sided media conglomerate is essential for critical thinking, because journalists have no place in thinking for people, which is unfortunately true on all sides, in practice.
Worse, corporate media sources use their powerful positions not just as a beacon of authority, but as a way to enforce false narratives through their close partnerships with their preferred political partners, who are working to manipulate those narratives in their favor for political gain, like winning elections at nearly any cost. Additionally, shaming and declaring citizen & independent journalists as "misinformants" for questioning mainstream narratives that have been identified as patently false/twisted, either by lying or by omission, evidenced by whistleblowers calling out these issues in interviews with independent sources, knowing their stories won't be edited for political purposes.
Similarly on X, now that it isn't captured by a political side that openly believes censorship is acceptable to elevate their own preferred narratives, information can flow freely and users on X can think for themselves (scary, I know... imagine if YOU could think freely and post your own convictions! How will humanity survive?). Since the previous "community guidelines" enforcers at Twitter have been fired, faithful counter-reporting is no longer being policed (the "now" true Hunter Biden report comes to mind conveniently after the 2020 election was over). Now Conservatives can have an equal and prominent voice there, given that Twitter/X has always been a premier source of real-time news and reporting.
If something cannot be questioned, speculating on the motives around it is essential. The 20th century saw too many tyrants dictating the flow of information for us to conveniently forget its devastating impacts on their respective societies. Not a single politician, media outlet, scientist, or "expert" is above being questioned, for any reason whatsoever. It is the only path to healthy, inclusive dialogue.
Ah yes, just last week me and my fellow billionaires at our secret biannual conference in Geneva were discussing how we can prevent people from reading books at the library. See, people reading is a threat to our power, one which we take very seriously. It is not going to be easy, especially seeing how many of us have donated millions of dollars to libraries and a few even have wings of libraries named after us, but the threat is too severe now, drastic measures must be taken.
Now seeing how people are on to our plot, the urgency is clear. I am proposing that over the next few decades we work secretly behind the scenes to gradually reduce funding for various local libraries which have seen visitors decline since the rise of the Internet.
> Well a library is a place where a population can spend the day getting smarter while not spending money.
If you're rich, powerful and an unethical asshole those are two things you definitely do not want.
This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
The assault on public institutions like libraries comes from 2 places:
1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about.
Or
2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
> > [Rich & powerful assholes often maintain their status by unethical means.]
> This is conspiracy level thinking.
The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing (latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists, reportedly a very conservative lower bound), and who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?
I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious.
I am of course not denying the existence of nice rich people. Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth. In fact, I fully expect to find many more assholes among super-rich people than I would among the general population. (But I'm not sure either: the strife we find among some of the poorest people also tend to generate assholes…)
I think "that" = "the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
>Though I'm afraid they tend to be selected out of ludicrous wealth.
The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries. Whether or not he was simply an outlier, I think that’s an important thing to point out.
Further, some data suggests that as much as 5% of the general population are narcissists. So collectively, your point seems to be that rich people are pretty much like the rest of us, just with more money.
I said "tend to". A tendency does not make an absolute and complete genocide. I also said "I'm afraid", which is supposed to convey some level of uncertainty. Carnegie's donation doesn't invalidate my point, even if he wasn't an outlier.
> The irony is that one of the most ludicrously wealthy people in history was also probably the single largest contributor to public libraries.
Where you see irony, I see expected statistics: the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more.
And I will add that one incentive for rich people to donate is their public image. And in many cases their "donations" are largely neutered by tax cuts or by increasing the return on some of their other investments (basically their donations causing other of their investments to increase their returns). Donations by rich people aren't always genuinely generous.
What evidence would it take to change your mind? Because it seems like you'll rationalize any outcome to fit your mental model.
If the wealthy don't fund something, it's because they're narcissists. If they do, it's because of statistics. At the same time, you ignore the statistics about narcissism.
> If the wealthy don't fund something, it's because they're narcissists. If they do, it's because of statistics.
I said no such strawman, and it's not my main point anyway.
My main point is: the idea that rich & powerful people will generally do what it takes to stay rich & powerful is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense. The idea that a sizeable proportion of them will resort to unethical (even lethal) means to do so is not conspiracy thinking, it's common sense.
That's it, and I don't think Mr Carnegie here provides any significant evidence to the contrary. I mean, the same guy reportedly had strikers shot and killed, didn't he? It's hard to believe such a guy donated large amounts of money out of the goodness of his heart.
You did say they want to remain high status, likely due to their over indexing in narcissism. Even if that’s not your main point, the logical leap that we seem to disagree on is that promoting illiteracy is the means to that end. Carnegie does provide evidence against that, as does all the libraries and educational buildings that are named for wealthy donors.
There’s a philosophical argument that all altruism is actually selfish in nature, so I don’t think your premise holds that the wealthy are unique in this regard. What you seem to be saying is that they are complicated just the same as everyone else, just with more resources. If your only point is that wealthy people are status-minded, I don't disagree. I disagree that they are uniquely status-minded. As William Storr's work attests, we are all status-driven apes, whether wealthy or not.
You also didn’t answer the question about what it would take to change your mind, which is usually indicative of a dogmatic, rather than reasoned, position.
>The prevalence of assholes is a documented thing...latest numbers I've heard was over 6% of clinical narcissists...who would ever be surprised that high-status people like being high-status?...the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold...it's just obvious."
Feel free to clarify, but to me, this reads as, "Rich people, being narcissists, will try to maintain their high status by keeping the education level of the general populace low."
It also reads as a narrative talking point without good evidence to support it. I.e., "I can't prove it, I just know it's true."
Wrong reading. I never intended to make a generalisation out of 6% or even triple that amount. I just wanted to establish that rich assholes are a thing.
You seem to imply they are a higher rate of rich
assholes, no? The most cited research on this (Piff et al.) is highly flawed IMO and hasn’t been able to be replicated.
Or is your point that people are assholes in general? If the latter, I’m failing to see how that gets connected to rich people actively suppressing education, especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
> You seem to imply they are a higher rate of rich assholes, no?
It seems likely. But that's a detail, because I believe the more important effect is the contempt higher-class people can have towards lower-class people. Some of it may even come from cognitive dissonance. See, barring a few exceptions, one does not get rich just by working. One also has to exploit other people, to spoil them of a fraction of their added value. The richer you are the truer this gets, and then you have to find some way to look at yourself in the mirror despite that.
> actively suppressing education
I don't recall saying that. My exact words were: "I don't know about libraries specifically, but the idea that rich assholes would like to keep the education level of the general population below a threatening threshold is not conspiracy thinking to me, it's just obvious."
> especially when, as you say, they are the most likely to donate money to those causes.
I didn't say that either. My exact words were: "the largest contributor to pretty much anything has to be ludicrously rich. Because the only way to give that much, is to own even more."
You certainly did say those things. They are quoted from your posts, but abbreviated to be less verbose and wandering. I used ellipses to show where words were cut, and I think you understand this so you seem to just be difficult/obtuse out of a desire to argue.
To be generous, you said they are the "largest contributors" which I agree is different than being "most likely." But the research does show they are more likely, possibly because they are in a position to do so. I think that's what connects to your point.
Just as a counterpoint to your late-stage capitalism-esque viewpoint, wealthy are also shown to over index in conscientiousness in some studies. This is a personality trait that relates to persistence which is an alternate explanation for goal-attainment (ie wealth).
> Just as a counterpoint to your late-stage capitalism-esque viewpoint, wealthy are also shown to over index in conscientiousness in some studies.
I fail to see how this is a counter point. Sure, conscientiousness, and I would add work ethics certainly explain some inequality. But even if they explained most of it (exploiting people does require work, and I'd expect the more conscientious capitalists are better at it), they would still come far, far short of morally justifying the level of inequality we observe today.
No billionaire ever deserved to be that wealthy.
Now we can discuss incentives, and I can accept that a good system may need to allow some people to accumulate undeserved wealth. Still, I will note that the mere existence of billionaires is a threat to democracy. (Or a blocker: our representative governments aren't very democratic to begin with, and we have studies showing that when billionaires and the people disagree over a piece of legislation the billionaires win most of the time.)
My current opinion on this is that putting a hard cap on individual wealth is a good thing. Furthermore, I think this hard cap should be well under $1B, almost certainly below $100M.
Well, that's probably because you are constantly arguing different points that aren't necessarily germane to the discussion. Remember, this was about your point that wealthy people build their wealth by suppressing education in the general populace. So this is a counter-point in that it is possible to build wealth by conscientious behavior instead. There is some research on the latter, but really only conjecture and false narratives on the former.
Wealth inequality and the state of democracy are digressions from that point. I don't think I made any statements about what level of wealth inequality is healthy for the stability of a society, let alone a moral argument for it, nor did I make any claims about democracy. Again, this just comes across as you having an axe to grind, and you'll shoehorn in talking points without addressing the central claim.
> This is conspiracy level thinking. Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
Of course not. They're scheming about how to monetize education, knowledge, and research.
> 1) Stop wasting my tax dollars on stuff I don't use or care about. Or 2) I bet there is an untapped commercial market that can be built, and people will love my solution more than public libraries.
(2) Gets a lot easier if you first advocate for (1) to make the public libraries worse.
> Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
They dont sit around scheming, they work, walk around doing it in action.
Company executives keep adding ingredients to processed food to make them addictive knowing it’ll hurt health outcomes and lead to more death.
Company executives continue to sell medicine that they sell for $20 or $10 in Europe or India, but charge americans $5000 or higher for the same medicine in the same package.
They shut down any research paper that outs them, by suppressing the findings, like Facebook or Junk food companies do whenever a research is conducted on their products.
We should celebrate our pioneers and innovators, but we shouldn’t ignore it blindly when MBA execs and Beancounters actively sabotage and hurt their own customers and the masses. Businesses are awesome, but it shouldnt be used to give a no questions asked green flag to anyone who runs businesses.
There are people actively lobbying for policies that lead to more american deaths, bankruptcies, families breaking into shambles, and the government watching from the sidelines and even sometimes helping to make it all happen.
Yes, there are people who do want to subdue the masses and keep them dumb, just as long as it helps them buy 1 more yacht or few more 0s in their bank balance.
I say it as a free market capitalist who is ardently anti-communist.
> Nobody wealthy is sitting around scheming how to keep the proles dumb and subdued.
There are corporate divisions doing A/B tests, etc. to find out what works for the lowest common denominator, and how to profit more from someone's ignorance. Many people here are directly involved in making it happen.
OverDrive (and Libby) were acquired by KKR, the behemoth PE firm responsible for bankrupting Toys R Us. KKR also acquired one of the Big Five publishing houses last year. I'm worried about public library funds being squeezed by an extractive PE playbook.
I wonder what kind of negotiating power a regional library has in that situation. Do state library agencies have more leverage than regional libraries? Do large states like California have more leverage in negotiating digital licenses than smaller states? Would a national library system have even more leverage? I'll ask a librarian tomorrow and report back.
OverDrive is a strong player but they’re still a commodity. Publishers and libraries can use other lending platforms if and when they emerge as stronger competitors. This article serves as a good overview: https://openeducationalberta.ca/ciicm/chapter/public-library...
They can afford to educate their own line and hoard resources across generations doing so. They can fail as many times as it takes before they finally succeed because of this. They throw the bodies of the world at their problems until they are solved, which necessitates an uneducated populace that doesn't realize they're chattel and canon fodder to this purpose. A populace that fear collective power, that fears community beyond immediate family, that shies away from actions that would better the world in favor of actions that are less risky personally.
Elites are always worried about the labor crisis - “nobody wants to work”. Usually this is about blue collar work, and their desire to underpay and overwork service/laborers.
Globally, this class of people definitely wants to reduce literacy to keep a stream of manual labor inflowing.
The number of vastly unequal societies throughout history who have banned the lower classes from learning how to read, or from any kind of education at all - beyond whatever narrow training will make them better perform their specific duties for those on top.
...and not just historically. Some societies where significant minority groups are banned from getting an education, in order to further perpetuate their marginalisation, still exist today.
The response to your comment thread here is some pretty high flying conspiracies. The thought that those in power would try and make the country illiterate is straight up ridiculous. That would completely undermine the competitiveness of the country AND the time line to get any benefit for the "elites or whomever is behind it" would be significantly long.
Now if you are talking about a country like India - sure I could see Modi doing that. In that case it would be more about restricting growth and investment into education then dismantling an economy built on knowledge.
I don't think I said anything about making people illiterate.
Undermining literacy means so they are not as literate as they could be to improve their lives.
For example, there are more than a few studies on literacy and education levels of the political spectrum for better and worse.
India is a different world. The crime against humanity that is the caste system all but forbade 1-3% of the population to be permitted to learn how to read. 95-98% of Indians were not permitted to learn how to read, and had to rely on the interpretations of the less populous castes.
Ironically it is a minority that largely broke this logjam and helped push literacy for the many forward.
I'll gladly take the downvotes for speaking the truth about caste being a divider between people and society.
Hence book bans and torching, although it's backfiring because they're being too general to try and avoid coming across as too totalitarian, so things like bibles are being banned too. Whoops.
The advocates of "whole-language" learning as against "phonics" seem to do a fair job of limiting or undermining literacy. Yet how it benefits them I don't see. And what is the reference of "it" in the last sentence? Literacy, or limited or undermined literacy?
In contrast, public libraries around the Philly area are essentially dead. Town libraries are so underfunded that their mortar presences are open only until 7 PM M-Th, close at 5 F & Sa, and are closed Sundays. They have greatly reduced their paper book holdings and now rely almost entirely on ebooks, which number fewer than 2000, and interlibrary loans of any kind do not exist.
In contrast, public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.
In my over 60 years, I've never lived anywhere so illiterate as Philly.
> public libraries in Michigan are thriving (another place I know well). I have no idea why the difference is so stark.
I can't speak for Philly, but Michiganders have a long long-standing community tradition of fighting to defend our public libraries from an onslaught of various attacks. And while the quality of the library system can vary (based on location and local funding authority), Michiganders generally have majority support for public libraries as an institution, and pass successful votes for them regularly.
(historic Library voting records)
https://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/-/media/Project/W... (be careful reading this, not every red/failing vote is bad -- for example, May 2023's red line is a success for that public library, that something bad did not pass)
Are you implying the OP was over-sampling on wealthier Michigan neighborhoods? Because I read their quote as applying to Michigan as a whole, and there are certainly parts of Michigan that are poor enough to have strained local taxes.
Not at all. I literally mean that libraries are funded by communities (i.e. private groups, towns, counties, states), and some communities chose to fund them lavishly and some not to fund them at all.
Where in Michigan? I regularly visit libraries in Ann Arbor, and Whitmore Lake. Both have libraries that are a wonderful resource for the community, but the difference in funding is obvious.
This! I'm from Oregon but live in Thailand, where there are ZERO libraries. My absolute favorite thing about going home is just maxxing out my library card and seeing how much I can get through before heading home (I can do ebooks and audiobooks while abroad with Libby but I'm one of those obnoxious people that always prefers physical)
This is an exaggeration. I also live in Thailand, and I just got a library card at the very stately Neilson Hayes library last week. A bit pricey (3000 THB/year) but amazing ambience since the library was built in 1860.
Yea $100 bucks a year for a small historical library with a very limited selection of English books (that's 45 minutes away from me) doesn't really compare to a free library that's in every city in the US (or many libraries in bigger cities)
it's odd to me that you'd expect a large stock of English books in any regular Thai library
even in Japan, with perhaps the very strongest reading culture in the world, you're going to find a relatively limited selection of books in library outside of their own language
you'll likely have less success finding a varied stock of Thai books in Oregon, to the surprise of nobody
There are hundreds of great ones, but Tale of Genji (classic), The Master of Go (amazing if you like the board game Go), Coin Locker Babies (Ryu Murkami > Haruki Murkami), Out by Natsuo Kirino.
I mean there are actually quite a few public libraries here, but of course the selection is primarily in Thai. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
To the above posters credit, it sounds like their claim of exaggeration was spot on (he didn't say it was a lie). You didn't say their libraries don't compare to US ones, you said they don't exist.
I haven't been to Thailand, but I assume there are also libraries at the universities. The parent appears to be referring to a tradition of public libraries, so these are not really counterexamples.
I've used private English libraries in various countries of the Middle East and East Asia. For the expat community, they were really a treasure before the internet.
University libraries are sort of a mixed bag. They're not really advertised but they're fairly open to public browsing in some cases, however pretty locked-down in others.
Libraries can be a useful place for homeless, or low income, people to get access to a computer to write up a resume, apply for jobs, etc.
The people who forget about libraries are likely well off. Shutting down libraries to feed the homeless doesn’t make sense, as libraries are a tool that can allow them to eventually feed themselves, if well used.
You mentioning helping the homeless in this convo has the same kind of vibe to me as conservatives only mentioning mental health when talking about gun control.
They only ever mention mental health as a distraction from issues they do actually care about (like gun control), and have no interest in actually solving mental health issues. It's a typical way of bad faith arguing. That's just vibes though; there's a good chance you'd actually in earnest like to divert library funds toward helping the homeless. It's an issue that's very close to my heart too, so I get the sentiment.
Still, I disagree. Just because one of two problems is worse (e.g. literacy and homelessness, or murder and burglary) doesn't mean we can just ignore one problem in favor of another. Just because murder is worse than burglary doesn't mean we should divert all police attention and money currently being spent on burglary to solving murders. Just because women's rights in the US by far surpass those in Saudi Arabia doesn't mean we should take the efforts we put into women's rights issues in the US and divert them to solving women's right's issues in SA. Just because homelessness is in some sense worse than illiteracy and low education doesn't mean we should divert funds from libraries to solving homelessness.
Having written all this out, it feels far too obvious for you to not know this. Maybe it's not just vibes.
I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is. Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now, and frankly nobody uses them. Any 'feel good' purpose like 'literacy' is already met by public schools. There's already federal subsidies for internet and telephone for the needy, and the people that live too far away to get internet definitely don't have the money or means to drive into town to use the library.
I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
> I volunteer at my local food bank to help feed to homeless. I understand just how dire the need is.
If you spent much deal actually dealing with the homeless themselves, you'd know how crucial a resource a library is for homeless people. For something you see as "dire", you don't seem to have even done anything as simple as google "libraries help homeless."
> Libraries are a luxury we cannot afford right now,
Completely false. Libraries are one of the areas of public spending where the return per dollar spent is highest. Libraries are social institutions we cannot afford not to fund.
> and frankly nobody uses them
Again, you seem to have failed to do basic research as libraries get a ton of use and genetally suffer from a lack of funding relative to their usage rates.
> There's already federal subsidies for internet and telephone for the needy, and the people that live too far away to get internet definitely don't have the money or means to drive into town to use the library.
Most poor people are urban and in dense enough areas to that easily access libraries could be (and often are) available.
> I would be willing to compromise on small buildings that function as internet cafes that are free to use for the public, we can get rid of all the excess staff and books, though.
Oh, how generous of you. Why don't you go meet some librarians and learn about what they actually do before you write off their usefulness.
What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter? There's a finite amount of money, and more pressing needs than letting people checkout paper books.
Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
You're choosing to let more people be unfed in order that a handful of people can read Harry Potter or whatever is popular these days. Bad trade off.
Libraries have more than Harry Potter books. They have books that allow people to learn skills that would be valuable in getting a job. There are meeting rooms and events. My local library has a ESL program to help people with their English skills, which can help make them more employable. During the heatwaves last summer they were telling people who couldn’t afford AC to come to the library to escape the heat, which may have saved some lives.
Libraries can help get people to the point where fewer people need the food bank. Maybe you should see what the library actually has to offer before you try to cut it from the budget.
There are so many other areas to find room in the budget without cutting libraries.
> What do you think you've done to sway my opinion on the matter?
I thought correcting your facts would have that effect. If your opinion isn't fact based, I doubt there's anything I can do to change your opinion. All I can do is callout the misinformation you are spreading.
> Let's look at it like this: Current budget: $100; $90 going to library, $10 going to feeding the needy. We can assume that even the entire library's budget won't overcome the shortfall in feeding the needy.
Or... set tax rates sufficient to do both? Neither actually costs that much. Lack of funding for either has to do with politics, not practicality.
You do realize that library budget cuts wouldn't automatically go to housing and feeding the homeless, right? And considering most municipalities seem to treat homeless people as cockroaches, the money would probably go to fund a new sports stadium or as a tax break for some new business.
Terribly ironic of you to want to divert library funds to homeless when the homeless are some of the most faithful users of libraries in major cities. Homeless aid organizations even base their programs around libraries.
Maybe this isn't as common in your region, but just about every library I've visited provides social services for the homeless.
If you search /r/libraries you'll find first-hand accounts from librarians who are committed to serving homeless patrons, even though they didn't sign up for a social worker role. Honestly, I wish I could allocate MORE funds to those kind of people instead of the grifters who profit from the "homeless industrial complex."
It's not disruption to make me wait 5 weeks to read a digital file through my local library's Libby service. It's an outdated business model using artificial scarcity that isn't effective at getting books onto readers devices. Spotify doesn't make me take out a hold on the artist I want to listen to. Netflix doesn't make me queue to watch the latest release.
Netflix has licensing restrictions too, but the limitation is time/exclusivity (rather than number of copies). You can only watch whatever Netflix owns distribution rights to. Although Netflix does charge more per device, so that's a bit like charging per "copy" of their service on top of the limited distribution.
I'm wondering if you'd really prefer a library system where you could get some titles instantly, but the majority of content is unavailable because some other digital service provider owns distribution in your region for the next 12-16 months. I'd hate that, personally.
I do pay for my library card, because my city doesn't have a library (unless you count bookmobile), and the nearby cities that do have libraries charge you to get a library card if you aren't a resident. And it is approx. $9.99/mo.
Wow... mine is $25/year. I live in a rural county, but work across the border in a less rural county, with a much bigger library system. For $25/year I get access to probably 10x as much stuff through them. I expect it might go to $30 this year.
The reason Spotify and Netflix don't make you wait is because they give the copyright owners money for views. A library does not, nor do I think they should.
The current business model of selling libraries ebooks that can only be viewed a max number of times before needing to be repurchased, or only for a limited amount of time, is a money grab pure and simple.
Since going full-time on my startup, I often work remotely at my local library. Over my time there, my eyes have been opened to what an absolute treasure public libraries are.
Besides the physical books everyone knows about, which are a treasure by themselves, there are many other valuable resources, as you mentioned, including:
- The Adobe suite, even including Character Animator
- Udemy
- Digital access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others
- Free notary services
- Print magazines and newspapers
- Puzzles
- Music and films
- eBooks and audiobooks
...not to mention community activities like classes, groups, and concerts.
Just being physically present in the library has benefited me. When I take breaks, I sometimes pick up a book at random. It may be about sales, health, politics, history. I sometimes come away with new ideas for my business, sometimes am just inspired or informed or amused in general.
I encourage anyone reading to stop by a library if you haven't been in a while. See what they offer. You might be surprised. And please, do what you can to support them in whatever way you can, even if that's just to use them, demonstrating the need for them by your patronage. We need these institutions, and they won't be around forever without our support.
I sincerely hope one day they get off their asses and implement casting that their predecessor, overdrive, had.
speaking of, btw, your library likely has 'partner' libraries where you can borrow stuff too using overdrive/libby. You can often see a list on top right of the overdrive page of your respective library.
The licensing costs for Ebooks are unsustainable for library's. The publishers don't want any sharing and so the cost per ebook vs physical is totally out of sync with Ebooks considerably higher. One could argue that publishers are the ones who are strangling the viability of libraries to exist.
This feels like something that could/should be legislated. Libraries should not be subject to the same restrictions on content sharing that consumers are.
Or maybe one better: eliminate restrictions on content sharing.
The only thing that kind of bothers me about libraries is that, as a tech focused individual, basically every book I read or whatever is either an ebook or a audiobook, and I don't want to have to go to the library to pick it out. I understand if I were getting physical books the need to go to a physical location to grab them, but if I'm getting something digital I don't want to have to go to the library. My library doesn't really offer an online catalog that you can just download from, only look at to see what you want to get in the library, and the free library services that they offer like the big ebook repositories don't have any books that I feel like I want to read, so it is just far easier to torrent things or have an audible subscription. Most libraries don't have really cool extra stuff like maker spaces or aquariums or anything remotely interesting other than books and maybe some computers for homeless people to use or whatever, so unless you're physically going there for a book, they're kind of pointless.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate and respect libraries, but they really just didn't change with the times around where I am, and it makes them far more inconvenient to use for someone in my particular position than it does to make them convenient. I will still support them as a public access, and I think it would be tragic if they went away, but I wish they would spend a little bit more of whatever budget they get investing on making it. Not a terrible experience to get shit online.
Yeah... Libraries are very much lovely places. Truly bliss how they can exist...
And about books themselves, I hate subscriptions, and all the DRM garbage, and if I can't own the epub without DRM, then I won't buy it. To be honest, the silver lining is that DeDRM exists, so I can actually obtain Japanese novels for my cute e-ink devices, but.. bleh.
In my city certain people are often using them and leaving... uh... errant trace elements of themselves on said resources, especially the public-use computers... :/
I'm not really a germaphobe, but in the age of the pandemic, I think public resources like libraries are under serious threat, just like busses and public transit. It would be nice if there was some sort of reassurance that cleaning and disinfecting was taking place between each use.
Lots of libraries let you volunteer if you're so inclined. Also, you can lobby for better library funding so that they can be staffed better. While you're at it, you need to find a better euphemism for homeless/unhomed people...
But you realize that you paid for all of this with your local taxes? It’s not like there is a magical place where laser cutters chose to spawn for free.
It might be great, but all the evidence says that we're not willing to nationalize the publishers in order to establish that deal as a durable offer, and that a private-sector publisher would change the terms of the deal the moment they'd gobbled up their competition, or perhaps even before. We would literally require that course of action from the corporate executives via the fiduciary duty.
Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech.
You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
You print books? Well we have e-books now.
You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it.
You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
What's sad though is that publishers have historically had one power that would have been unassailable – editorial judgement. They could have sustained their brands on quality. Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors, and here we are.
I can. Book publishers are terrible and they always have been. At least that is the case here in Denmark.
They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices. I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.
The worst part is how they pay artists. Authors are paid poorly as touched upon in this article. But illustrators are paid criminally low rates. A children book with 50 pages of breathtaking art can earn you as little as $500 for months for work. Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.
In general the model has never really worked for anyone except a few authors. There are the famous ones who sell a lot of books and then there are the ones who write a billion children’s books who actually don’t get the majority of their money from publishers but from the government compensation programs. But for the most part publishers have always run a business model akin to music streaming services where only a handful of Danish authors can actually make a living just by selling books. Mean while our publishing houses have been able to employ thousands and keep investors happy.
What a lot of artists and authors have done instead is to form smaller independent publishers. Which means you get 0 advertising and 0 product placement and so on, but ironically often will make you far more money than using the big publishers. These smaller indie publishers, and other creative ways of publishing like the article mentions, aren’t doing poorly. The big publishers are suffering. Thanks to the digital age. But I won’t miss them when they are gone.
> books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries
This sounds weird. Wouldn’t the books which are lent more also sell more? Childrens books are a big market for book stores and of course they want to sell the most popular books. Are you referring to some particular book which cannot be purchased?
It may sound weird, but there is not a link between lending from libraries and book sales. Some children’s books sell well, but if you go to the sections of them in book stores you’ll rarely find more than a handful of Danish authors represented. The ones which the bookstores know will sell well.
Our Libraries have to make all Danish published material available. Some of this is indeed not bought, but because children’s books are often on the high end of popularity at libraries they generally by every children’s book which gets published buy one of our major publishers. Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
Out of curiosity, can you provide some examples of these books which are artificially expensive, popular in libraries, but not for sale commercially?
> Also, publishers often lobby the municipality politicians who set the overall guidelines for their local libraries to make sure their books are represented.
Politicians are supposed to set the overall guidelines but not to decide what individial books libraries purchase. Do you have examples where politicians pressure or force libraries to buy specific books?
So, can I publish a book in Denmark, say it costs 1,000 dollars, and your libraries will be forced to buy it just because they have to make "all Danish published material available."?? There must be some sort of guidelines (though seeing how Swedish law works I wouldn't be surprised you guys just "trust" people to price things correctly).
All publishers are required to supply one copy of any published book to the royal library (for free).
Individual libraries are not required to buy any particular book. They have a fixed budget for buying material and will decid based on quality and expected demand.
> I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though.
There is no universe in which public funds are leeched without political complicity and corruption. Most likely the publishers benefitted are either related to or provided kickbacks to the influential parties.
What do you mean “the deal with the library”? What deal are you referring to? Libraries does not make individual deals with publishers or authors. They buy the books at market price and pay authors some additional royalties determined by objective criteria according to an agreement with the organization for authors and illustrators. It is all public information.
If you want to make an accusation of corruption you need to be more specific.
> Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on.
Who makes decisions for font cover design? Are they in a position to help out their friends with larger typefaces?
> They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices.
This is also true of academic presses. Their market are university research libraries who will pay $400 for a two-volume tome on the spread of printing presses in the New World colonies.
As far as I can tell, the comment you are replying to is just making shit up. The claim about royalties depending on the cover make absolutely no sense, since it is the publisher who commision the cover design.
If you can find people that do months of work for 500 in Denmark of all places then clearly this activity is understood to be a high status signal not a business opportunity.
People are doing it for recognition or some vague notion of arriving as an artist. You can earn that in a week as a waiter
Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence.
Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books."
The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset.
> The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.
I suspect I’d read a lot more non-fiction books if I couldn’t access the short form equivalent on my phone readily. But instead I read articles shared on HN or Reddit, with a sprinkling of non fiction books mixed in. Compared to my dad, who devoured non fiction books in the 80s and 90s, my lifetime spend is going to be far lower.
A lot of non-fiction books--especially in the business realm--have always been a long-form (or short-form) article padded out to book length for publishing economics reasons. And, if you look at the programming realm specifically, a lot of reference books are essentially available online.
I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire.
Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.
>They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire.
Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms
Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread.
Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.
IMO there are still quality publishers, but they are small and tend to focus on specific topics. Two that I'm aware of, although I'm sure there are more out there:
New York Review Books [1] is another significant one. It's the publishing divison of the confusingly named The New York Review of Books, which is an amazing magazine (it's not really book reviews).
Yes people are buying John Grisham and JK Rowling and the latest celebrity memoir, but eventually (1) interest will run out and people will want the next new thing and (2) these big brands will realize that they don't need the publishers to market for them (and this is already happening, as the article says). What then?
> You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper.
That just makes it Easter for publishers. The major problem with Amazon is monopsony, not easier distribution.
> You print books? Well we have e-books now.
Which have to be purchased ultimately from the publishers, so again, they’re still there making money, they just don’t need to bother printing books anymore. You’ll note they’re not any cheaper.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
I think this is confusing cause and effect. Authors turned to social media because publishers weren’t doing a great job marketing, not because it makes publishers unnecessary.
> You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly.
Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. Too much, and you have a cashflow problem today. Too little, and lose out on future returns.
> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.
Most authors have no fans yet, and most never will - most authors write only a few books in their lifetime.
From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
> The vast majority of sales is still paper books.
Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.
Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.
A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:
1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.
2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.
3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.
4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.
5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.
That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.
The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
To sales numbers, you're right that revenue skews it somewhat, but see [1] and [2]. Per 2022, print books added up 788 million sold, while e-books did did 191 million in 2020.
2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.
> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.
> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.
> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.
When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ?
Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world.
You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thrieving.
> Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher
Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.
Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.
It's difficult to prove a negative. Ebooks are a growing market in the US, the EU and SEA (though TBH I have no idea about China amd India)
It's been more than a decade that it's mainstream and takes about 10~20% of book sales depending on the country.
Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's presence is a blow against the industry as a whole.
What more would be needed to see it as a validated business area?
Ebook sales have trended down in the US since 2013[0]. They got a pandemic bump in 2020 which didn’t put them over the peak years in 2013/14 and like many things had a correction downwards afterwards[1].
Amazon maintains 70% of the US ebook marketplace and keeps a much bigger portion of the money from books published through their publishing arm than they do book published through the traditional publishers. They also have less high standards for publishing. This makes it harder to find traditional published books on the biggest platform for selling them.
I'll take your point: there seems to be a US specific problem with ebooks.
In particular, the lack of numbers from the dominant player (Amazon) makes trend analysis all the more difficult. Yet there's still an increase after 2020:
On Amazon, are you merging publishing and distribution as a single activity ? I thought Amazon in the US only accepted self-publication under their name and the rest of the Kindle available titles are from each publishers only using Amazon as a printer/distributor.
E.g. who would you assign as 50 shades of grey's publisher for the ebook version?
Amazon has both a self publishing arm (kindle direct) and a traditional publishing arm (amazon publishing). Like most traditional publishers they have a variety of imprints (e.g. 47North for Scifi/fantasy). They compete for authors via the same mechanisms other publishers do and have notable non-self published authors (Greg Bear jumps out to me as a scifi fan).
I don't know the specific legal contracts involved with 50 Shades of Grey's ebook distribution but I'd assume that Vintage Books bought those rights after they became the publisher for the book.
The adversarial relationship was basically the publishers' choice.
Remember that Amazon was willing to basically treat eBooks like normal books - negotiate the price they pay with the publishers and then sell the books at whatever price they want. The publishers are the ones who forced the agency model where retailers are forced to sell at a set price.
That’s one way to describe it. The other way is to say Amazon used their outsized power in the book world, including disallowing pre sales and delaying shipments of regular books, to demand a price from the publishers.
It took a bunch of public pressure to change that arrangement.
I think you can easily say the publishers have bad ebook pricing strategy but Amazon certainly wasn’t using normal market practices for setting prices.
> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".
this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good.
also, books these indie presses are always good:
- tyrant (rip)
- graywolf
- new directions
- NYRB
and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.
I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publishers sell eBooks for the same price as print books but pay almost nothing to produce them. That's a big bump in profits.
I don't see how any publisher is losing money on their back catalog due to scanning by Google, either. Google doesn't sell or even offer access to the full text of most books they scan, certainly not any that are under copyright and still being sold by publishers. Out of print books are by definition not earning money for publishers, so it wouldn't make any difference there.
Notwithstanding what I understand about the publishing industry, I'm talking about the marginal cost of distributing a .mobi or whatever versus manufacturing a printed book, not the entire cost of publishing an eBook.
That's only a dollar or two of difference per unit in costs to the publisher. The majority of their costs are exactly the same for ebooks and printed books.
> I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution
You're right that publishers don't handle printing, but they do need to handle distribution. Amazon won't help if you want to get books on shelves of retailers, and printers don't distribute. Smaller publishers will usually use the distribution network of a larger publisher. For example, HarperCollins and PRH both handle distribution in the UK for themselves and others.
> Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good".
I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.
Martha Wells had a Patreon for a while before Murderbot Diaries blew up. If I have the story right, the short stories she published there are rolled up in a collected short stories book now.
My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3.
A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well.
The medium may be different but the process is old.
Prior to the digital age where it's possible for the author to self-publish the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books and giving authors 15%.
So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.
Having written two novels, I will tell you it's far less work for a lot of writers to write the thing than getting decent sales. It varies - some do slave over their manuscripts for years, while others churn them out in a week, but selling books is hard work.
I don’t think it would have been possible for publishers to deal with the absolutely massive amount of books they’d have to vet to do what you’re saying.
That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool.
The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.
Curation is a multi-stage filtering pipeline. Such brands do not look at a firehose of content - they rely on existing networks and markers of quality before even considering content.
Hard to feel sympathy for industry that left to its own devices requires a 50% discount to sell in store, near 40% to get to Amazon/BN etc, and for bricks and mortar, requires you to accept returns that end up as a loss.
Authors have been complaining about publishers for ever. Publishers treated authors like crap when they controlled the market. No sympathy for them at all.
If they had any integrity they'd move to be the Spotify of books and serve their customers better. Instead (as the article says) they're spending their efforts trying to bail the sinking boat and resist any such move.
Ebooks are touching or have crossed 50% of sales in certain combinations of markets and genres. Overall they make up 30-50% of all book sales. So no, print books aren't still the vast majority.
I remember reading on Charles Stross' blog that the paperback is kind of dead in the US. At least for his niche. I think his last book only went out in hard cover.
In the UK many years ago, there was the Net Book Agreement, which was price fixing and Amazon, BooksOnline/StreetsOnline comprehensively broke that. Unfortunately, book shops didn't really learn, and we are where we are.
Back to the title. I still buy books. I've stopped buying them from Amazon, and just buy them from my LBS.
Though one thing still makes me irrationally angry - "SciFi + Fantasy" as "a genre" in bookshops. No. It. Isn't. It's two separate. Two loved-up vampires, isn't sci-fi. At least on Amazon I can filter that. Browse on Amazon, buy in the LBS. Which is the reverse of what I did a decade ago.
The Wikipedia article suggests that it was not Amazon and online bookselling that broke the Net Book Agreement, but big high street chain bookstores like Dillons. One of the references links to a newspaper article from December 1994 saying the agreement is "on its last legs", and Amazon was only founded in July 1994, so seems unlikely to have been very influential in its demise.
There are responses to every single one of these. Similar to Radioshack (3D printers, drones, Arduino, Raspberry PI), and Intel's (mobile, GPUs, foundries, AI) bankruptcies or "lost decades".
Distribute Books - They could have built a competitive distribution system by responding to what was an obvious aggressive threat. Amazon founded in 94', public by 97', buying book sellers by 98'. Four years, and Amazon was going International and buying book sellers.
Scanned catalog - Multiple responses. Legally inclined, lawsuits before it was all irreparably scraped (or afterward). Tech inclined, scrape your own stuff and make it available. Culturally or historically inclined, donate the texts to Gutenberg or a museum so the scraping doesn't get them much.
Authors have their own followings - Interact. "Hi, this is so-and-so from PRH, that's a neat idea for the author's work, and we'll discuss trying to work it into the next book launch." There's probably authors who follow authors, "Any of you wanna write a book?"
Cash advances - The cash advances are broke anyways. One of main points of the article. 70% of spending goes to 1% of authors. Try a slightly less power-law distribution. Maybe something a little less than x^60... PRH alone gave 55% of all advances in $1,000,000+ land. Have your own Kickstarters, or crowdfunding site. Arrange crowdfunding campaigns with marginal authors (for better author %). Work with fans directly so fans can put up the advance with pre-orders. Lots of alternatives to wringing their hands. (If Bates White Economic Consulting is correct, then 95% of money likely goes to 5% of authors).
What this article told me was the publishing industry has a bad case of "try to spend zero work, while making infinite $". 'if the platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.' 'Does the best selling author have the best marketing budget? No. Why? She's the queen of TikTok.' (she does her own marketing)
Ideally, the authors get their own loans from the bank, print their own materials, arrange their own distribution, put out their own marketing, and then we collect a vague value-add for putting our logo somewhere.
Copyright law is ridiculous and abusive (thank you supreme court).
There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly.
It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.
Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days.
The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.
Yes, it's not particularly ecological, but I found that I'm able to focus at the text much better this way. My Kindle (despite plenty of obvious advantages) just doesn't really work for me.
It took me years to realize this, but I always start to tinker with the brightness settings, switch pages back and forth, go into the book library and back, play with highlighting words, etc. I will do anything instead of reading the text. Meanwhile with a paper book I don't have an urge to flip a page back and forth and observe how it behaves. I can focus on the text.
I do the same - I far prefer paper books for reading, and mostly because it makes an enormous difference in my ability to focus.
Re: the ecological side - I'm not actually convinced that a paperback book is markedly more of an ecological burden than an e-reader and the rest of the associated infrastructure. I think it's possible the e-reader pencils out in the long term, but I think a full lifecycle accounting of the energy and resources required to create, use, and dispose of an e-reader would be markedly higher than one would suspect, and I think people replace them more often than necessary.
Books, on the other hand, are trees. Bury 'em in your yard when you're done with them and the fungi will know what to do to recycle them.
Worrying about the environmental impact of books is misguided. You use far more paper products in the course of your everyday life: paper bags, cardboard packaging, paper towels, etc. etc. Even for an avid reader, the impact is negligible.
With paper books I'm more concerned with having to have space to put it when I'm done. But, I find it more enjoyable to read a physical book, and am more likely to re-read it.
Another nice thing about paper books is that you can lend them out to your friends when you're finished reading them. This saves a bit of space, plus your friends can just pick them up and read them without worrying about a bunch of BS like whether it's compatible with their e-reader, if the DRM will work, if the publisher will revoke the rights for some reason, etc.
Or give them away, or leave them in a little free library for someone else to enjoy. In my old neighborhood somebody else had similar taste in scifi and (as far as I could tell) we traded Asimov books back and forth through the book box in the park!
I'd love to keep them all forever but (a) I think my house is about maxed out on shelves and (b) a book's potential is wasted on the shelf.
That has always been a pain point for me. I read a lot, so having physical copies can turn into a storage problem, especially since I keep a good backlog of books. I may not need a new book now, but I found one at the store that looks really good, so I buy it, place it on the shelf and it enters the queue. Although I did get myself used to using a kindle. Especially when I was in the Navy and needed enough to read for a 7 month deployment.
My current strategy is this. If its a book I know that will have re-read value that I really enjoy. I get a physical copy (such as LOTR). If its an interesting book that I want to read, but I don't see it as having high re-read value, I buy it on my kindle. May not be logical, but its a system that works for me so far.
Get the ebook for archival purpose and ditch the paper book when you’re done with your first read through.
If you later find out you want the paper book as home ornament, then spend a little extra to decorate your home.
The two major mistakes we make about books is:
1) we think we have to finish it. No, drop it if it’s boring.
2) we think we have to keep it around. No. Take a picture and write a few notes for your personal blog if you need to keep track. You don’t need it in your room or house.
FWIW - This (GP post) is not my experience with eReaders. Not sure if they have the eInk one or not (like the Fire or tablet ones), but I have the eInk sort.
Anyway, I really like it because it's far lighter weight than a paperback, easier to hold, and I can have like the entire library on there and take it with me. I don't experience the distraction that they are referring to, because there's really not anything else to do except read my book. How much time can I spend on settings? Browsing my library? As far as brightness I leave it alone mostly and don't think about it unless it's irritatingly one way or the other.
I have no idea what "navigation setup pages" are - I've been through several different Kindles and I pretty much just take them out of the box and start reading. There's nothing to "set up" outside of logging into my Amazon account.
Also, while I know the readership of HN skews young, but when you reach your 50s, having the ability to make the text larger in an ebook is a killer feature.
Yeah my vision is still good but farsighted so need low-strength reading glasses, larger fonts, or what I've started doing with this eReader is just getting good at reading fuzzy letters with a relaxed gaze at less than arms length. It's actually less straining than trying to force focusing closer than is comfortable.
I tried using landscape mode or larger fonts but didn't like the extra page scrolling/turning. Eventually I suppose we'll get lightweight and normal looking AR glasses for reading eBooks.
Thanks (everyone) for the replies and different viewpoints.
I already went through all the setup menus, including messing with fonts, layouts, making some collection/folders, and downloading some samples to preview.
So far it all seems pretty good. I don't think I'll be too distracted by it. The 7" screen is a tad small, but I really do like the size and weight so will keep it. Anything larger/heavier will likely not be kept on my person so loses a lot of use.
Another great use I just discovered is loading it with pdf's of all my device/appliance/toys manuals in a User Manuals collection.
Chiming in with the others to say that my experience with e-readers has been great. Physical books can grow to be a huge burden over the years.
For me personally, e-readers have not caused any loss of focus. In fact, the integrated dictionaries often keep me MORE focused than the interruption represented by pulling out a dictionary or googling a word.
I'll acknowledge there is a tactile joy to physical paper that is lost when using an e-reader, but for me it's well worth the trade-off for the the portability and space saved.
Also consider that often, people who are expressing skepticism of digital reading have only ever tried it on laptops and iPads, which is a very different (more distracting) experience from an e-ink reader.
Another massive advantage to using Kindle estead of iPad - enourmous battery life. My like 6-8 year old Kindle survives what feels like a month without recharge with active use. This enables you to just drop it in your backpack and be sure that it works the next time you feel like reading.
A lot of the posts here are just individuals' opinions, not universal experiences. Yours may well be different!
Personally, I carry an e-ink reader everywhere and read it every time I get a spare minute or so. It's done wonders for my reading habits. And unlike this topic's creator, I basically set the font and formatting once and almost never mess with them again.
Everybody's different! I prefer to read on paper, I know many other people who prefer to read on their kindle. Whatever works for you is the right answer for you!
I still use ebooks when I travel - I'll usually have one or two actual physical books with me, but I'll also have a few loaded up on my iPad in case I get bored or finish them early.
The undeniable minus of a Kindle e-reader is: the illustrations suck. They're just too small. Half the time, my "library" has book covers that I can't even make out.
Yeah, I've owned a e-paper Kindle for a decade but probably never finished reading a book on it. Instead I use a iPad 11 or mini, which are superior in every way (that I care about) except reading in sunshine. I love how lightweight the Kindle is, but not its small reading area or lack of color or weak illumination. Or its inability to serve any task other than reading ebooks.
I discovered that, although one really doesn't see the difference between a lower res display and a retina res display, it is just more pleasant to read the retina display.
Another nice benefit of paper is that the company that sold it can't just bust down your door, steal the book, drop off a few bucks, and then go back along their merry way. Amazon did exactly this with, amongst other books, 1984. Such a perfectly appropriate book.
If someone a) finds my calibre-web installation on the public internet b) manages to crack my username and password to log in c) scan the contents d) notify the correct rights holders e) send a subpoena for pirating content
Accidentally? My calibre-web is actually exposed online :P
It doesn't list any books that I have publicly though. All you'll see is a login prompt. Books? what books? You can't DMCA me because I only have gutenberg collections in there ;)
You've got to wonder what the hapless Amazon employee asked to implement this felt, and how much leeway they had in which book for that to happen to first.
I am kind of the opposite; I have found it much easier to read on Kindle simply because I can make the text as big as I want.
In high school, I remembered that I really struggled to read The Once and Future King, and I never finished it. I eventually assumed I was too dumb to understand it, and that it’s just not for me.
Fast forward about 13 years, and I decide to give the book a try again, this time on the Kindle, and I surprisingly was able to get through it really quickly and didn’t have any issues understanding it.
I don’t think that I’ve gotten appreciably smarter than I was in high school, and I realized that the only really different variable is the font size. As a teenager I was reading my dad’s hand me down copy, which had tiny text on fairly small pages. With the Kindle I make the font gigantic. I have to turn the page more often, but that doesn’t really bother me.
Overwhelmingly I find it easier to read stuff if the text is really big; I am not sure why. My eyesight is fine, and I am not dyslexic (I was tested as a teenager), but tiny text is just really hard for me to read, while big text isn’t.
Yes, surely the only reason you'd dislike something at 14-18 years old and like it at 27-31 is the font size.
I take it your tastes have otherwise been immutable in that time period, and that you listen to the same music, follow the same fashion trends etc. as you did back then?
I didn’t say that they were immutable, but from a comprehension level I don’t think that things have changed substantially. Is it really controversial that bigger fonts are easier for me to read?
I thought I made that pretty clear, that it was that I was having trouble parsing and understanding the small text.
ETA:
Also, lol, my tastes in music really hasn’t changed either. Looking at my YouTube music history, the last 40 songs I listened to were ones I listened to in high school. I also wear more or less the style clothes; I still have of the shirts I wore back then actually.
Note that only having a certain chunk of text on the screen at one time may be a variable as well as the age/life-place difference as others have so politely hinted at.
I prefer to read paper books, but there are three reasons I generally don't.
a) Font size is getting too small for me. Years ago I changed to large hardcover (sometimes large but softcover) versions instead of the smaller-sized books I used to buy, simply because the fonts are larger then. With the Kindle I can set the font size to what I want.
b) Weight and size. I read on airplanes, in hotels etc. I read a lot and I read fast, so I bring more than one book (and even that is too big and heavy, see a). The Kindle is king here.
c) Storage. I don't have enough room for more books at home. I've sadly had to dump lots and lots and lots of books, even though I like to read the same books again (and again). Tried to sort out those most unlikely to get re-read, but..
I can't even give them away. Used-book stores have more than they can handle.
As to the Kindle - I've never felt any urge to tinker with anything, except when I'm forced to: I set the font size, that's one single operation, forget it (at least for that book). If I occasionally read at night I have to add some backlight.
And that's about it. I just read.
What I miss about paper books is the nice cover (color..), how easy it is to "see" the book (bookmarks, flip it open somewhere else and so on). In addition to actually reading it. But the Kindle is actually very nice to read (unlike phones, PC monitors, tablets, all of that. I can't ready more than a couple of paragraphs on LCD displays)
Another benefit to paper books, in my experience, is it's a lot easier to remember the rough location of a particular passage (towards the front, middle, near the end, etc.) than with digital
A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.
My own personal anecdata on this comes from being able to find a passage I read in a 500-page book in 1992 for a class I was taking in 1998. I could probably even find that same passage now if I were to walk across the room to the bookcase where I have that book.
Although on the other hand, I was also able to turn up an article I’d read online a couple years later when it was relevant to a friend’s relationship with her newly out trans kid, but it was definitely a different sort of recall and lookup happening in the latter case.
While physical "progress bar" is much easier to remeber than digital one (on the side of the screen for pdfs), because you actually interact with it the whole time, i don't find (ha) finding a particular passage hard without it.
I personally usually can remeber a phrase or just a word and search for them in a PDF to find the needed passage.
It's pretty easy to highlight passages with most e-reader software. Some even let you write a note that goes with the highlight. You can then look through a list of all highlighted passages.
It's when something comes up and you remember that you read something relevant in the past. In most of those cases it's not about "Ah, this is something I may want to check again at a later time, so let's highlight it". So, there's no list of highlighted passages to search through.
Indeed this is one of those things I miss about paper books. When the above happens I have a terrible time finding that on my Kindle. Most of the time I'm not able to, while with a paper book I didn't have that problem, mostly.
I classify skimming as a "distracting" activity. I always ask myself: What information do I need? And then it's very easy to get to the relevant passage. And outlines are there for a reason (PDF Expert can edit them) so navigating between the same file is not that cumbersome for me. I do agree that the experience is more pleasant with a paper book, but in a focused session, the result is pretty much the same.
Skimming is great for building a mental map, but that is a separate activity than reading to learn. And it can be done digitally too, just differently.
That's a software choice issue. You can definitely flip through digital texts more easily than physical. With a decent monitor, you can flip through multiple books at the same time which is quite difficult to do with physical books, assuming you haven't summoned eldritch appendages to help.
> Paper books are also just orders of magnitude easier to flip through and re-read specific chapters, paragraphs or sections.
Whatever works for you, of course. PDFs have bookmarks, which instantly take me to a specific spot on a specific page. Also, I can open multiple instances of the PDF, viewing multiple pages of the same book (or some PDF readers allow split screens to do the same thing). Edit: And if I don't recall where something is, I can search for it.
I prefer PDFs for informative material (various documentation), though they're less useful if it's just a photocopied old manual (no OCR).
It's when reading books (literature, not documentation) that the e-readers have something going for them. I read nearly all my books on the Kindle, but I never use it for documentation - I've tried, that's just cumbersome. PDFs on a PC are fine.
I read paper books because I can flip back and forth without friction, and I can underline and scribble.
I don't know why eReader interfaces make these two functions -- critical for deep reading -- so difficult.
Kindle is optimized for linear reading only. So beach reading and long romances.
But if you do the kind of reading that Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" proposes (skimming, inspectional reading, writing notes), you pretty much can't with Kindles.
I truly don’t mean to be pedantic, but there’s a giant implicit “for me” in there. I do not want or need to scribble or write in my books for “deep reading”. It’s totally fine if you want to, but that’s your preference and not a general requirement everyone has.
I just finished “Moby Dick” on a Kobo. It’s no “Ulysses”, thank heavens, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it as a long romance or a beach read.
I think Moby Dick is a romance. I guess the term is confusing in English because people think “love story” but an older use of the word just means a novel with adventure, chivalric elements.
There is also a giant implicit “for me” in your preference. It just happens that your preference happens to be one that is mainstream. A lot of types of reading are not linear —- for instance, if you have to read to write a book report, you have to go back, make notes, flip back and forth. A straight through reading will not produce a good book report.
I read non-fiction and also great books (of the western canon) and in order to really read to understand, I need to flip back and forth and take notes and engage with the text. My reading instructor always tells me, “good reading is re-reading.” Single pass reading works for entertainment reading, but not for deep reading. (By deep reading, I mean the kind of reading that is taught in Mortimer Adler’s book referenced above)
For deep reading you have to interact with the text, most commonly by debating with it in the margins. This is pretty standard for academic reading (say when taking a humanities or literature class). It’s a pretty common use case that eReaders don’t support.
All of that is perfectly fine, of course, so long as you recognize that it’s not the correct or better way to study literature. It’s the way you were taught and I’m guessing most of us have learned different methods for learning the canon.
For example, I take notes in a separate book. The thing crucial to your preferred method is not at all needed for mine. In other words, most ereaders are not optimal for your process but just fine for most of us.
And yes, even for classic great books and not just amusement. I suspect you’ll find a higher than average portion of readers here are familiar with the books you’re talking about. We’re a reasonably erudite group.
This is interesting, I'm pretty much the opposite. I only read paper books if there are no electronic versions available.
Fiction I read on a Kindle.
My deep reading all happens on a PC actually. Not even a tablet. I find it much easier to highlight and annotate reading material with mouse and keyboard and look up references with a proper multi-window screen.
Also, while you certainly can underline and write notes on paper, this information then stays on paper and in this book. No way to index it easily, no way to cross-reference etc.
While you can scribble, you can easily highlight and comment on books. Going back and forth is maybe slightly harder than a book, but it isn't "so difficult." I'm not saying reading on a Kindle is better than a paper book. But I didn't think it is as bad s you claim it is. I personally like it because I can read anywhere. I don't need to carry a large heavy book around.
It's likely some arbitrary jargon that someone made up. I have my own method of reading, which since we're throwing out pretentious flowery prose, I'm going to call "predictive perusal".
For each chapter or titled section, I read the first sentence or title and then mentally position myself as the writer of that section and attempt to predict the contents. For convergence I attempt to traverse further plies. For divergence, I attempt to figure out the root of the difference.
EDIT: For the record, I have never felt the need to scribble in the margins of a book. It's far better to take notes on separate media to prevent "preloading" your existing thoughts at the time should you choose to re-read the book years later.
The older I get, the more I appreciate being able to select a larger font with my Kindle. I love books, but the accessibility features of a modern ereader are pretty great too.
I've been putting off glasses for as long as I can. I suspect I'll return to my Kindle again in the future for this reason. It's good to be reminded that both things can coexist.
Because I want minimal complexity. (Usually in the tropics, often with rum and a hammock)
Dead tree books' short term failure modes are water and fire, and once failure is confined to emergencies-that-are-already-emergencies they impose no additional cognitive burden.
Also, I suspect the physical friction involved in "swiping away from" paper books helps reset my dopamine baseline / memory, but that's just suspicion from having lived pre-smartphone.
PS: Also, re: environmental impact. eBay and Amazon sell tons of used books. Sure you're shipping them around, but I really buy new these days.
You forgot the third and fourth failure modes: weight and bag space. Books take a lot of it. An e-reader is thinner than any book and weighs the same no matter how many it's holding.
I used to take my e-reader on field expeditions when I was an archaeologist. Never had one die or break even after months in places like Siberia. The number of notebooks that were ruined during those same expeditions is non-zero, usually from condensation or the physical trauma of a backpack.
Considering you're on HN, it's likely a safe bet to say you also travel with a laptop. In which case, an e-reader is still a waste of space because your laptop can just open ebooks too. Or if you don't, then your phone is still a better space saver for reading books with. Yet, you will likely prefer to take your e-reader with anyway (and its charger if it isn't the same as other devices).
This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.
Of course it's a relative argument. Everything is.
I don't personally travel with a laptop unless I plan on working remote. Too heavy/bulky and more importantly, you need to take them out going through TSA. The e-reader doesn't need a charger for the 2-4 weeks I usually travel. If I'm traveling longer, I'll bring a single additional USB cable (that will go away the next time I upgrade).
A phone doesn't take bag space because it's always in my pocket, but it's significantly less ergonomic and much less power efficient for reading. The value-add of being able to read without draining battery on my most important travel tool is worth it on its own.
My laptop and phone can't last through a long-haul flight. My e-reader doesn't need charging until I come home, fits in a jeans pocket and is a similar weight to my passport.
That's kind of my point - your preferences are to the advantage of the e-reader. For others, the same might apply to physical books instead, despite the disadvantage of bulk.
The ergonomics on any laptop is dogshit compared to a dedicated e-ink reader. Just the amount of brightness the display beams to your face makes it suboptimal for reading in low light.
And the "charger" I need with my ancient Kindle is a standard micro-USB cable, not exactly exotic. And as soon as this one breaks down, the next one will be USB-C like a good 90%+ of my devices I travel with.
I'm just the opposite. One of the worst things about vacations was having to carry along all those books or take a detour to a bookstore (if there were any) to buy more. Now I just carry a single small e-reader. It's a great savings in terms of cargo space.
I don't consider an e-ink reader very complex. You charge it once in a while, download books to it once in a while, and otherwise it's basically a book except it remembers what page you were on.
E-readers are often very simple devices. Their main audience is older people.
Light being a dependency of reading a printed book is one of the biggest plus for e-ink readers. You don't need light, they already come with it! It's so much easier reading with a Kindle (in dark mode) at bed time than it is a paper book.
Well, yes and no.. I do use the backlight on my Kindle if it's dark, but this changes how it looks. I have a Paperwhite Kindle. With the backlight on it's more like reading on LCD, though not as bad. The Kindle looks much nicer if I can use a bedside lamp instead of the backlight, just as I would with a paper book.
There's a tiny amount of light, yes. I don't know why Amazon made it that way. It's not really visible.. not to me, at least. But it's probably one reason the battery is slowly drained, over weeks, even if not in use.
I have a slightly different problem. What I miss about the physical book is its context - that is to say, the cover art, its particular weight, the font face, how the chapter numbers are printed, etc., which give a book its certain "feel." With an e-book, you don't get any of that, so all books have a kind of sameness.
I feel this strongly. Physical books make a deeper impression in my memory. There are all sorts of particularities of how the book was bound: it's size, it's smell, the texture of the paper, etc. It's like the book exists in its own unique space (vs all digital books existing in the single shared space of my computer/reader). I think a book's reading environment loses some richness when all these subtle little details are homogenized.
Well you can get the cover art, but yeah. I mean you can get the differing font faces and etc. if the publisher built that into the file, but most don't go to that amount of effort on their e-books.
I use my iPad and my Kobo for digital reading. I have paper version of "important" books (stuff I'd like to read if I don't have power), but some are unwieldy (Algorithms by Cormen et Al).
I prefer e-ink for reading, but it's too slow for my learning workflow. I highlight and mark interesting stuff, that I export later to condense and reflect upon. And that is cumbersome on an e-reader. There's also the matter of size. I generally like the PDF version of technical books as they're typeset well, but my e-reader is too small for them. So I use my iPad for those (Distraction is handled by the fact that I read those in short focused sessions).
But for fiction books, the e-reader is perfect. I don't highlight text in those books, I just read. Any other operation is slow enough that I just can't fiddle with it. And it's perfect for long sessions of reading as it does not project light in my eyes. It's light, so I just bring it with me everywhere.
Same. I recently got one of these wirecutter book lights: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/glocusent-reading... Does an amber color for bedtime reading, and now I' tearing through books again. It's so much easier to skim, skip, re-find something (yes, even without fancy search) and I just find myself reading faster with real books again. It's rekindled :) a love of books again I feel like I lost somehow only doing it on e-readers.
On top of all of that, nobody's going to revise the book out from under me while I'm reading it, or prevent me from loaning it to a friend, or even yanking it entirely from my device.
As far as I know (in the sense that I've never experienced anything like it in a decade of using a Kindle) that the book's getting revised from under me while I'm reading it. There's an occasional update for some books, but I have to actively choose to download the updated version, otherwise my original stays the same. I think I've only downloaded an updated version a single time.
Same here. I'm not sure if it's psychological. When reading my Kindle, I have to constantly fight my urge to do something else, maybe except for reading a page-turner novel.
I haven't had much trouble focusing on reading on computers, my only expectation is for the device to be touch screen and a pressure sensitive pen. The touch screen makes moving through pages trivial (for casual reading on say, my kindle, I have the habit of laying back and just tapping with my nose to flip pages lol) and the pen makes it trivial to mark up more serious reading material. With paper books I tend to not be near them right when I need them, and tend to be too wary of just marking them up. With digital stuff, and all the syncing we have between devices these days, I pretty much always have multiple devices at hand where the material is accessible.
I do still prefer physical books for things like art, I find it easier to study it and understand how it's put together that way (maybe because a physical copy forces me to look at the piece as a whole, rather than getting distracted by and overfocusing on minute details that turn out to not matter until I grasp the whole structure). However, even there, once I do understand how to look at the art, I can go with the digital version just fine.
It's also more ... social perhaps. I'm reading a book that an uncle bought, but never really got around to reading. I would have never picked up that book myself, but he brought it over an I stuck it in the bookshelf.
Similarly my dad has a bunch of books I bought years ago. It's not books that I'd want to re-read, but interesting enough. With ebooks that just not possible, unless you do some cumbersome DRM removal.
There's a lot of good things about ebooks, but the usability just isn't there yet. It is a nice alternative for long out of print books though.
I'd buy and read move, I think, if more stuff was translated to Danish, but most of the books you can get in Danish easily is repetitive crime novels. It's all variations of someone got brutally murdered and now some alcoholic Scandinavia cop / ex-cop with a broken love life has to solve the case for some reason.
Yes, there's a strange habit with things we can twiddle and the surface area for twiddling physical books is much more limited and less engaging than with electronic devices.
There's something to dedicated physical entities being single purpose and dead end that allows them to serve you in a very focused manner. Things with more bells and whistles, knobs and pulls will simply draw you into their twiddling even when it serves no purpose. It's like working with these things creates an itch that we need to scratch and it is distracting even if the recovery for focus for those things is minimal, it all adds up and gets you out of the focus state.
Last Saturday I went to the bookstore, bought a paperback novel, and then went home and started reading it right away. It felt great and it reminded me of doing this in the past as I used to do this a lot in the past, but for some reason I had stopped.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts now, and that really cuts into my book reading. But nothing beats sitting down in the sun and reading a good paperback.
Yes plus the emotion of sitting on a couch with a paper book vs. a device is very different. The feeling of flicking pages is better than the UI of book readers or smart phones.
exact opposite for me - the more i got into ebooks, the harder i found it to handle the ergonomics of paper books, and today my reading is pretty much 100% on my phone or kindle.
Honestly it is likely more ecological than ebooks after you factor in everything. Think about how many e-readers are sitting in the bottom of a landfill somewhere. Screens, batteries, plastic shells. The energy to not only power the device but all of the infrastructure for transmitting and storing the book.
I'm the opposite. I stopped reading books because I was accumulating too many and it was difficult to find the ones I like without paying full price for new copies (which I'd eventually just discard). Also I find them cumbersome. Now I have a Kobo I read a lot. I can read on my side in bed. It's great.
However, paper is still the best format by far for text books and references. I can't stand having to use a screen for that. If I'm using a reference sheet I always print it out.
What goes on in your head that you even consider the "ecologicity" of a book. It has no impact. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Stop feeling guilty about meaningless things.
>>> "Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?"
I sincerely hope nothing "disrupts" public libraries in my lifetime. As a California resident, I can walk into ANY public library in the state and get a free library card with access to physical books, audiobooks, ebooks. Some branches have laptops, hotspots, tablets, e-readers available to borrow. My local branch even has a Makerspace with 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, and other misc tools.