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No one buys books

elysian.press

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Re: No one buys books

#101

Post by paxys »

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.

Re: No one buys books

#105

Post by criddell »

echelon_musk wrote: post #72
yreg wrote: post #51

I recently started buying paper books. 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.…

The older I get the less I trust myself to know how to administer or even to care how to work any current or future reading e-device. A printed book requires light as just about it's only dependency! I definitely agree with you about the distractions of digital devices. Switching to a book is a focused mode.

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.

Re: No one buys books

#109

Post by greenie_beans »

vundercind wrote: post #82
bombcar wrote: post #25

The entire book industry rides on the backs of bibles, hobbits, and extremely ravenous caterpillars. Seems almost poetic, somehow.

I gotta admit: I rarely make time for any recent fiction. Too busy catching up on the last 5,000 years. I don’t expect that to change before I die. Film has a similar problem—there are plausibly low-thousands existing films worth my time, a whole lot of them 30+ years old. I could never watch a film made after 2000 and not run out of good entertainment in my lifetime. They’re damn lucky the Mouse got copyright extend…

read "the sarah book" or "crapalachia" by scott mcclananhan if you want to read fiction from a living author that should be included in your reading list for the past 5k years of language arts.

Re: No one buys books

#110

Post by jaberwooky »

Books are like the wayback machine. You can reread authors as they actually wrote their oeuvres without editing from modern day overzealous publishers who censor or otherwise alter the originals.
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