311–320 of 752 posts
There are small publishers. There are also print shops. You can design and sell a book yourself. I buy physical books. I bought Greg Egan’s self-published books.
There does exist a real threat to the book market, and that’s LLMs, but as of 2024 the market is far from dead.
All modern digital systems are by comparison, distraction machines. You never know when the next interruption ('notification') gets surfaced, the next update, the next forced restart, the next bug, the next battery problem, the next broken or lost charger cable.
Physical books require light, the book, and your mind. All else fades away, and your mind is given free reign to ponder, to consider, to deliberate. No wonder civilization flourished whenever the physical written form was embraced at sustained scale.
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 Kickstarte…
> You print books? Well we have e-books now. It's often the same publishers publishing the e-books. They did successfully make that transition. > Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors If they're best sellers, as you note, that was clearly a good choice. They were selling what people actually wanted.
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.…
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)
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 Kickstarte…
Aren’t print books still the vast majority of sales?
I've been buying scifi books from thrift stores for a decade or more. But in the last couple years, there's been a near complete collapse in it. The racks of scifi have abruptly dwindled to a handful of lonely books. The entire book section has dramatically shrunk as well. This is across thrift stores, not just one. Is it: 1. nobody buys physical books anymore 2. nobody donates physical books anymore 3. donations see…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's why a retina display ipad is now my preferred reader.
I slightly prefer physical books and still collect them, but a tablet lets carry dozens on the road
I'm in a very heavy library family; we are checking out and reading a few hundred books per year between all of us. Yet we still buy a few books, and I bet that if we made an inventory of the books we currently own that are in the house, it would number in the hundreds. But... most were purchased secondhand. I take my daughter to the bookstore every few months; it is always busy. While she is browsing, I also look ar…
> book will run $15-20 Everybody needs to get paid, and everybody needs to make a profit. The folks that store the books (think Wholesale), the movers/couriers, the retail that has to pay rent/employees/etc _and_ make a profit. The consider that (depending on the country) there is a VAT on that book. It slowly adds up. I remember in Brighton back in the 90s I had found a second hand bookstore, that had 5x the books p…
Sometimes I miss being young and poor. I'm not sure I'd enjoy spending a day like that anymore, and I'm not sure why.
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.…
This distribution is pretty common in artistic professions and professional sport. A tiny fraction takes most of the pot.
As they say around here, that's a feature and not a bug. In art, people tend to do stuff not because they are looking to earn an income, but they have something to prove or say or show.