Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one buys books

elysian.press

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 752 posts

Re: No one buys books

#631

Post by linuxftw »

wesselbindt wrote: post #607
linuxftw wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like it's a totally unnecessary public expenditure at this point, and those funds could be used for, IDK, feeding the homeless?

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…

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.

Re: No one buys books

#632

Post by emodendroket »

outop wrote: post #418
emodendroket wrote: post #375

> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity…

How is this an unhealthy market? Everyone can easily access the books they want. People choose to read the Bible and Harry Potter because that's what they want to read. Of course, it might be a shame that we all coordinate on reading a few hits that everyone else is reading rather than check out some underappreciated books. But is the market really to blame for that? Amazon makes it easier than ever to find all the b…

Their idea of the problem with the proposed merger, making it unhealthy, was that it would reduce the number of players in the market. How is one of the players getting picked apart by private equity instead of merging with a different player a better outcome, then?

Re: No one buys books

#633

Post by Spivak »

sandspar wrote: post #346
mlsu wrote: post #117

Books are a vestigial organ. Nobody uses books as their primary mode of accessing information about the world anymore. What is interesting is that the cultural mores around this vestigial organ have persisted to such a great degree. Harry Potter Books are a psycho-social mechanism of self-construction more than an actual work of fiction. The phenomenon of "I am a bookish person who reads Harry Potter" as a psychologi…

You're talking about midwits or whatever. Millions of very intelligent people still get most of their knowledge from books. Books remain the highest octane fuel.

It's always fun to see "parent's point immediately proven in the replies" happen in the wild.

Re: No one buys books

#634

Post by runamok »

grepLeigh wrote: post #434
yellow_postit wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny seeing this comment and the article about Seattle libraries reducing digital copies both on HNews front page at the same time. I love libraries. It also feels like all our public institutions in the US are crumbling under assault from all sides.

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 stat…

Oh no, worst news I have heard in a while. My wife and I LOVE Libby.

Re: No one buys books

#636

Post by tptacek »

AlbertCory wrote: post #617
tptacek wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have what the article says to go on, and the article contradicts you. But I know a bit more about the music industry, and it is absolutely the case that midlist music acts don't --- and never did --- generate enough record sales to cover their nut. There's a famous Steve Albini zine article that indicts the recording industry for never recouping an advance, and a less famous David Lowery article that explains why n…

We're done here. Trolls get one answer, and you've had yours.

Just in case it's helpful: I think you're going to find this approach to dealing with disagreements on HN isn't going to work out to your benefit, or to the benefit of whatever point you're trying to make.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: No one buys books

#637

Post by jxramos »

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.…

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.

Re: No one buys books

#638

Post by gavin_gee »

grepLeigh wrote: post #332

From the article: >>> "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…

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.

Re: No one buys books

#639

Post by wizzwizz4 »

fragmede wrote: post #352
somenameforme wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 expect it's all on George Orwell. Numbers sort before letters.

Re: No one buys books

#640

Post by wenc »

kstrauser wrote: post #349
wenc wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN