The zine scene's seen weak weeks, certainly, but the gritty ink stays distinct: a permanent link for those who think outside the precinct. It may wax and wane, but for any with an intention to mention the subversive soul, zines offer distinct impressions.
I'd originally intended to simply argue that short form print never went anywhere and therefore had nowhere to return from, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to wax poetic ^.^
rylando 4 hours ago [-]
snap snap snap
goodmythical 57 minutes ago [-]
thank you, thank you, I'll be here till they kick me out
teeray 7 hours ago [-]
> A quarter-century ago, conventional wisdom held that ebooks, read on electronic devices, would replace books made of paper.
Until publishers thought “huh, we can increase our margins AND increase our prices too for ebooks?!”
amarant 6 hours ago [-]
I've made the switch to ebooks.i haven't yet had a problem with pricing like you suggest, but I have been a little worried about my library of purchased books might one day disappear since they all use DRM, and I don't really own any of my books in any real sense of the word.
Then again, even that doesn't worry me too much, since I almost never read a book twice anyway. I think the only book I've read more than once is the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
For now, in my experience, ebooks have always been cheaper than print versions of the same work. I suspect that if one calculated the resell value of a printed book, the prices would come out about equal. Which is why I chose eBooks for their convenience.
VorpalWay 3 hours ago [-]
If you don't read a book multiple times, why not borrow from a public library (if such a thing exist in the country you live in)? Here in Sweden they are free, and you can even get them to loan a book from another library if they don't have it locally (though for physical books it will of course take a few days to get it delivered). Remote loans used to cist around 20 SEK (about 2 EUR), but is now also free since earlier this year.
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
amarant 55 minutes ago [-]
I prefer the slim device that keeps track of where I am in the book, has a built in backlight that is easy on the eyes and doesn't disturb my wife when I'm reading in bed until long after she's asleep, and that lets me acquire the next book in a series with only a little bit more effort than it is too turn the page, over the heavy physical tome that would tire my arms.
I am a creature of comfort after all!
sleazebreeze 44 minutes ago [-]
Many libraries have ebooks. I am familiar with the app Libby in parts of the US.
jszymborski 5 hours ago [-]
This is why you download the liberated versions from Anna after supporting the author.
xp84 6 hours ago [-]
The resale value of books isn’t that great for most individuals since you have to do at minimum the work of listing it on eBay, and maybe even listing it on Amazon who has much more hoops to jump through, and then pay for shipping and platform fees. But the value to publishers of killing off the used book market by not printing the paper book in the first place is the reason ebooks are so popular with them.
Did you know that when libraries buy ebooks, the license automatically evaporates after a set number of loans? Like 10 or 20 IIRC.
jszymborski 5 hours ago [-]
My local indie bookshop will buy paper books off me with as much hoop jumping as it take to buy a book, but yah you recoup a small fraction of the cost.
bluebarbet 3 hours ago [-]
I'd argue that we never really "owned" books. Put aside the mundane physical object and assume that a book is a work of culture, authored by somebody else. What can "own" possibly mean in this context? You don't somehow commandeer its copyright by gaining an indefinite right to consult it. The words "own" and "buy" and "sell" are fundamentally ill-suited to abstract quantities such as knowledge and information and ideas. Perhaps our attachment to this (IMO) egregious category error of "ownership" can be explained by centuries of capitalism and (more recently) consumerism.
throw5 2 hours ago [-]
> What can "own" possibly mean in this context?
This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.
But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.
yazantapuz 2 hours ago [-]
I just returned from my mom's house. Visited her with my 4yo daughter. The house is full with old magazines and books, it's a time machine to my youth (and that of my parents). The magazines are full of drawings, annotations, etc, by me and my brothers... My daughter could connect with all that easily, we read together the same phisical comic book, she can see how her father and uncles draw on it just like her... Good luck having that on digital.
tolerance 5 hours ago [-]
Today I had a bizarre experience. I went to a library. I spent a good 40+ minutes browsing through the aisles offering a truly intriguing selection acquiring a stack of books along the way and one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed.
A few of them were about how economically alienated Millennials are and why. One book with a broken piggy bank on the cover blamed boomers.
I mention this because I don't know how accurate my next claim is about to be because I put the books that may support my claim back on the shelf. If I hadn't then I would've just hedged my argument with "I need time to read these books but..."
It's a shame that Millennial's are yet to be able to turn what I'm going to call "The People's High-Brow Culture"—half-low-brow-half-high-brow—into sustainable media.
I think Tumblr was peak 'what I'm referring to'.
No, don't call it mid-brow. This is different. I think.
Who am I kidding.
I don't actually have to prove my point.
If I can get enough people to wax nostalgic about how everything they consumed online, particularly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, had just the right blend of dilettante mediocracy...passionate exchanges about art and culture without the professional affect is what I'm struggling to describe.
It's probably less a matter of economic alienation alone but an institutional kind as well. Maybe they're correlated. I did not get popular economics books that would help make my case here.
Vice may have been the closest real outlet to what I'm trying to describe but we should all know how that turned out.
I'm imagining a dilettante mediocracy...people who were too naive to know that the people working for the actual publications parallel to them could afford to loaf around and try to get paid for covering the things they wrote about.
It seems that alls left of this era is "BookTok" and "BookTube" and somehow apparently...Anthony Fantano.
This is not a good explanation of what I think. Sorry.
I'm tired of puffy stuffy "Bequest betwixt the classics, my dear" sort of media that Portico represents to me.
When do I get be middle-aged and affect my good taste on younger generations who are desperately in need of it. I don't wanna read about Myrtle Beach and Dean Martin or Marcus Aurelius!
Portico??? I don't even own a house!
drivers99 47 minutes ago [-]
> one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed
If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.
I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.
(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)
> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!
One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
vardalab 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure if the writing style is deliberate, but it was confusing to parse. Needs some editing by chat jippity.
phainopepla2 2 hours ago [-]
I'd much rather read idiosyncratic human writing than text extruded through an LLM
card_zero 2 hours ago [-]
The word was effect both times, noun and verb! Gotcha.
So, you're praising a sort of cultured counterculture, and mourning it because you think it's gone away.
I'd originally intended to simply argue that short form print never went anywhere and therefore had nowhere to return from, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to wax poetic ^.^
Until publishers thought “huh, we can increase our margins AND increase our prices too for ebooks?!”
Then again, even that doesn't worry me too much, since I almost never read a book twice anyway. I think the only book I've read more than once is the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
For now, in my experience, ebooks have always been cheaper than print versions of the same work. I suspect that if one calculated the resell value of a printed book, the prices would come out about equal. Which is why I chose eBooks for their convenience.
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
I am a creature of comfort after all!
This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.
But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.
A few of them were about how economically alienated Millennials are and why. One book with a broken piggy bank on the cover blamed boomers.
I mention this because I don't know how accurate my next claim is about to be because I put the books that may support my claim back on the shelf. If I hadn't then I would've just hedged my argument with "I need time to read these books but..."
It's a shame that Millennial's are yet to be able to turn what I'm going to call "The People's High-Brow Culture"—half-low-brow-half-high-brow—into sustainable media.
I think Tumblr was peak 'what I'm referring to'. No, don't call it mid-brow. This is different. I think. Who am I kidding. I don't actually have to prove my point. If I can get enough people to wax nostalgic about how everything they consumed online, particularly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, had just the right blend of dilettante mediocracy...passionate exchanges about art and culture without the professional affect is what I'm struggling to describe.
It's probably less a matter of economic alienation alone but an institutional kind as well. Maybe they're correlated. I did not get popular economics books that would help make my case here.
Vice may have been the closest real outlet to what I'm trying to describe but we should all know how that turned out.
I'm imagining a dilettante mediocracy...people who were too naive to know that the people working for the actual publications parallel to them could afford to loaf around and try to get paid for covering the things they wrote about.
It seems that alls left of this era is "BookTok" and "BookTube" and somehow apparently...Anthony Fantano.
This is not a good explanation of what I think. Sorry.
I'm tired of puffy stuffy "Bequest betwixt the classics, my dear" sort of media that Portico represents to me.
When do I get be middle-aged and affect my good taste on younger generations who are desperately in need of it. I don't wanna read about Myrtle Beach and Dean Martin or Marcus Aurelius!
Portico??? I don't even own a house!
If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.
I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.
(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)
> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!
One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
So, you're praising a sort of cultured counterculture, and mourning it because you think it's gone away.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/516/278/c19...
Edit: Substack is mid-brow.