>>> "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.

I love libraries.

It also feels like all our public institutions in the US are crumbling under assault from all sides.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Your son can do that too. Make sure he knows it.

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.

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.

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.

> 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…)

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those already on top.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

Globally, this class of people definitely wants to reduce literacy to keep a stream of manual labor inflowing.

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.

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)

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

Like for English a good 3 would be Infinite Jest (trendy, pretentious), Moby Dick (classic), and Lord of The Rings (meme worthy).

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.

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.

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 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.

Random stat from my Oregon county (pop. 600k) library collective of 16 local libraries: 2023 saw 10.8M items checked out, up 4% from 2022

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.

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 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.

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.

The same type of revelation of the person, who says that foodstamps are totally unnecessary expenditure.

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."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-libraries...

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 agree that it's artificial scarcity and it's hard to feel bad for the publishing companies

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.

That seems very much like a disruption to me. In the "interruption to the regular flow or sequence of something" meaning of the word.

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.

Or maybe one better: eliminate restrictions on content sharing.

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.

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.

The cycle of enshittification consumes all.

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.

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.

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?

Also libriaries does not have to buy any book.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

If you want to make an accusation of corruption you need to be more specific.

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.

1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44

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.

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.

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.

Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy

(Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)

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.

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.

The vast majority of sales is still paper books.

> 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.

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.

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.

[1] https://wordsrated.com/book-sales-statistics/

[2] https://wordsrated.com/ebooks-sales-statistics/

(they don't cite sources, but a quick checks makes it quite clear the numbers come from Statista - some of it behind their paywall)

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.

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.

It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.

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?

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.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/13/amazon-hachett...

I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more.

Both of those seem very positive to me.

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.

The world will be a better place without them.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

Uncanny valley, or maybe I just read the signals and interpreted them right.

When was the last time someone bought you an ebook as a gift? This is is the main market for cookbooks, for example.

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.

e-books - Great. Sell e-books yourselves. Sell better e-books with Publisher extras.

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.

Publishers have been shafting authors for centuries. I'll shed no tears on their behalf.

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.

It seems to me that you're rather underestimating the importance of having something to put in the book.

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.

Not sure why I am this way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have one professional development book and was going find a work of fiction to start. Hope it works out.

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.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also wound up inadvertently encouraging other people to get them.

Only one person out of about 6 who got them after I got them didn't use them. She didn't actually read much.

...they can get my money.

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 ;)

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)

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.

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 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.

This and the fact that the kindle is _exactly_ where I left it, no need for physical bookmarks.

I can skim through a shelf full of books in a way that I’m just not able to with ebooks, even with stuff like full text search available in Calibre.

A progress bar really doesn't replace the context of the stack of pages behind and ahead of your current page.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t take notes when I’m reading fiction like “A Man Called Ove”. But I do take notes and flip back and forth when I’m reading say Girard.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is why I find "saving space during travels" a very relative argument to make, because it's clearly down to preference.

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.

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 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.

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.

I suppose the use case is picking up the kindle at night in a dark room while you disabled the light when you were reading outside during the day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like a fair compromise to me re: ecological impact.

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.

As if food packaging is particulary ecological, but we continue to order food, eat takeaway and processed food reliant on packaging.

I also buy paper books. Cheap paperback ones.

Books can easily be recycled as opposed to food packaging which mostly ends up in landfills or litters the environment.

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.