Now a New York-based literary agent, Romero owns an Amazon Kindle, which is roughly the same size as a mass-market paperback but can store thousands of books rather than one. Still, she feels that something is being lost. “Whether it was the ink or the paper, they had a certain smell and it’s very nostalgic to me and many others.
“We’re definitely losing accessibility and that’s a huge thing right now, especially in this country, whether it’s libraries being defunded, book bannings happening, one person saying let’s get rid of 200 books because I don’t want my child to read diverse authors.
“At the same time when you’re looking, for example, at kid lit, a 14- or 15-year-old is not going to be able to buy maybe a $19.99 or $21.99 hardcover YA book, especially if they’re working a minimum-wage or babysitting job, so it becomes fully inaccessible whereas they could have just gone and picked something up like a mass-market paperback. That affordability was huge. It’s sad to see.”
As our own Bloke on M4 has been known to note, the Kindle – and the like – has massively increased availability.
$50 gets you access to more free stuff than you can read in a lifetime. Sure, much of it won’t be all that good. But then nor were many of the mass market paperbacks any good…..
And it has improved disability accessibility with its text options – no-one needs to get a large print version (often not available in mass market paperback).
I’m not disabled, Julia.
Just old
Less need for libraries today. Who is banning books? I know that many parents don’t want their kids stuffed full of tranny nonsense and I also know that in the US parents have tried to get books about fisting etc removed from schools. No one is stopping this stuff being published, although the authorities should probably check the authors’ hard drives.
“banning” = “book isn’t being forced to be bought using public funds and put in the children’s section at the library”.
You can’t hate these people enough for their torture of the English language.
I remember 25 yers ago I downloaded for free a huge library of the classics that were out of copyright. That was for my PalmPilot 🙂
I assume I could do that for my Kindle too. (I haven’t read a book on it for years now. My eyes prefer paper.
/Jonathan
Just let the Libby app and you get free access to e-books from your local library. Doesn’t have everything but there’s a good selection.
No, there’s a bad selection.
I’m subscribed to the Edinburgh libraries and it’s a horrible mixture of the woke, romance, and lightweight local history. There’s some popular but worthwhile stuff in there but it’s mighty hard to find: when you do, you’ll have to reserve it but I don’t mind that.
Almost every time I’ve done an author search it’s recognised the author and even suggested titles – but they’re not actually available. You can register your interest and apparently they’ll consider making an addition. Yeah, right.
And this from the capital of something pretending to be a nation.
Yes, I remain a member of my university library specifically to get access to the technical references. I often find I’m the only person who has booked some of them out – though I wouldn’t know how many times they’ve been used without booking out.
Must admit I do go down to Library and lounge in air-conditioned comfort while I read the newspapers.
And every now and then I spot a book, and take it out and read it. Makes my retirement quite pleasant!!
Or the Kindle App – no need to buy a Kindle.
Yarp. A comment made there by Raffles. You can read all classic literature for about $0. Nearly all the Austens, Whartons, Dickens etc. If someone hasn’t put them in the Kindle store, they’re on Project Gutenberg as epub files.
Lots of old books have been republished on Kindle because the cost is tiny. You don’t need to do a print run (expensive for small volumes, cost of storage). Scan the book, proofread it and put it on the Kindle store. You don’t have a high barrier to publishing. The British Library Crime Classics series, detective books from the 1920s and 1930s are about £3 a book.
“whether it’s libraries being defunded”
If it’s like the UK, good. Libraries are empty. Almost no-one is using them. Which leads to the bizarre situation that the cost per rental is about as much as buying a physical book from Amazon. Libraries were useful 100 years ago, when books cost a lot to make, so you shared them around. But they aren’t expensive to make now if you’re knocking out JK Rowling and Andy Weir books.
And I’m with Julia on this. I don’t have reading glasses. My optician says I could have them, but I just put the text a bit bigger. Does the same job.
Also, the thing of Kindle apps and Kindles is cool. Read a kindle book, but if you’re on the bus, open it in the app on the phone and have a few pages, Go home and your Kindle moves forward.
Thousands of free digital books available on Project Gutenberg:- https://archive.org/details/gutenberg
Yeah, quality’s not always great though. Some of the older ones that were just computer scanned without being tidied up are pretty much unreadable.
One of my lockdown projects was tidying up a particularly bad one by a long out of copyright author I like, with a view to putting it up on Kindle, but it was a huge job because there were so many mistakes.
I understand people wanting to read real books as well as using a Kindle. It isn’t a completely rational thing, I have a mechanical watch that I really like even though my quartz one is more accurate, I have a digital piano but I would have an acoustic grand if I could afford it and had the space for it.
Claiming that real books are unaffordable is just absurd. There are free exchanges at supermarkets and in old phone boxes, charity shops sell them for pennies. I just bought a Jules Verne book, a beautiful hard back tome with over eight hundred pages, a tenner from Amazon.
I still buy books, but a handful of hardbacks a year rather than dozens of paperbacks.
I still buy paper books though I have a Kobo reader. I must have bought thousands over the decades – mainly paperback novels but also hardbacks for technical & reference books. A year or two ago I managed to get all John Wyndham’s novels in paperback, all second hand though – I first read Day of the Triffids and a few others as a teenager. I acquired a lot of Ted Allbeury novels as paperbacks years ago but they were going for a song on Kobo so I bought the lot on there.
I find software books easier as paper. Because you’ll get a figure on one page, and then text on the next and you have to keep flipping back and forth with a Kindle, or referencing something earlier. I can’t remember the last time I bought a novel on paper for me.
Yup. KDP gives you access to thousands of books for the price of your subscription. Personally, I prefer print, but then, I still use a fountain pen.
Books are free if you know where to look and don’t mind what you read.
It’s the same shit with people whining about the barrier-to-entry costs of creativity, as a pretext to demolishing copyright. Singing, dancing, acting and reciting poetry require no tools at all. A pencil and paper can be had for nothing and with them you can draw, write, write music, and make sculpture and origami. Creativity and its expression really isn’t a scarce resource.
One of the greatly underrated additions to our wealth, is the work of Project Gutenberg where out-of-copyright books get made available, for no cost, in a variety of formats. A quarter-century ago that was a bit of a niche (I had the complete Sherlock Holmes collection on my Psion 5, then added Alexander Dumas) but it’s now really easy to reach out to a vast archive of literature.
Read them on a Kindle, view them on a mobile phone, print them out and read them on paper, up to you how you do it.
There will remain a market for books on paper (just as music on CD, even vinyl, still has its niche) but access to a great many famous texts is now trivially easy, at a negligible marginal cost.
For no cost?
Someone, somewhere is paying.
Go to https://www.gutenberg.org/ and note that (a) downloading is free to the visitor, (b) there’s a link in the top right for donations.
The thing with books is that the cost per download is tiny. A novel without images on ePub is about 300k. That compares to about 5mb for a song and around 1GB for a movie.
Downloads on AWS are about 9c per GB. So, it costs about $1 for 30,000 downloads. If you give $5, that’s funding over 100,000 downloads.
It runs on a small number of staff. It’s all set up, just keep the software ticking over. They don’t fart around with new logos and making it pretty. And new books are added using giant book scanners and the OCR is checked with humans volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders. You can go on there and just get a random page, and it gives you the scan and the text and you fix the odd thing. I’ve done a few pages.
The complete Dumas? That should get you through 15 years in the Chateau d’If.
I once managed the complete musketeer saga over a Christmas break
Just one of many examples of Leftist dishonesty – not putting books with graphic sexual content in elementary schools is not “banning books”.
Somebody pointed out a really funny example; there was a bookstore with a table right inside the front door advertising a pile of “banned books” for sale.
And if that’s not enough . . .
I don’t know whether the UK has this, but in the US, there’s an app called Hoopla, that can load on your phone, on a laptop, on smart TV’s, on a Kindle. And what it does is give you online lending of the entire digital catalogue of your local lending library, that your property taxes pay for. Books, periodicals, movies, audiobooks, TV shows, educational materials of every sort, historical records, the scope is too vast to even comprehend. And it’s all free. The only limit is that there’s a cap on how many items you can borrow per month, and loans are for 30 days. It’s totally integrated – you can read or watch anything seamlessly across all devices. I can climb off the tractor listening to Sherlock Holmes Bluetoothed off my phone and walk into my shop and it’s synced on the laptop on the shelf. It’s just stunningly-good.
I wanted to see the first Ealing comedy, ‘Hue and Cry’, from 1946, again. One streaming service had it for rent, at $6.99, plus I had to subscribe to the service. No, thank you. On Hoopla – free, right now.
Access to published material is at a level that one could only have dreamed of just a few years ago, at lower cost than ever before. This woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and I suspect her real beef is that young readers don’t seek out enough access to what she thinks they ought to be reading.
llater,
llamas
I’ve spent a lot of time in my library digitising and proofreading archives, with the unfortunate effect that I now rarely need to go the library as the data I need is now digially accessible. 😉
“We’re definitely losing accessibility and that’s a huge thing right now, especially in this country, where everyone has internet.”
FIFY
“one person saying let’s get rid of 200 books because I don’t want my child to read diverse authors”
How dare a parent control what their child reads! That’s the job of New York literary agents.
Characterizing kiddie porn as ‘diverse authors’ is sufficient to ban all diversity. Her assertion transcends all of society, not just books. She defends kiddie porn. And still has a job.
Warning: don’t follow the link –
https://shellyromero.com/
Should have heeded the warning…
Agreed. God, she’s hideous.
And what the fuck is a ‘final girl’?
Actually, I don’t care.
In her case, fervently to be hoped for. Give her a Darwin Award.
I read diverse authors as a teen. Silverberg, Asimov, Varley, Vance, Poul, Van Voght, Heinlein, Smith, Bradbury, Clerk, Knight, that’s a diverse set of authors.
I generally prefer books on paper, but sometimes, especially for non fiction, digital is far superior. Instead of laboriously looking up a footnote you just tap on the link.
The great thing about Kindle is you don’t need to purchase from Amazon, so all the books are free
Something no one has commented on is what to do with print books after you have read them. One might give them away, or keep them. I’m in the latter category, and have two personal libraries for print books at home. Some of the books I have read more than once. One personal library is recreational reading, the other is technical stuff. When I worked in a University, I had three personal libraries of print books! The Kindle is an extra library for digital books.
At home, I must be a favoured customer for IKEA’s ‘Billy’ bookcases.They are certainly better than the MFI ones they replaced. Is it my imagination, or have they shot up in price recently?
Last year, I needed to convert one of my libraries back into a bedroom for occasional use with a ‘Study Bed’ (see the Study Bed company on the web – their products are brilliant). It required some carpentry on the Billys, and parting company with several series of books that I didn’t intend to read again to make up for lost shelf space.
The Kindle takes up a lot less shelf space than most books.
In answer to JuliaM, yes, you can read with larger print, but a Kindle or its equivalent has to be a larger size model if you are to read equations / formulae, and the dynamic reformatting often loses some of the connection between the body of text and any figures, or even between figures and their captions. Plain text is my preference for a Kindle or Kindle Fire that is one of the smaller sizes.
Book cases full of books will stop bullets.
Follow me for more tips on home defense.
I’ve had to have a periodic clearout but it’s a case of what to ditch? I’ve had to re-acquire books I had let go because I realised i wanted to read them again. I built bookshelves in our study but they are all chock-full so we have bookshelves in other rooms too.
Having to clear out the ancestral house. Three entire rooms near wholly walled in bookcases, plus a few that have escaped onto landings and corridors….
Online access to “stuff” has improved literacy massively, reversing an unexpected decline at the end of the 20th century, and allows kids to socially interact with a far greater variety of other people and a far greater number of people with similar interests than ever before. Even in my school of 2,000 pupils there were only four “like me” people that I hung out with. Online and electronic access had eliminated the purgatory of growing up being the only whatever in the village.
Clearly IT MUST BE BANNED!!!!!
An interesting and iconoclastic counterpoint.
But, and let me run this by you, isn’t what you describe basically turning everyone into everyone else’s mere pen-pal?
Whoever invented the epub document format, hated people who read.
When I go down to the local bib and browse along the shelves, I find books I would never have encountered otherwise. Second-hand book shops know what sells and what doesn’t, and only keep glossy blockbuster best-sellers.
an Amazon Kindle, which is roughly the same size as a mass-market paperback
That doesn’t actually describe it. My Kindle’s considerably less than 1cm thick. In paperback terms, around 50 pages. Most paperbacks are around twice that & many far more. Which means you can easily take A Kindle virtually anywhere. Fit’s in an inside jacket pocket or a small handbag. And because you can, you often do. When you wouldn’t want to be bothered lugging a bulky book around, just in case.