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!
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 ^.^
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.
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.
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!
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 ^.^
> 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?!”
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.
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.