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I find I don’t enjoy review-summaries unless I have a sense of why the reviewer is reading, what their own larger project is. If their larger project is just something like “read 100 books on X” I get bored. That shtick was interesting 5 years ago.
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Yeah definitely feel like an asshole posting this thread especially since I drafted off the benefits of writing about books back when there were far fewer people doing it and they had way more cachet than they do today.
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In 2009 nobody ever said of a book, “this should be a thread at best”. Even the fluffiest faddish business book was given benefit of doubt of having a decent essay’s worth of content to it. Books meant something beyond just being an intellectual calling card for “thought leaders”
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I think the book as a mainstream medium is possibly dead. Now new books are of the following types: 1. Personal brand calling card 2. Scholarly specialist things 3. B2B middleware for movies/TV, incidentally also read by nerds 4. Reactionary memberberries for waldenponders
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I think all the paper-book supremacists gloating at the plateauing of ebooks are misreading what’s happened. It’s not that p-books are fighting back, it’s that blogs etc are undermining both now. The p-book resurgence is a transient domestic cozy reactionary thing. Doomed.
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Replying to
I don't think this is quite true 😆 Ebook plateau partly due to weird econ stuff but also paper books = aesthetically preferable *and* resilient tech superior to ebooks in many ways (I'm no pbook supremacist, read lots on kindle too & all for new book forms/tech!)
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The resilience point I believe to be way overstated: people simply don't care. They're willing to risk loss of 99% of books. It's like activists think people care about privacy way more than they actually do. Whatever the actual risks, people act like recoverability will be easy.
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Yeah and related to that pricing weirdness, often cheaper to buy (used books at least!) Re: aesthetics, I'm thinking more about where it overlaps w/ actual utility. Books just feel good to hold, better to gift, etc. I think fairly pervasive even if unconscious
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yeah that's the main reason I've bought paper books recently: price. In rare cases (a couple of graphic novels) for aesthetics. Mostly I assume we're in a future of indefinitely improving general access and most stuff will go public domain and I won't even need to own them
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