Dvergar wrote:
Borders failed because of it's own deficiencies.
Visiting a Borders, with all these smug complacent people buying pop "literature", music that sounds like something out of
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in the background, and eating the disgusting emulsified food they serve, makes me wish I could mow them all down with a chainsaw.
Seriously, last time I visited one, their inventory was like 95% crap and most of it wasn't even books, it was music, electronics, toys, and a massive abundance of shitty kitsch. The books they did have were disproportionately political bullshit or by female or colored authors (as in, the authors weren't good enough to stand on their own merits).
I came there trying to buy some classical texts I needed for my Capstone paper. The Classical Literature section was categorized under History (as in, "this has no relevance in the here and now"), was badly organized (included in this section were some books about Leif Erikson) and I found none of the six or so titles I was looking for.
So then I went to a used bookstore near Harvard and got everything I needed, and more, a stack of about a dozen like-new books, for the cost of two books at Borders.
Dvergar wrote:
It will. It will take time and it won't stamp it out entirely, but eventually e-readers will trump books for new releases.
I pretty much agree with Dvergar's take on it.
But I think a lot of that is less because of the merits of the ebook and more because of the complacency and stupidity of publishers, and the "TLDR" culture of illiteracy and general stupidity.
Modern books are written according to an arbitrary and really bad scheme: all books have to be about the same length (250-600 pages), have the same layout (introduction, several chapters, conclusion that restates introduction), and a ton of often specious citations. This means that most modern literature is stereotyped, irrelevant, and of low quality.
This also creates production and storage problems. Why keep around a shitton of mostly irrelevant and bloated books? So much easier to put all that garbage on disk and never open the files. Because the books are devoid of substance, a lot of resources go into appearance - relief covers, shiny photo ink covers, etc, all of which dramatically increases the production cost above simple pulp with plain covers.
Now, you look at books from the 20th century, most of them are pure pulp, with simple black-and-white illustrations, with plain covers, and they don't follow a single scheme - I learned about science mostly from a collection of 40-page pamphlets written in plain English and distributed by the American government during the postwar era. In
Saddam's Bombmaker, the author says, tongue-in-cheek, "we referred to the bookshelf with a big sign [saying it was a gift from the US], these reference books were very helpful to us".
Also, in both the recent and distant past, literature was much more diverse in scheme. You have books like
De Republica or
The Republic which take the form of an imaginary dialogue. A lot of books, such as
The Communist Manifesto, were very short, only a few dozen pages long.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is something like 5000 pages long (now THAT'S a TLDR - just reading it is considered a major accomplishment). There's a lot less diversity today, and a lot more funneling everything into a single format regardless of how inappropriate that format is.
If a book can be 50 pages long, or needs a few thousand, or should take a format other than a narrative, or take the form of prose or rhetoric, then that's how it should be.
Instead you see the crap at Borders, with books that borrow the worst elements of modern art, with random words or scribblings on pages, or vertical layout, or other total shit.
If publishers published books that were interesting and relevant and not purely political, printed strict economy versions, and "aimed higher" (rather than letting Harvard and Oxford have a monopoly on all non-moron texts, esp since they do it so badly by making all their shit almost unreadable unless you already have the information you need), books could be a much more mainstream form of media.
As it happens, I'm probably going to running off an endless supply of 30-80 year old books that keep washing up in bankrupt libraries and junk shops. Buying new books is for suckers. No, seriously.
