Books are physically changing because of inflation

https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/09/08/books-are-physically-changing-because-of-inflation

by pseudolus • 4 years ago

67 103 4 years ago

witheld• 4 years ago

mercy_dude• 4 years ago

Does anyone read books anymore? I recently went to the university Library I went to 15yrs back and I was shocked to see how few students were reading books. Most were on their laptops presumably reading from e books.

senectus1• 4 years ago

yes, very very definitely.

doommius• 4 years ago

Printed books - > 300-400 € per semester. Ebooks from questionable sites - > free. + more and more material is from papers instead of books so pdf were easier unless you wanted to pay 20 cent per page printed at the university printers.

Markoff2• 4 years ago

By questionable you mean unofficial, right? Because your wording seems to imply these sites are somehow bad.

q-big• 4 years ago

Printed books - > 300-400 € per semester. Ebooks from questionable sites - > free. + more and more material is from papers instead of books so pdf were easier unless you wanted to pay 20 cent per page printed at the university printers.

As a student (or even researcher), you often gets these papers from similarly "questionable" websites because the typical university subscription for academic journals is not as encompassing as you need it for your studies/work.

asciimov• 4 years ago

Most people you see sitting at the library are doing class work or studying with online materials. If you want to see people using books, go up into the stacks or sit by the checkout desk.

bowsamic• 4 years ago

Why wouldn’t people still be reading books??

reedf1• 4 years ago

Text books are highly dense, and often complete works on a subject (or with reference to others forming a corpus of complete works). Some are kept up-to-date on a subject with annexes.

Few wrote read textbooks, they are often used as reference or worked from. But textbooks can form a through line or a framework to guide you through a subject in a bespoke way - as pictured by an expert or team of experts.

faeriechangling• 4 years ago

Sure I read physical books, but for me they are one medium among many and don’t hold the mysticism that teachers imbued them with.

They are very very big blocks of plaintext in sequential order. There’s only so many things books are good at. I’ve seen people buy paper books for classes with open book exams where ebooks are allowed and that’s just a mistake.

I feel as ebook technology improves just a tad from where it is today so we get some great large format color I’m probably going to stop buying books to save my wallet and I feel long term the physical book will become a novelty and picked up by hipsters in the same fashion as vinyl.

mcv4• 4 years ago

I can't seem to read from paper anymore. I read plenty online and from PDFs, but I really struggle to read a normal paper book.

This also makes it harder for my kids to read. Too many screens, games and youtube, and they just don't want to read from paper. My oldest at least reads some manga online.

stephenbennyhat• 4 years ago

Are you sure you don't need reading glasses? I find reading from screens (such as an iPad) physically much easier than reading from paper. Getting dedicated reading glasses made a huge difference to this and I found reading from paper became enjoyable again.

executesorder662• 4 years ago

Does anyone read books anymore?

No. Not a single person has read a paper book in the last 15 years. If you go into a book store right now and see someone buying a book with cash, then you can be sure they are a mule for a money laundering operation.

The people in public spaces that are "reading books", the pages are actually all blank. They are paid actors employed by Big Publishing to keep the facade up that they are legitimate businesses, and are not just fronts for laundering money for drug cartels and the like.

They are all in on it, and you better keep quiet, or they will be on to you.

selimthegrim• 4 years ago

The birds (which aren’t real) are reading the books

pwinnski6• 4 years ago

A university library would be the last place I'd expect to see people reading books.

Try a non-university library, an airport, a beach, a coffee shop, poolside, or any number of other places, but university libraries are for studying and doing homework, not usually reading books.

guidoism• 4 years ago

Good. I hope authors start writing more succinctly.

benj1112• 4 years ago

Do you not want your novels bo be loccuatious?

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

*loquacious (unless this is intended as a meta-joke)

szszrk2• 4 years ago

There are weird differences between publishers in different countries.

In Poland there is this weird contest of making books largest possible. Mandatory points are huge font, enormous margins, huge spaces between paragraphs and chapters always starting from new page. Preferably with some graphic on half of such starting page. Magnified if it's a children's book. Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.

It is shocking when you take same book released in UK or US. It looks like at least cut in HALF and actually much easier to read.

sofixa3• 4 years ago

Similar in France, books are enormous - huge fonts, very wide margins everywhere, thick paper. The French editions of A Song of Ice and Fire are spread in more (IIRC all books after the first one are split in two) and bigger books than the English ones. It's a horrible waste.

Meanwhile there are "pocket" editions that are on the small side, but better.

The only positive excuse i can find is that publishers consider that the majority of their readers would be older and with poor vision, so bigger books.

bloak• 4 years ago

Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.

That's pretty much universal in modern English books, too, and I've seen it given as a rule in several places.

I'm not sure about other languages and other times, but first editions of Kafka definitely have some long paragraphs: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Prozess/1._Kapitel

layer82• 4 years ago

I would actually appreciate larger font and graphics in English books, it would be easier on the eyes. in return they could drop all the filler and repetition in nonfiction books. Fiction books often could also use some editing.

nostromo• 4 years ago

As noted in the article, usually they just use shitty thin paper.

ahartmetz• 4 years ago

You were thinking of Neal Stephenson, right?

drewcoo• 4 years ago

That wouldn't fix his endings.

mcv4• 4 years ago

Not sure why that's downvoted; I'm a slow reader and frequently annoyed at how excessively verbose too many books these days are. SciFi books from a couple of decades ago were much shorter and often better than SciFi books today. I like books that get to the point and tell me straight up what they're about and what the central idea of it is.

politelemon• 4 years ago

I would expect publishers to start promoting ebooks more as it moves consumer attention away from physical books, and the publishers should be able to format the pages, margins, lettering however they want. That is, if they have the foresight to do so and their workflows can handle it.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

I hope this is not the case. After working all day on a computer the last thing I want to do is to look at a screen.

sofixa3• 4 years ago

I have really sensitive eyes (astigmatism, easily strained, dry, photosensitive) and I can't look at a screen without my glasses for more than a minute without getting a headache (but have otherwise perfect vision). The e-ink screens i own, a last gen Kindle and an Onyx Boox, are really paper-like and do not tire my eyes at all.

bonzini• 4 years ago

It's not a screen that emits light, it's a surface that reflects it. (Technically there are usually small LEDs on the side but they don't hurt your vision, you hardly notice them unless your room light is off).

pwinnski6• 4 years ago

When my eyes reach their limit with computer and phone screens, I reach for my Kindle Paperwhite. That one screen, with its matte surface and side-lighting, lets my eyes relax.

im3w1l• 4 years ago

It won't be long until "Siri, read me a story"

mikro2nd2• 4 years ago

You'll not prise my paper books from my cold, dead hands with a crowbar. I dislike ebooks intensely and won't use/buy them except for the most ephemeral use-cases (tech books).

executesorder662• 4 years ago

I am the same. When it comes to a tech reference book, I want something that I can search, and copy+paste text from. But if I am reading for entertainment, an e-book is the worst experience I can imagine.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

Well, that depends on the purpose. Quick dictionary search and quick browsing (and libraries at hand, etc.) can be quite advantageous.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th• 4 years ago

I don't dislike ebooks, but otherwise agree with you.

greenie_beans• 4 years ago

the book, like the bike, is a perfect invention

layer82• 4 years ago

the publishers should be able to format the pages, margins, lettering however they want.

For e-books, hopefully they shouldn’t. The reader should.

temp2022account• 4 years ago

I'd be all in favor of ebooks as a first-class citizen, except we've been down this road before and we all know where it leads: Books with advertisements embedded in them, which would ruin reading for me.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

For what paper scarcity is concerned, the products of foremost (in quantity and name) publishers have already been pulp fiction level for a long time, compared to the offer in other countries.

For what text amount - which one cannot really write as "content amount" - is concerned, that is limited to some specific slices of the "market", e.g. what in some territories is called "literature for evasion". For that matter a piece of information run according to which the highest slice of market in the USA is of colouring books - but that just stretches the gap between "what a book can be" and the standard of "the codified way to convey information and wisdom". It is odd to speak about books and refer to "commissioned hypnotic material".

Dalewyn3• 4 years ago

I feel word salad like this will be literature's undoing, rather than any scarcity of physical media like paper.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

I beg your pardon? What do you mean?

If you intend to accuse my style of something, be more substantive - I just rechecked what I wrote and, yes, I had to correct a 'could' into a 'can'. For the rest, I do not see anything wrong.

You state you "«feel»", but in a discussion board you should elaborate.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

Now that the message of Dalewyn is clearer:

what once was denounced as "undoing" was "newspeak" (as per Orwell), which is in a way the opposite...

I can confirm that the original post was the opposite of "«salad»": the structures were intended and all (reasonably) terms were chosen.

pwinnski6• 4 years ago

English is such a marvelously flexible language, and yet you've stretched it beyond common understanding still.

For what paper scarcity is concerned...
For what text amount... is concerned...

I don't think this construction works as well as you think it does.

If I can try to translate what you meant, I'd guess:

As far as paper scarcity goes, the foremost US publishers have already been publishing only "pulp fiction" for a long time, especially in contrast to publishers in other countries.

As far as text size goes, that's only an issue in some segments of the market. In some countries it's called "literature for evasion." For that matter, the biggest slice of the market in the USA is coloring books, but that stretches the definition of "books."

I don't even think I agree with most of what you said, but it wasn't until I tried to translate it into readable English that I knew that.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

I am not sure I would fully recognize what I intended in your rephrasing. The first point was about how often those publications feel like "pulp paper" - they are very cheap. In some territories, that happened with publishers that faced some financial crisis, while with one of the most known publishers in English language it is the typical experience.

In the second point, I noted that the amount of text (character count) seems to have a critical relation to the burden set by inflation primarily with that literature that seems to be inflating the number of pages as part of its virtual "key performance indicators". Which seemed to me an odd focus in the article, since "many things are a book" (it seems to some data, as I mentioned, that the largest part of books sold in the USA are colouring books), but for Books (especially when we are talking about a context of crisis), I think of James Joyce and Umberto Eco, not of those produced with the purpose of "I really need to think to something different than the daily hassles, for the longest possible time".

mdp202117• 4 years ago

By the way: you used 'as far as x goes' in your translations: I have not had much time to think about it and verify it, but for example I would avoid that expression, for the "relation" I rendered though 'for what x is concerned': because I do not see the metaphor of "covering some distance" proper for the purpose (I may be wrong, I would need a bit of time for concentration).

I would avoid it just like I would try to avoid in French the expression 'tout le monde' for "everyone", because "it is not the whole of the world: it is just this room", or in Spanish the term 'Argelia' because, "really, you inverted them sounds".

That is how I write: vetting the expressions like a judge. I do not know if you do the same.

Stratoscope• 4 years ago

The pleasure of a book that feels right in the hand—not too light or too heavy; pages creamy; fonts beetle-black—is something that publishers strive to preserve.

I am having some cognitive dissonance here.

I have hundreds of books in my pocket. Thousands if you count my O'Reilly subscription.

Nothing about them has changed because of inflation. Except maybe the price.

Yes, all my books "feel" about the same now. And if I don't like the way they feel - maybe because of the font size - I can adjust that for any book.

Here is what I am confused about. Nobody calls an old vinyl LP or a CD "music". No one calls a DVD a "movie".

Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?

Yes, of course I realize that many people prefer those creamy pages and beetle-black fonts. And for some things I do enjoy the printed page.

But for the most part, I am happy that I have all my books handy on whatever device I'm using. I don't think any more of a book as being the printed word.

RamblingCTO• 4 years ago

Because books always meant the physical books. ebooks are something else. Don't make it weird.

manigandham2• 4 years ago

Because that is what a book is - a physical item. You’re using the wrong word.

Literature is to music as a book is to vinyl or CD.

karlerss• 4 years ago

Alternatively, if you know the type of literature, you can call it a novel or a poetry collection.

ben0x539• 4 years ago

Eh, "book" is widely used as the unit of literature. If someone says "I wrote a book!", you don't assume that they created exactly one physical item by writing on a lot of pages and tying them together or anything.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

a physical item

Not really. More like, "a container". It goes in the direction of "physical" (as opposed to the content), but it is not necessarily physical. For example, a file already is a "book".

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Ultimately, I use a Kindle and an iPad because it's more convenient, but with a book I can, afterwards (sometimes many months or years afterwards), remember parts of the book by the section they were in and frequently take only a couple of skips to get to the sentence I want.

That's a pretty neat feeling when you don't remember the words but the idea and the rough location so there's some distinct utility. But perhaps AI fuzzy search will suffice in the years to come.

EZ-Cheeze• 4 years ago

Really good post that makes you think about Platonic ideals.

rob74• 4 years ago

To quote Wikipedia:

A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover.[1] The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex (plural, codices). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.

...so the book is the medium, not the abstract work of literature. A novel can be available as a book or an eBook (or, if you feel really "retro", as a scroll) the same way as a music album can be available as a vinyl record, a CD or via streaming.

panxyh• 4 years ago

I am having some cognitive dissonance here.
Yes, of course I realize that many people prefer those creamy pages and beetle-black fonts.
But for the most part, [me me me]

So is your confusion about semantics, or that some people prefer physical books, which you seem to understand anyway?

How is your preference for digital books in conflict with line you quoted?

The drawbacks and upsides of both medium types are obvious, as is the fact that a medium isn't synonymous with it's content but not irrelevant.

gjvc• 4 years ago

This is just vapid sophistry.

fhcyvgdneej• 4 years ago

I don't understand the confusion here whatsoever. People still associate records with a certain warnth and unintended sounds like scratching. Further, no one who reads significsntly considers books to be just physical books. It's a srrawman. The distinction is that the lower bar for books that exist /only/ as ebooks (due to cheaper publishing costs) results in a noticeable drop in quality that leads to a prejudice against ebook‐only texts amongst consumers.

ephbit• 4 years ago

Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?

Maybe because until some 15 years ago, physical books/magazines/newspapers have been _the_ medium that people had been using to consume the vast majority of written texts over centuries, from their very childhood to old age.

Doesn't surprise me at all.

mdp202117• 4 years ago

Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?

Well, terminologically (which is not the exact focus), because 'book' is the «medium»: 'book' comes from "bark" ("beech") and as such intends the container; the content could be called 'text' ("the weaving of ideas").

So, on the actual point:

-- the distinction involving "vinyl" and "opticals", "music" and "movies" on the one hand, and books on the other, is simply that relatively little option for the "storage of words" has fused the ideas of "books" and "texts" more closely.

-- and going towards the point of the quote, there is an actual experience of the object, an appreciation, which is important to some. You have a parallel in "music and movies", but more than in the container, it is in the "reproduction equipment" - theater vs mobile vs television vs projector etc.

pwinnski6• 4 years ago

I think you have it backward? Although to a certain extent, books have lasted so long as a technology that the two meanings have become intertwined.

Movies used to come on VHS tapes, now they come on DVDs or via streaming.

Music used to come on 8-tracks, then cassette tapes, then CDs, now streaming.

Novels once came as scrolls, perhaps, but still mostly come as books, although now often ebooks.

Non-fiction writing also mostly comes as books, and I suspect non-fiction ebooks are a smaller percentage of overall non-fiction sales than that of novels.

elliekelly• 4 years ago

Reviews of Ms Rowling’s new book were largely positive

What? This article was clearly written by someone with an angle or who doesn’t follow the publishing industry. The reviews were “largely positive” simply because the book was so terrible the vast majority of reviewers opted not to review it at all. JKR obviously wields a lot of influence in the publishing world and silence from book reviewers about her latest novel speaks volumes.

Compare the four reviews of JKR’s The Ink Black Heart[1] with the 12 reviews given to Richard Osmond’s latest The Bullet that Missed[2] or Stephen Kings newest title Fairy Tale[3] which received 13 reviews or even debut novels from unknown authors like Kaikeyi[4] Beautiful Country[5] both of which received nearly twice as many reviews as Rowling.

[1]https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-ink-black-heart/

[2]https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-bullet-that-missed-a-t...

[3]https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/fairy-tale/

[4]https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/kaikeyi/

[5]https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/beautiful-country-a-memoir...

Books are physically changing because of inflation

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