This is how our retail bookstores are except half the items in the shop aren’t even books.
Here bookstores have become mostly selling useless trinkets nobody needs, music and games.
Thank chist I have dropped book reading as a hobby otherwise I’d be pretty upset.
I feel like this is more specifically just your average Barnes and Noble. We have two small bookstores in town, one mostly selling used books and the other is mostly new, and they are the best. Soft instrumental music, a nice atmosphere, stands displaying local authors. They’re great.
Very on point, other than small indie or used book stores, the main part of every book store is filled with books with meaningless titles and art. And only likes to tell you about its awards and reviews.
My god, am I grateful for our local indie bookstore.
Theres a local used bookstore which is only vaguely organized, smells of decades if not centuries old paper, the politics section is just piles of conservative nonsense and two rows of well organized works by economic philosophers, and theres a cobweb covered copy of Dianetics on top of the Sci-fi shelf. It is truly cozy and glorious.
There are always copies of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. There are always copies of The Two Towers or Return of the King, but frequently no copies of The Fellowship of the Ring. There are always copies of the Chronicles of Narnia books, but never an entire set from the same printing. The staff will always have an author that they will defend their excellent writing while acknowledging that they were horrible human beings, e. g. H. P. Lovecraft, Ernest Hemingway, and recently we get to add Neil Gaiman. If you’re very lucky, someone came in and sold a first autographed edition that’s worth $100+ but the buyer screwed the pooch and priced it at $10.
Edit: Hang out long enough, and you’ll get to hear a customer come in and ask “Can you recommend a book for me?” without providing any more helpful details, and you can hear the staffer’s soul break just a tiny bit more.
Life is too short to read shitty self help books that’s written by influencers(yuck) or some LLM shit books. Read the classics.
There are loads of great contemporary writers. Some of the best books I’ve ever read have come out in the past 4 years.
You gotta find your favorite classics. I can’t read some old 19th century British lady writing about 18th century British teenagers getting married to their cousins, but I fuck with HP Lovecraft and HG Wells
Awards are meaningless. “NYT bestseller”, just as meaningless.
Books are personal, like art, you probably will not actually like the vast majority of what you see. Even if you appreciate the effort that went into it you wouldn’t want it hanging in your home. Some of it is just hotel art. Mass produced for consumption, everyone sees it, but it has no staying power at all. A lot of books are crap, and I really like books.
Around 2010, I worked for a company where one project was to increase the social profile of our company. We hired a marketing company to help us improve how our CTO, CEO, CFO, all the C-level folks looked to the public. Pretty much, throwing money to make these people get famous, so the company to could make money from all the news.
A year later, CFO was on talk shows discussing his new book, which was a NYT best seller. The book was garbage and full of content scraped from a dozen other “thought leaders”.
The thought leader circlejerk where hundreds of them have ghost writers write their shit, all of them tell the same 10 stories, all of them quote each other, all of them buy their way onto NYT best sellers list because some thought leader friend wanted to do the same so they inflate the sales. Then the Ted talks, the podcast tours, the constant INNOVATORS bs. Yuck.
Yep. The recycling of profundity.
I’d rather read a book that had “NYT Least Best Seller”
Support your local independent bookstores (if you still have any)!
I don’t know how common bookstores that are not part of large chains still are in other countries, here in Germany we have this thing called Buchpreisbindung (roughly translates to “fixed book prices”) which means bookstores actually have to compete only through presentation and their professional advice. Independent bookstores often have very knowledgeable personal that can give you great advice for free (in case of Germany) or with little extra cost compared to just ordering on Amazon/one of the corporate chains, e.g. at the bookstore around the corner the owner has been selling books for 50 years and has read basically everything ever published at this point.
She has just recommended me Gentleman overboard which is a short, although nonetheless incredibly moving book about a gentleman… well, going over board.
As for the titles/front page design/self-help books: I feel with OOP, but this seems to be what people care about/still feel they have the time to read. One actually very good (although slightly older) book from this rather modern category is The subtle art to not give a fuck.
Tldr go out, search for and support independent bookstores!
Ya don’t have to read those books, y’know.
Is this about the US? Is the US alright?
I was in a bookstore yesterday. I did have a chuckle at this self-help book called something along the lines of “How to Politely Tell People to Fuck Off”, which proudly stated to be written by a social therapist or some other Pokemon evolution of a psychologist.
Otherwise it was novels from mainstay authors, young adult stuff whose quality was undecypherable from their “my cousin knows Photoshop” covers and a bunch of pseudo-academic highly specific texts from local self-published authors.
I was disheartened to see that the native minority language section keeps shrinking, especially among children’s stuff. And while I was looking at that I also noticed the manga section is bigger than the graphic novel section and that is bigger than US comics, which were now nonexistent. More neutral about that one.
You know very well that the US is not alright, lol
Is there a country you would consider alright?
No not really, but most are less fucked up than the USA
We’re #1!
Most? Like Venezuela and North Korea? Ethiopia? Yemen? Cambodia? Ukraine? Russia? Sierre Leone? Mexico? Canada? Italy? Greece? Iraq? Iran? Sudan? South Africa? Sweden? Afghanistan? China?
Edit: ITT a bunch of rich trust fund wannabe commies who have never left their affluent neighborhood to visit anywhere except a four seasons in another wealthy country.
I get you’re trying to be clever by listing a bunch of places that the US has either bombed, couped or threatened into destitution but that doesn’t really make them less “alright” in the sense we’re talking about here. And even for living standards, many of those are much nicer lmao. Then what’s left… Yeah Russia also sucks, ok? If that’s your bar for a country being alright then we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
More than half of those have higher average living standards than the US.
As a Canadian I’m very confused by this guy, I think he might have brain damage
No they don’t
Politically however it seems to be all right lately.
I always have a book or author in mind when I go to a book store. I have walked past the displays anon mentions, but they are ‘whats new’ advertising so they are flashy and change often.
My complaint is that the types of books I like are given less and less shelf space every year. Romance and children’s books have mostly replaced science fiction and fantasy. I guess the stores know what sells and stock it.Presumably science fiction and fantasy readers are more likely to use e-books and audio-books over paper books and more likely to use online stores over brick and mortar than some other demographics.
Cue “am I out of touch” meme.
OP, it’s OK to no longer be up-to-date with the literature scene.
Don’t forget the smut. So much smut.
PeoPLe SHouLd ReAd MoRe BoOkS
Yeah, people should. Don’t make it sound like every book on the market currently is just bullshit self-help books. Go buy a copy of any novel of George Orwell/Stefan Zweig/Franz Kafka, or, The Handmaid’s Tale, Of Mice and Men, Fahrenheit 451, etc etc etc…
There are so many great world classics on the market that you can probably buy for dirt cheap if you live in the west.
Or better yet, go on Standard E-books and browse a huge, copyright-free collection of old books, of the writers being Shakespeare, Nietzche, Homer, Oscar Wilde and much, much more.
Don’t let a post from fucking 4chan of all places to dissuade you from reading.
Well, i was already holding my opinion before this 4chan post; this just gave me opportunity to formulate it.
However, it is important to note that many people say “people should read more books” without in any way, implicit or explicit specifying which books to read.
There are a lot of people saying “they’re gonna educate themselves through youtube”, but in the end, not all youtube videos that seem to have good content, actually have good content. There’s a lot of videos containing pseudo-clever thoughts, that lead people to believe they have learned something, while actually, they haven’t. And the people often even pay/donate for it. That is my consideration.
It is the same with books: By reading “books”, people are often caught in reading not-actually-all-that-great books, like all (or most of) the modern stuff, and that does not help anyone.
I apologize, I hadn’t understood your thoughts very well. Thanks for clarifying.
This greentext is literally just right-wingers convincing each other their already-held stereotypes are true.
Wait, isn’t enshittificaion a left-wing idea?
The way I read it, this post complains about “wokization” more than enshittification.
Else why would it point out “African or Indian last names”, reviews using the word “brave”, or “books about Trump gathering dust”? Those are all right-wing memes.
All of that just sounded like ‘dumb stuff that sells books these days’ but I can definitely see where you’re coming from
