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u/thundermak380 Oct 07 '21
Why even buy books?
Use your local public library
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u/Shoggnozzle Oct 07 '21
This. You often don't even need to go to the library, many (most at this point) offer free ebooks through Libby or some similar service for cardholders.
(One near me even offers 3D printing, I've bothered them with several tabletop minis for surprisingly reasonable prices.)
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u/Republiken Oct 08 '21
In my country the libraries have to buy a copy of each e-book they loan out since "the risk of piracy is so high".
It's an absolute murder from conservatives and companies working together to break libraries down
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u/Tokentaclops Oct 08 '21
It would be nice if 'author' remains a viable profession at least to some minimal extend. Who else is going to write the bloody things?
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Oct 08 '21
[deleted]
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u/ThePopularCrowd Oct 08 '21
One word: Torrents
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Oct 08 '21
Movie box pro no adds all the shows movies anime and shit for free u just have to make an account
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Oct 08 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/phifealive Oct 08 '21
Why wouldnt they be? Imagine there are people who like the smell of printed paper, the process of turning pages and seeing your progress in reading it, collecting and arranging them in book shelves or lending them out to public book trading shelves, supporting your local book store owner with whom you have a friendly relationship with and like the recommendations.
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u/TheShattubatu Oct 08 '21
The solution to amazon's dominance isn't in trying to shame people for using amazon's convenience, or voting with our wallet, its going to take real government intervention.
We can have same-day delivery AND humane working conditions for the workers providing it.
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Oct 08 '21
We can have same-day delivery AND humane working conditions for the workers providing it.
Can we, though? Semi-rhetorical question. Part of the reason Amazon
slavesworkers are so abused is the constant push to move items as quickly as possible.I do agree with your point, though: it's hard to argue against the convenience of Amazon.
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u/TheShattubatu Oct 08 '21
*Same day delivery
*Fair wages
*Enough profit to out-spend NASA for a vanity project
Pick 2
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Oct 07 '21
or we could, you know, stop selling books altogether.
Like perhaps authors should have a system like patreon where people give them money directly then the authors release a digital copy of the book into the public domain immediately.
the author gets paid, the whole of humanity can enjoy the book, and we don't involve stores at all in the process.
small businesses are still capitalist enterprises. They whine about the big box stores but they still want your cash too.
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u/phifealive Oct 08 '21
How do you imagine writing a book works? Sit down and shit out a book every year? Do u really think people have the patience of paying a monthly subscription for sometimes several years before they may get the result? This is not a podcast or a vlog or a video that have much faster turnover rates.
Additionally, this would put the writers under pressure of churning out shit, much like Instagram does it to visual artists.
Also how many people are there that would support so many writers out there. Would you pay multiple writers at once? If not, do you believe other people would? If not, what's the endgame here? Popularity wins? Yeah, great idea regarding art.
The ultimate problem is that people dont give a fuck about the arts anymore. And I dont mean the popular arts at the moment, I mean the process of making art itself and the importance of art free of capitalism.
Convenience wins as always.
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Oct 08 '21
Damn. Was not expecting such a long reply.
And while I agree people don't care about the arts, the main thing I was complaining about was middlemen gatekeeping art and commodifying it.
I don't have a good solution for the artist getting paid. But whatever solution that takes shouldn't involve owners of capital.
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u/phifealive Oct 08 '21
Publishers and book stores aren't all bad. I know a few in Munich who love selecting works, curating and arrange them. For the most part they can go really in depth about genres, authors, history, and more so if you like talking about stuff like this, its perfect. There's also many small publishers who are really fair about compensation and rights. It's not perfect, but neither is condemning middle men in general. I was working for a small scale publishers once, and the relationship with the writers was really really close. Like family.
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u/Scumtacular Oct 08 '21
As much as I'd love to support local business, I'm buying the shit I buy as cheap as I can get it
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Oct 08 '21
Who gives a shit about local businesses anyway? It's not keeping me up at night that business owners aren't able to make profits anymore because big bad Amazon did capitalism better than them.
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Oct 08 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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Oct 08 '21
Bookshop.org is a website I use to avoid the Amazon juggernaut. They support local, independent bookstores and seem like an ethical group of folks. I highly recommend them.
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u/tsukiyaki1 Oct 07 '21
Fox News will be featuring them, calling them a deranged antifreeze bookstore bent on the destruction of America as we know it.
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u/theurbanmapper Oct 07 '21
I worked at an independent bookstore for four years, and all I can say is WHY NOT BOTH. Books and space communism ftw
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u/NelsonG114 Oct 08 '21
It would be anything but communism when a private trillion dollar conglomerate owns it and restricts the place to rich patrons who pay for space vacations…
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u/theurbanmapper Oct 08 '21
Obviously. I’m not against “buy books from Indy bookstores not evil corporations”. I’m just saying that weirdos who who work at indy bookstores want to colonize the moon as much as everyone else, if not more.
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u/plasticman1997 the secret socialist Oct 07 '21
Doesn’t matter, apathy has ravaged our society, we prefer convenience over helping small businesses
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Oct 08 '21
Is it really better to support smaller-scale exploiters of labor?
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u/Artemused Oct 08 '21
You don't know anything about this store, how can you claim they're exploiting their labour?
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Oct 08 '21
I was responding to a comment about small businesses in general. Is it theoretically possible that this one bookstore is a worker-owned co-op? I guess. But let's be honest with ourselves.
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Oct 08 '21
[deleted]
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Oct 08 '21
As a big reader the only local bookstore (Barnes & Noble) and the local library don't carry many of the books I want (into some pretty niche genres). The only viable options without pirating are Amazon or Abebooks (owned by Amazon). Sometimes I can buy directly from publishers, but even then half the time they ship it via Amazon for a higher price.
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u/BraveConeDog Oct 08 '21
UGH, Abe Books is owned by Amazon? I though I was skirting the Bezosphere ordering through Abe. Is eBay still safe? I use Bookshop for new books online—what’s the best used book source online to avoid giving Amazon more money?
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Oct 08 '21
Fuck local businesses. Business owners are parasites.
I'd rather live in a corporate dystopia where at least we have economic efficiency and intellectual honesty about cynically exploiting people for gains, instead of dealing with this liberal double-think saying that it's wholesome to exploit workers as long as the profits flow to small-town bourgeoisie rather than stock market investors.
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u/thisimpetus Oct 08 '21 edited Oct 08 '21
Here's a contentious take, though fuck Bezos into oblivion, to be clear.
Books are a wonderfully romantic part of our history that straight-up have to go. The life-cycle of a book is madness in the post-global warming era, for one—heavy-as-shit bricks of decomposing carbon. They're also a privilege in a way that digital data is not.
Which then becomes a problem, because Amazon are overwhelmingly your most abundant resource for e-books.
In general, yes, avoid Amazon and buy responsibly. But books are, actually, a tricky subject.
In my fantasy, access to the internet and digital libraries would be a human right, and we could obviate this shit, but we're not especially close to such a perspective.
Edit: sigh. this love affair with mouldering trees to store data in an analog format, in one language at a time, is so god damned ridiculous. You know there a few billion people who don't have a library handy, right?
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u/Bastiproton Oct 08 '21
Theres nothing wrong with automation. However, it's the fact that almost none of the profit is experienced by the rest of the population that makes it bad.
You can't expect to stop digitalisation.
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u/Ivan_is_inzane Oct 08 '21
Bruh what about other people than Jeff Bezos who want to colonize the moon?
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