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.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
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”
Amusing greentext - but doesn't match the bookshops that I was in recently. There are some really good bookshops.
Don't forget about the stand with a sign that says "Booktok made me read it" and it's the same 3 books repeated ad infinitum and despite all being first editions they all have sprayed edges.
I hate what book tok has done to the book world.
Life is too short to read shitty self help books that's written by influencers(yuck) or some LLM shit books. Read the classics.
Yeah, classics really don't do it for me.
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
The only book I've read from an "influencer" is How to Win at Chess by Levy Rozman (@GothamChess), and mostly because it was one of two books on chess at my local library. He runs a chess training website (chessly), so he actually has some creds there.
I also bought The Civilian Rights Handbook by John Lang (@AuditTheAudit) because I wanted to support him thought the book might be genuinely interesting to read and loan.
Other than that, I mostly read from regular authors, either past or present.
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.
I use audiobooks exclusively for my sci-fi and fantasy. There are so many great narrators in the genres that I can't imagine going back to my made-up voices for characters.
I think it would help sell physical media if Brandon Sanderson didn't write 7 million words and sell a brick.
Books so large they literally fuck up your wrists from holding them for too long are certainly part of the reason physical books are on the decline in some fields.
It is way harder to share e-books with friends. If you tend to pass books around, you still want paper.
This. I rarely use physical stores for my SciFi books, and only ever go after comics and stuff like that in hard copy. "Normal" books are easier for me to ingest digitally, either via text or audio.
Ya don’t have to read those books, y’know.
"Warhammer 40k novels, the most superb prose. Only the finest for the Gentlemen. Ah yes, 'adult manga' of course. 1984? Perfection. Of course, I haven't read it. I just need a copy to throw at minorities. It is truly an excellent work."
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!
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
Politically however it seems to be all right lately.
Bruh
The part a out randomly generated awards are so on point. Altough it could work with author names as well well. P. E. Nmyass
does not sound like parallel, sounds like modern internet/reality has infected bookstores. It just needs books created by AI on influencers and it'll be complete
PeoPLe SHouLd ReAd MoRe BoOkS
Then the books are like: 👆
Don't forget the smut. So much smut.
Lmao, Sarah J Maas catching strays.
That's a very Dutch sounding name ngl
I just learned the book I'm reading has a glow in the dark cover
I'm too early on in the book to know what that means
Ok but I would read 'All The Fire That We Hold Tomorrow.'
That book is so hot right now.
Tap for spoiler
Please take it away from me, it burns.
Oh, I've read Cwayed. Interesting style.
Cue “am I out of touch” meme.
OP, it's OK to no longer be up-to-date with the literature scene.
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