Dunkelheit

Modern Books Suck

The commodification of books and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. There is no legitimate reason for the continued printing of the modern paperback to continue.

An Abundance of Nothing.

Let’s state the obvious first. You walk into your local (or high street) book shop and what do you see promoted the most? Erotic fiction, books about why you should hate yourself, books promoting diets that will kill you.

There is no reason for these to exist. They functionally have no contents, they do not contribute to any thing meaningful and serve only as a means to assist consumers in parting with their wages.

Additionally these books are always printed in a low quality, disposable paperback format. Of course they are not deserving of a higher quality printing anyway, after all the contents of these books is nothing more than a mockery.

Books that have stood the test of time will of course have shelf space reserved for them in these shops and the quality difference between them and what surrounds them is night and day. But these books are hardly ever put on the display tables or promoted for sale. In fact most book shops seem to be content to not have these books in stock at all if they can get away with it.

The Paperback Paradox

Every time I enter a book shop there is always a “new from best sellers” as well as a “reprinted classics” display. The interesting thing is that these best selling authors apparently didn’t earn the right to a first edition hardback, something that used to be a given.

Additionally these so called “reprinted classics” are always “edited for modern sensibilities” which of course is just a fancy way of saying censored and modified, making them anything but a reprint and completely useless.

It is rather ironic that the perception of the paperback bringing literature to the masses has resulted in the worst quality of writing in history.

Additionally it is also ironic that the proliferation of paperbacks is for some reason a sacred cow to the very same groups of reactionary liberals that think banning plastic straws will stop the third world from dumping all their trash into the oceans and rivers.

Print on Demand and Self-Publishing

An interesting phenomena that has emerged in the last decade has been the ability for authors to self-publish their books using print on demand services like Lulu. This has resulted in some authors that would have been ignored otherwise being able to bring their books to market.

It is a double edged sword however as most of these books are of an even worse quality that what is being pushed out by the larger publishing houses. Now if these books really are “print on demand” and I have no reason to believe otherwise based on my experience with them then the environmental issues are at least minimized if not completely mitigated by preventing the waste of excessive quantities of printing materials.

Print on demand has caused problems for legitimate authors in that they are now competing against algorithms for exposure on self-publishing services. Most book descriptions on Amazon for example look like old YouTube video descriptions with hundreds of unrelated words included for the sake of getting the attention of primitive search engines.

Based and Red pilled Book Reviews

There is a severe lack of high quality discussion regarding high quality books online. At least from what I can see. “BookTube” is full of people that recommend books on the cover art alone for example. I’m sure that some of them actually read the books but they don’t give this impression in their videos.

Good books are undoubtedly being published, be it with publishers or via print on demand services but they are competing for attention with books written by algorithms, marketed by algorithms and sold by algorithms.

I will continue to look out for based and red pilled book reviewers, discussion, etc online of course but in the mean time I should put my keyboard where my mouth is and try to contribute to what I want to see. As such I will start publishing essays, reviews, etc on this very subject on this site. I even made a 📚 Books tag for it.