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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3123 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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https://old.reddit.com/r/madlads/s/yV09R82gov

I came across this reddit post of a guy who cuts his books in half. I found it funny that this triggered people in the comments. Many people refuse to fold pages or write in their books. I don't see what the big deal is. To me a book is just a tool. I understand taking care to preserve semi-rare books, but these were books you can just walk into any bookstore and buy.

I used to know someone who would even try to avoid creasing the spine. But I've also heard about a guy who would rip pages of shlocky fiction as he read them to keep his place. Where are you on the spectrum?

Historically I cared very well for my books, and I am intentionally trying to change that and become a margin writer because it seems fun/good/helpful. I did the "cut the book in half" thing for a lot of books in college though.

I was definitely raised to care for books, and I think this reflects a generational thing. I thought of books as important items to protect, both because they were expensive (at scale) and because the knowledge in them was valuable to preserve. Books were pricy, destroying them would be playing into the hands of the big corporate booksellers. Used bookstores existed, but before the internet buying books secondhand was so haphazard as to be mostly useless, and obviously you never write in a library book. I also have a natural prissiness towards damaging anything, one of my major flaws as a mechanic is a refusal to just smack the damn thing for fear of breaking it. Comedically, this comes out when my wife and I lift weights together. I rerack 350 silently, she reracks 135 like she's trying to make as much noise as possible.

Today, preserving the knowledge in them is achieved through digital means, and for various reasons books are cheap (I make more money, and any book I want I could download a pdf in a few minutes of search, and there are more classics I want to read on Project Gutenberg than I'll ever actually get through anyway). The risk, see @KulakRevolt 's latest, is that publishers will stop producing them, booksellers will stop selling them (who would have believed, watching You've Got Mail that Borders would be bankrupt and AOL irrelevant today?) the books I buy in print I am very intentional about as an act of supporting my local small bookstore. I'm not buying them to preserve the knowledge in them, but to preserve the supply chain of getting them to me, I want to give money to the local store that stocks it and the small publishers that produce it. So I'm much more amenable to destroying a book as I'm reading it.

At the same time, taking notes while doing something is a good way to jog memory. And a friend who lives far away and I have taken to sending each other annotated copies of books we loved.

And a friend who lives far away and I have taken to sending each other annotated copies of books we loved.

This is a genius level remote-book-club idea. If one were so inclined, it would probably be possible to set up a marketing blog explaining how to do this, inviting people to register which books they're doing this with, ranking the most common, and then dropping affiliate links to generate income.

Or some sort of variant of Reese Witherspoon's crowdsourced book-to-film audiences

I rerack 350 silently, she reracks 135 like she's trying to make as much noise as possible.

SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST (NSFW Audio)

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