Books to Read

The Atlantic published A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. It’s a list worth looking through, and of course, reading…

  1. Americanah By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  2. The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
  3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian By Sherman Alexie
  4. Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom By Ryan T. Anderson
  5. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism By Edward Baptist
  6. Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith By Francis Beckwith
  7. The Coming By Daniel Black
  8. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism By Pascal Bruckner
  9. Between the World and Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates
  10. Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics By Cathy Cohen
  11. Evicted By Matthew Desmond
  12. Roads to Dominion: Right Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States By Sara Diamond
  13. Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America By Tamara Draut
  14. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America By Martin Gilens
  15. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion By Jonathan Haidt
  16. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements By Eric Hoffer
  17. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right By Arlie Russell Hochschild
  18. Book of Judges
  19. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the 20th Century By Alice Kessler-Harris
  20. The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism By Yuval Levin 
  21. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness By George Lipsitz
  22. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class By Ian Haney López
  23. A Canticle for Leibowitz By Walter Miller
  24. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 By Charles Murray
  25. Dreams From My Father By Barack Obama
  26. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America By George Packer
  27. Citizen: An American Lyric By Claudia Rankine
  28. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty By Dorothy Roberts
  29. The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown By Paul Taylor
  30. Because of Sex: One Law, 10 Cases and 50 Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work By Gillian Thomas
  31. Habibi By Craig Thompson
  32. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! By Mo Willems
  33. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America By Colin Woodard

Who sells books for a penny?

The book market is a mess and the second hand book market is even weirder. As a buyer the second hand books on Amazon are amazing as many hardcover, good condition books are listed at a penny $0.01 of course the shipping is added to this but at $4 a book this is still a sweet deal. After buying the 5 volume History of Private Life and having it shipped to my house for a total of $20 dollars I tried to figure out how it was even possible.

 

 

The massive set consisted on Volume I: From Pagan Rome to ByzantiumVolume II: Revelations of the Medieval WorldVolume III: Passions of the RenaissanceVolume IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great WarVolume V: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. Its authors are respected historians and the weight alone makes this an impressive purchase.

Naturally it made no sense and I was at a loss to how it worked. Finally, after Googling, I came across this thread. Its from 2012 but it throws some light on how the whole thing works.

In brief:
A seller lists a book for $.01
Amazon collects $3.99 from the buyer and gives $2.66 ($.01 + $2.64 shipping allowance) to the seller. (The $1.35 ‘closing fee’ is subtracted from the shipping allowance by Amazon)
The seller is a ProMerchant, so doesn’t pay the $.99 fee (but does pay $40 per month to be a ProMerchant).
The 15% fee on 1 cent is zero.
The seller pays $2.38 or $2.88 in postage for a 1 or 2 pound package (or less, if it is very light weight and can go First Class. Much less if the penny seller is high volume and uses Bulk Mail).
The seller cost for the book is zero, because he got it for free somehow.
The seller used recycled packing materials, so those cost nothing, too.
The seller ends-up with $.27 (if it’s 1 pound media mail) in a domestic shipment (a bit more if it’s mailed using Bulk Mail).
The seller is happy with his “profit”.
Amazon ends up with $1.35 from the shipping.
Amazon is even happier than the seller.

Its not exactly big bucks but it does explain a little more how 1penny books can be sold at a (sort of) profit.

 

The Unmanly Reader

There is something compelling about lists. That’s why they are often used as clickbait and some of them are amusing. But there is something about book lists. The 10, 50, 100 books you should read always makes me wonder why the list is there. Is it to make those who have read them feel better? Or is it designed to make those who haven’t read feel inferior? Or maybe they are designed to rank our cultural capital? If you read 80 out of 100 on the list you have a solid B. Its good but you must try harder. Oh, dear only a C- well then…

This usually doesn’t bother me but then I came across the list of 80 Books Every Man Should Read with the tag line: ” An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. How many have you read?”

What does it mean? How many must I have read to be considered a man?

Efficiency is for washing, not for literature

In the last weeks there has been a new buzz about a speed reading software called Spritz. The idea is that too much time is spent scanning sentences while reading. So if the reader can keep her eyes steady and the words can fly past then reading speeds can increase. HuffPost reports that with Spritz a reader should be able to clear 1000 words per minute, which would mean that you could read a Harry Potter book in under 90 minutes.

Naturally this is not really a new thing. There is other software aimed at increasing reading speeds (Spreeder, Quickreader, Read Quick, and add ons for Firefox).

Viewed in this way applications like these are great for efficiency. But isn’t that the problem? Do we really read Harry Potter for efficiency? If we take software like this and add it to the numerous lists-of-books-to-read-before-you-die (Goodreads, 1001 books to read before you die, Amazon’s 100 books, 50 books before you die) you get a very odd relationship to literature and reading.

Efficiency is for washing, not for literature. Yes, there are too many books. No, you will never read them all. Even Erasmus complained of there being too many books in the 15th century.

Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?

But the problem with an (almost) infinite number of books is not resolved by increasing our stress in reading so as to grab a larger part of the pie.

When the last gatekeeper but one is gone

At the moment, those people are obsessed with how they read books—whether it’s on a Kindle or an iPad or on printed pages. This conversation, though important, takes place in the shallows and misses the deeper currents that, in the digital age, are pushing American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful corporations. Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?

George Packer Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? The New Yorker

Paper vs Digital Books infographic

Paper books are nothing more than the corpses of dead trees and other cool one-liners abound. But why do people chose to prefer one version over another?

Fatbrain asked around and created this infographic.

What are the top reasons for choosing a real life, lo-fi, analogue, hardcopy book over the digital option? In a recent poll we asked 1,000 Fatbrainers just that. Here’s what they told us.

books_infographic

Inconvenience is not all bad

The cost of data storage and retrieval is hardly anything that an individual thinks about today. Some of us may need to delete things from our devices but actual storage of data is not an issue. A tweet from SciencePorn last year demonstrated the cost of 1gb of storage over time:

  • 1981 $300000
  • 1987 $50000
  • 1990 $10000
  • 1994 $1000
  • 1997 $100
  • 2000 $10
  • 2004 $1
  • 2012 $0.10

I would love to have a better source than a tweet but it serves its purpose in this post.

The data question today is one of where and how we keep our physical storage devices. And yes, this could be about hard drives that hum with lights that shine but my idea today is more about the way in which we store our physical books. When it comes to music and movies I have moved completely digital – the thought of buying, carrying and storing plastic in order to enjoy those medium is foreign to me.

But books are a problem. I have an e-reader and a tablet both of which have a seemingly endless array of books on them. Reading from these devices is not a problem. I do have issues with commenting texts, on remembering where in the text I read something and finding a book that I have digitally.

All the devices have the ability to make notes but none are better than a pencil. My books contain small texts and question marks. Exclamation marks can sometimes mean I agree, disagree or even just approve of the order in which the words came. Typing will not really do it for me. The way’s in which the marks where scratched also make a difference – when I really disagree I will underscore heavily or circle words. It’s so annoying trying to do that digitally. Also I noticed something even more important: I never looked at my digital notes. They were ephemeral: I wrote them; I felt pleased; and then I forgot them completely. Finding them and recreating the context in which they were written isn’t working for me.

Another problem, for me, is the loss of geography in the book. I first noticed that it didn’t matter how engrossed I was in a text, I would often forget what the book was called or who the author was – While I was reading! But more importantly I could almost never find the passages that I remembered reading. In a physical book I would know approximately where on the page and in the book the passage was. There is a loss of context in the digital version.

But most importantly was the loss of books. I would collect books to be read but they would all disappear in the neutral packaging of the device. Nothing happened to remind me of their existence, no guilty pangs to goad me into reading. My collection of books was increasing while my reading time was shrinking.

Dreams of devices and systems to collect the worlds knowledge are old. But we now have overcome most of the barriers to such systems and by solving the problem have lost the books. Ok, maybe its just me. But I cannot help but think of the wonderful device dreamed of by Captain Agostino Ramelli:

This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moreover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing.

Captain Agostino Ramelli

The advantage of his device is that it does not hide the books needed to be read. You could naturally just scroll passed the book but it was still there demanding attention. The digital world gives us convenience, but too much convenience is not a good thing.

The abundance of books is distraction

Another package arrives and my first thought is the joy of packages. It’s an conditioned response from decades of birthdays and Christmases. Despite knowing what’s inside there is an element of anticipation when I unwrap yet another book that I could not help ordering. Yupp, another book. The joy of holding the book is only marred by the sinking feeling that I should be writing faster, better and to be blunt about it, more. Just more.

There is a sadness in living in a time when there are enormous amounts of books. Most of the books I buy are second hand copies where the postage costs more than the content. Today the gorgeous On Paper: The Everything of it’s two-thousand-year history by a self-confessed bibliophiliac by the prolific Nicholas Basbanes. Thankfully, in this case, the book cost more than the postage.

Read Books by Wrote. CC BY.

But then I leaf through the book, marveling at all the letter, lines, paragraphs, chapters… The weight in my hand and the need to read it. Now. Read. Now. But, there is a pile of necessary books. All relevant to the project and this is just one of many. Place the book in the already precariously balanced pile and sigh while I think that the abundance of books is distraction.

The only thing that calms me is the thought that these words are neither original nor my own. Seneca wrote that the abundance of books is distraction (distringit librorum multitudo). Getting lost in so many books is unhelpful. Anne Bair quotes his explanation to what he means (in another great book: Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age)

You should always read the standard authors; and when you crave change, fall back upon those whom you read before.

And yet, here I am with another great looking book on my desk. It demands my attention and offers me the chance to procrastinate. Reading is not laziness but research, its not procrastination, it’s preparation. And yet the more I read the less text gets produced.

So I do neither: I blog my dilemma.

Libraries without books

Anyone vaguely following the discussion on books and reading will come across posts like the rise of e-books, the demise of reading and the need for change in libraries. The latter is particularly poignant as libraries struggle to adapt to social media and become venues and experiences rather than… well, you know… libraries. The question is can we have a library without books?
Evelyn Juers knows where she stands, and writes in What is a library without books? that

Sydney’s Mitchell Library Reading Room should be kept as a place of books and readers and intellectual exchange, not transformed into a social hub

Is the problem that the use/usability/usefulness of libraries cannot (should not) be decided by popular majority opinion? Or is this just an opinionated paternalistic view of the world?

Collections by Wrote CC BY NC

Breaking up with eBooks

Just love the text Librarian in Black writes about ending her relationship with eBooks I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too)

I want to break up with eBooks. Don’t get me wrong, eBooks is dead sexy and great arm candy at parties, as well as a magnet for attention and memorable experiences. But man…eBooks makes for a crap boyfriend. This relationship is as dysfunctional as it gets.

The flash of the ebook may be losing some of its glamor and I do miss many of the things that paper books had (ease of use and tactile sensation) but I am not sure if I am ready for a clean break just yet… I may just have to keep seeing them on the side?

Librarian in Black has written a wonderful text – read it!