Stepping back from the digital.
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I do not think that any member of this forum is rejecting printed books. I have two rooms with printed books and some of them were sent to a book binding company for hard cover
There were bookstores all over, Buenos Aires is one of the few cities that has many bookstores, most bookstores were closed due to high cost of the rents and high prices of the books, only Barnes and Noble survived and Amazon.
My first Alma-mater was surrounded by bookstores and all of them were closed, and now it is surrounded with night clubs and bars
I have my own personal library that I have been collecting for several years and I have a 12 inches iPad and a laptop with hundred of digital books too.
I have more printed books than digital, but the reality is that we can not live in the past anymore and printed books are becoming very expensive including the socialist literature.
I paid $225.00 for the 52 volume of Marx and Engels, and $125.00 for the 42 volumes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Enver Hoxha, collected works, and now the price is over $3,000.00 for the work of Marx and Engels. and they have copyright, and digital are free, The MIA removed them from the internet,
Legal books like a hornbook and a casebook the price was $35.00 and now the price is $325.00, a book on Robins Pathology the price is $250.00, and a book on Harrison internal medicine is $450.00 and they are digitally free in some websites .
The University of Buenos Aires is selling teachers lectures because the books are very expensive and students can not buy them, many libraries have computers with digitally textbooks because it is cheaper for them and cheaper for the students. I go to the library almost every day and I take my own printed books
A friend in Switzerland salvaged a sackload of beautiful old hardback books of English literature the university had attempted to burn. He saved all but the most blackened from the bonfire and struggled through the streets with the sack until his dad picked him up in the car.
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, all blackened but salvageable.
A closing bookshop near here too, i was told, had a huge skip outside full of books just thrown away.bibliophile ? I am one of those F pervert too because I love books and libraries. I grew up in a small town and the best center of entertainment was the town library . My father was always reading books and he was not an intellectual but he was a walking library, China books and periodical was throwing thousands of books and I took all of them and I gave all them to several Leninists organizations . In the USA they want to burn books what for ? Nobody is reading anything. They are reading the collected works of Donald Trump
In the 1970s, following a personal project in school, i subscribed to China Pictorial, China Reconstructs, Chinese Literature and Peking Review, plus really cheap books from China, including the works of Stalin, and literature from FLP Peking and Panda Books.
I also got a big parcel of KMT books from Taipei, one of which was speeches of Chiang Kai-shek, in which he let slip that Mao’s China had nothing to do with communism!One thing I do like about the internet, namely Youtube, for history lovers like me, is access to
music I never had before.The KMT musical propaganda is as rousing, maybe more so, than Red Chinese songs and marches.
As a teenager I frequented an LP shop run by a militarist, but he had a collection I devoured at the time: Imperial Russian marches, Soviet songs, Red China songs and marches, Spanish civil war, American civil war, English civil war, American Sousa marches, Napoleonic, French Revolution … he had everything.
“Books offer a tactile experience that screens simply cannot replicate.”
TM:
Your #255505 and #255506
‘I also got a big parcel of KMT books from Taipei, one of which was speeches of Chiang Kai-shek, in which he let slip that Mao’s China had nothing to do with communism!’
What book and what speech? Or just what speech, and of what year?
‘The KMT musical propaganda is as rousing, maybe more so, than Red Chinese songs and marches.’
What is the (rousing) KMT musical propaganda you refer to?
I wasn’t intimating any support on my part, just saying that the same framework, propaganda-wise, as Mao’s nationalistic displays was in place on the KMT side too. And the music catchier!
Chiang’s cult was under way as Mao’s was. He also had plans in place for the seizure of Tibet.But, even so, I don’t think the tyranny over everyday life would have approached Mao’s peasant tyranny.
I wish I still had the book of speeches to quote from, but we are talking about my childhood years. All I can tell you is that it was a blue paperback called Speeches of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Who here has said they are not bothered about printed books disappearing? In fact what is the evidence that they will disappear completely? Why should they?
Most people here will have books too but are not elitist and snobbish about it.I was replying to this you posted last month:
“ A lifelong lover of printed books, like William Morris btw, were I a teenager or in my twenties I would be distraught at their disappearance (which doesn’t bother people on this forum). Fortunately, I’ll be dead before books disappear, and I have hundreds, and can still obtain those I want.
Well, except for two, there are no more bookshops in the combined towns where I live, and the one near me has to mostly stock plushes, novelties and jigsaw puzzles in order to survive.
As for buying books online, one has to check and check again to ensure one is getting a real book, and not a print on demand non-book consisting of photocopied pages glued together.
“As for buying books online, one has to check and check again to ensure one is getting a real book, and not a print on demand non-book consisting of photocopied pages glued together.”
As par for the course, you’re a bit out of date with this. All paperback books have always been made by gluing pages together. You’re right that the binding quality of some early print on demand books left something to be desired, but now the quality matches offset books. In fact, they often use higher-quality paper. Most academic titles are now printed on demand but this is no grand problem.
TM – “Use the word bibliophile here and people sneer “f*****g pervert!””
To be honest TM, the only person I see regularly sneering at other people on this forum is you. Sports fans are either barbarians or philistines, people who don’t use reported English are ill educated brutes, those who prefer to read online are to be condemned.
The Socialist world that TM strives for is one where everyone conforms with the world of TM! People have other tastes than you get over yourself.
As you say, “except for two, there are no more bookshops in the combined two where I live”, so what you are saying is that actually there are bookshops near where you live, there are two, by your own admission.
You say “were I a teenager or in my twenties I would be distraught at their disappearance (which doesn’t bother people on this forum). Fortunately, I’ll be dead before books disappear, and I have hundreds, and can still obtain those I want.”, so you aren’t a teenager, you are not be alive when (or) books disappear, what have you got to worry about? Is it that you are distraught that people live after you are dead and buried won’t be forced to conform with you view of how a life must be lived? Very strange.
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