Slashdot Mirror
Bookstore Owner Burns Books
Several readers sent us links to an AP story about a pair of Kansas City booksellers who staged a book bonfire, claiming to protest declining literacy. The story doesn't convey a sure sense of the booksellers' motives for what could, in fact, be a PR stunt or a subtle act of extortion against book lovers — it does mention that people were buying books out of the piles awaiting immolation. The bookstore's own site tries to sound sincere, but it offers visitors a chance to save books from the flames for $1 each plus postage.
If no one else has noticed, the world is AWASH in books. Technology has made book production so cheap that any idiot can publish a book.
Come to think of it, maybe this guy is onto something. With the price of firewood so high, maybe I can get a bunch of used books for less money to burn.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I couldn't be bothered to read TFA... what's this about?
I'd guess Fahrenheit 451.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
It was probably books from their bargain section, which never sold and have been collecting dust in the backfroom for 10+ years.
Ray Bradbury
I have a whole box of kittens at home.
I'll drown them all next week.
Unless of course someone buys them off me first...
Well heck, cheap books! Now if I can only find where to get these I'll be on it like flies on honey covered books :)
My UID is prime... is yours?
So to get people to read books, you have to burn them. I understand now. No wonder I never did well in Reading/English classes.
I've been reading mostly ebooks for a while. They can be read on a cell phone, on a pc, on a PDA, and anything that can read ASCII or PDF and are sure easier to carry than normal paper books. Seeing that I now measure my reading habits in megabytes instead of pages, I think it's pretty unintelligent to say that because books are being sold less literacy is declining.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Because you cannot just give the damn books away, right? Heck, recycling the books at part of a PR stunt would be better than burning them.
I read about this earlier, and have three questions: 1) Is this a sincere protest about a supposed lack of reading among the US population? Millions of new unsold books are pulped each year, so this just sounds illogical. or 2) Is this a bizarre marketing ploy? and 3) Is there a list of which books you can "save" for a dollar each? Can you select them? How much is shipping and handling? Enough to turn "saved" into "positive profit margin," I suspect.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Did he buy his carbon offsets for the burning of these books?
Bearded Dragon
Don't burn them, but where is the link to buy?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
...that is:
> The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the
> Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne
> didn't have a permit for burning.
So, Bob's your uncle.
The Army reading list
Especially the extremely popular titles he has listed on his website. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code? Sheesh, those books are so common they aren't worth the paper they're printed on. It's no loss if he burns them.
The thing is that the vast majority of books become useless once you've read them. Especially mass market fiction like Da Vinci and Potter. No one wants them because everyone that wanted to read them has, so there's an enormous surplus. With sights like Amazon.com selling books like these essentially for shipping charges, why would buy them at a brick-and-mortar? It's cheaper and easier to just pull up Amazon, click 3-4 times and wait a week. Most of the time you're buying from a used bookstore just like this guy with a surplus of that book and just wants to get rid of it and make a dollar on the shipping.
AccountKiller
Perpetuating the stereotype of books being the domain of crazy nerds is the best way to encourage widespread literacy?
Seems to me the only thing Wayne's "made" is at least thirty bucks, judging from the article.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
...they weren't complaining. Could it be that because of a certain online bookstore the sales of brick'n'mortar stores are somewhere near the bottom?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What an idiot. He could donate them to libraries, schools, prisons, whatever. He could also just recycle the paper. Burning them pollutes and adds to the CO2 loading. I hope someone from the EPA will be there to slap him with some nice fines for smoke and such and someone from the fire department to nail him if he doesn't have proper safeguards in place.
Some of the big box chains (Borders, Barnes & Noble) could be why his sales are down. Same for Amazon.
Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.
Instead of polluting the environment by burning 20,000 books, why doesn't this jerk call or dump them at a recycling center? Or maybe he's the kind of guy who only drives 10-mpg SUV's. To me it sounds like a publicity stunt.
If you don't like the idea of this fellow burning books, why don't you do something about it? Buy some of the books that would otherwise be burned. If they were published before 1923, they are now part of the public domain, and, if you're feeling nice, you could even record yourself reading it and post it to LibriVox.
The saddest part about this is that if "Wayne" had swallowed his anti-Web sentiment for a moment and actually posted an online announcement for the books, they could have gone to someone who would have appreciated them, versus into a pit of flames. Somebody get this guy some Wellbutrin.
Co-founder, IntellectConnect.com
Book sales aren't decreasing, they're slowly increasing--generally 1% a year or above, I think. What's happening is the same thing that's happening in the rest of our markets: a few major superstore chains are muscling out the middle guys. The dynamics of the market are changing, too--as with video, the post popular works are sucking up a larger and larger percentage of buyers, while mid-list titles are losing market-share. More mid-list books are being published than used to be, I think, though some publishing houses are cutting back--but it's much harder for a mid-list book to gain a devoted readership, because big chains require publishers to pay them promotion fees for things like book placement near the counter, whereas independent stores would put interesting things or things they thought would sell near the counter, and that included mid-list books without the same advertising budget. The cost of advertising/marketing/promotion as a percentage of book sales has also skyrocketed, while the royalties paid to authors who actually write the books haven't kept up with inflation.
Also, the profit margin on in the publishing industry is relatively small. (I want to say around 7%, but that could be wrong, and of course it varies somewhat by publishing house.) For booksellers, I'm not sure--a very large percentage of a book's sale at list price is above what the bookseller paid for it, but I don't know how overhead and employee salaries figure into the equation.
That being said, while book sales are increasing (and have almost every year since we started keeping track of them), the amount of time we spend reading has started to decrease drastically. (Look up the NEA "Reading at Risk" study.) Similarly, the breadth (and I believe quantity) of books ordered by library collections has decreased. And the budgets of educational libraries are increasingly being swallowed up by effectively monopolistic journal publishers.
I'm happy with people being parted with their money over something this stupid. All libraries and bookstores destroy books. There isn't enough room for them all. Stealing from the stupid is a good practice though. The more money that gets extracted from the stupid and the gullible, the harder it is for them to breed, and the better off the world is.
but my lady worked @ BGI (Borders/Waldenbooks/Brentanos/Paperchase) for almost ten years, but recently left. The company is in dire straights even though they also sell multimedia.
While many adults buy plenty of product, there is apparently a large decline in teens buying the latest album or DVD box-set.
Hmmmm. I bet all those kids are legally paying for their multimedia on Amazon and E-Bay... wait... no I don't.
Either way, burning books is stupid.
Regards.
P.S. Apparently you will see Borders diversifying heavily over the next couple years. They have already slated 1/2 of the Waldenbook operations for closure even though they are marginally profitable. Apparently not having floor space to diversify into higher tech stock was the death knell for those stores. There is even a rumor of download kiosks & cell phone kiosks slated for test markets. *ROFL* There was a rumor of a partnership w/B&N floating around earlier this year.
Step 1.) Place books on Amazon
Step 2.) Wait a while
Step 3.) Profit
It says he tried to donate the books but was unable to find any takers.
To combat illiteracy, I think we should exclusively confine all life-saving information to printed material. Don't tell kids not to jump in front of speeding vehicles, or poke themselves in the face with sharp knives, or leap off tall buildings... keep that information in books. Give it a few years, and illiteracy will be a think of the past, since all the dumb kids will be dead :)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You protest declining literacy by BURNING books? Isn't that a little umm.....ironically incorrect? Why don't they burn radios or TVs instead? I'm certain the presence of those devices cause declining literacy more than books do... >_>
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
if this guy were wearing rainbow suspenders and burning old copies of King's Quest and Appleworks on 5.25" floppies? Would anyone care?
Heinrich Heine
-- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
Has anyone noticed the prices on books lately? New hardbacks are going for $25 to $30 USD, and mass market paperbacks are going for $8 USD. I read typically five or six books a month. But they're mostly paperbacks where I can buy four for the price of three, and other books when there's a 30% off discount of the retail price. When I was a kid, I could get ten paperback books for $30 USD and be set for the next three months. These days I can barely get more than four. If it true that large numbers of new books are being pulped each year, the publisher should drop the prices to make books more affordable for the masses.
...books burn YOU!
Why waste perfectly good kindling? This is KC damnit! Slap some Gate's BBQ sauce the grill and burn up a few steaks while you're at it.
There are a whole lot of libraries (or what's left of them) in Iraq that got burned involunarily in the "stuff happens" period following the U.S. invasion that would probably love to have a bunch of material in English -- "I for one welcome our new English-speaking overlords" -- and if this guy wants to make a statement, why not just load all of the stuff in a cargo container and ship it over there?
I've actually been to this place. Unlike most /.-ers, I live in the benighted state of Kansas and this place is just two blocks from the University of Kansas Medical Center, where I've spent more time than I would have liked... It's quite a groovy little bookstore -- reminds me a lot of City Lights in San Francisco. Yes, even in Kansas we know about things like City Lights. We also walk on two legs, but only because the Chinese invented the wheelborrow. About 4,000 years after Creation.
In principle, it is a bookstore well worth supporting. But in light of all of the folks in the world who would love to use these books to improve their English, this book-burning gesture seems misguided. To say nothing of reinforcing the view of Kansans as more or less like Neanderthals, but with less intellectual sophistication. Though truth be told, this bookstore is a full 50 meters on the Missouri side of the state line, so don't blame Kansas. Please. Now excuse me while I go club something for dinner.
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
This little spectacle isn't even CLOSE to the "send money or I'll kill and eat this cute bunny" web site. Books? Pah! Warm and fuzzy -> Hassenpfeffer: true drama.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
all I can say is, "You sick bastard." Is it just me or is there something inherently wrong about burning books? Just the thought of it makes me cringe.
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
Yeah, that helps. I'm going to shoot some people and scream at the top of my lungs about gun safety.
Es brennt!
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
That doesn't sound like a very good bookstore, does it? Do they get a lot of business?
Very retro-surreal of them. Too bad we don't have any stores that sell witches, they could protest by burning witches!
Which brings me to the question: did they, by any chance, burn any Harry Potter books...?
Literacy is at an all time high in human history. Books are plentiful, governments and non-profit organizations are getting serious about education, and with the popularity of the internet and mobile phone texting in most of the world there is significant incentives for people to become literate.
Being able to read no only enriches your life, it now lets you participate in the latest fads and is now a requirement for most modern forms of socialization.
Although some people believe that the word literacy means people have read "the classics", and it seems that the classics are less relevant in people's lives. and in most schools they have been cut as a requirement. these days most kids learn about the classics through various made-for-TV movies.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well, I'll be up that way during the Louisville Lebowskifest. I'll make sure to incinerate at least one body, and one car, as I play with the nihilists.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
How much to donate books? I can get my hands on few by Ann Coulter :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Booooks? What are booooks?" - Weena
H.G. Wells, The Time machine.
(Well ok the Original Motion Picture)
No, this guy just wants to generate more sales, and to do so in the most inhumane, barbaric, evil way possible. People who burn books are disguisting, and honestly, if I lived in this area, the thought of a book store owner, of all people, who was willing to burn a book, would ensure that I would never, ever, ever purchase anything at his establishment ever again. Burning any book, good or bad, whether you approve of it or not, is a crime against humanity; it is a violation against the essence of human genius, creativity, and generation, be it hate speech or a widely acclaimed work of art (hell, even a Tom Clancy novel). And for a book store owner, whom one would assume would be a bibliophile, to do this, is monstrous. Like I said: shoot him.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
...would at least try to spell authors' names correctly. Brodsky, not "Brodskey."
My e-Books that is! HA!
The Goreacle is not pleased!!!
Repent!!
Buy your Eco-Indulgences.
And, Jon Stewart's take.
At least they won't expose themselves to some kind of copyright violation.
Burn motherfucker, burn... oooppssss. I did not sing this to the Slashdot audience, I was just thinking of it...
One more time then: burn motherfucker, burn.
I used to teach in Ethiopia; education at the university level is in English. I had brilliant students whose work would have been a lot better had they had access to whatever random book they happened to need for their research. Students taking courses who live on about $20 per month can't afford to buy the course books; instead a group gets together and pools in to make a xerox copy. Pretty much any book of any value would be welcomed, though one would probably have to make arrangements to avoid customs duties.
AFAIK most African universities and libraries are in a similar situation.
Of course sending them to Africa probably wouldn't get you on the front pages or generate any revenue for your store....
I heard this guy on a interview this evening. He is a frickin' jerk trying to make a name for himself, his bookstore and his publishing company. So people are reading less. That's the only measure of intellect? Give me a break!
Oh, sure; they'd take that rare report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910--but how many copies of "Harry Potter" can a library reasonably take? I mean, what are they supposed to do? Rent a warehouse and store the books?In other words, rather than pay the dumping fees to dump the excess stock in a landfill--excess stock no-one wants not because we're illiterate but because really, how many copies of "The Hunt for Red October" is a family supposed to own?--he burns them in an illegal bonfire.
The whole burning the books thing is a huge win/win: it taps into that underlying emotional current we have in America against book burning, while at the same time reduces the amount of money-loosing stock he has to carry without paying dumping charges to dump them at a landfill. And the real win: because he has tapped into that emotional current--
(Emphasis mine.) By tapping into that current he caused people like Marcia Trayford to "adopt" as many books as she could--books she would have otherwise not bought. Meaning rather than continue to pay for storage fees or landfill disposal charges, he made twenty bucks he wouldn't have made before.
So now the fascinating equation here will be: will he make money by having the occassional book burning--by causing people to "rescue" books from a book burning, even though the books themselves are in such wide circulation that you otherwise couldn't give them away (so the burning isn't classic censorship, but just property disposal)? Or would it be cheaper to just dump the books at a landfill?
My guess? P.T. Barnum was right--and the people coming in to "rescue" books that are not being censored but just disposed of will more than offset the cost to obtain a permit to burn private property for disposal purposes.
and it gave me back money, it was called something like... e - day? no , hmmm it was E-Bay.
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
A couple of years ago someone who sold on eBay gave me lots of hints for selling books. Basically estate buy anything but Joan Collins type books because all 999,999 of her true believer readers buy every book in the first printing. So there is zero residual interest in a Joan Collins style book.
c ountry_per_year
The KC gentleman picked awful places to dump his books. He mentioned libraries. Libraries are going digital now. By the way, this very second is a most EXCELLENT time in ALL OF HISTORY to load up on bound magazines that libraries are dumping. Pick your favorite magazine and go check eBay when you are done here.
So the guy seemed to be a bit odd. And I guess that is the very definition of small shop bookseller today. Not so long ago, production of books in the USA in 1966 was a mere 68,175. So a shopping mall B.Dalton or Kansas City shop could carry most of them through the year. In 2006 yearly production of USA books was 172,000. That means an average of 472 new books EVERY DAY. How do you pick what people want out of that number? UK had an even larger increase.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_
Thanks,
Jim
was Greensburg, KS. You know, that city that got wiped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago by an F5 tornado? The citizens are trying to rebuild, but they have nothing. Here's a perfect example of people in need of books, and this guy who is a few hours drive away burns them. What a waste.
I have written a thoughtful letter to the bookstore asking that instead of staging another burning, that he look around the Kansas City area to find an organization that would haul the books away to Greensburg to help them out. I live in Kansas, and when I get a few free days, I'd be more than happy to load up my station wagon with books and drive them down to Greensburg.
Not mainstream enough to warrant the distribution of an e-book? I would think it would be much easier and certainly much cheaper to create one digital copy of a text and distribute it on the internet than to get a book printed, bound and carried in stores.
where they BOUGHT a whole bunch of French wine and poured it down the sewers. This book burning seems about as smart to me as that.
You have to wonder the worth of these books.
And I don't mean the monetary worth. What I mean is that if the books were "good," then someone else would have bought them or accepted them for free.
It's the nature of free enterprise: if these books, that this guys is trying to give away, were worth while, they wouldn't last a day.
I don't offer too many guarantees, but this I can guarantee you that if these books were masterpieces or technical programming manuals (Java or the programming flavour of the month), he would end up making money.
But obviously, these books are garbage--regardless of all the effort put by the original authors.
I would just recycle them; why make such a big deal about books no one wants.
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
Can anyone tell me the origin of "you insensitive clod"? Is it a reference to something, something that some celebrity said, or is it just one of those things that everyone seems to agree upon?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Maybe it's the bibliophile in me, but a book has always seemed more permanent. Now, this might be a little hypocritical in an age of horrible binding, crappy paper, and poor ink quality, but there is something more, I guess romantic, in a sense, about a book. After all, when I give my family members books for birthdays and holidays (we're all book-nerds), I don;t give them burned cds and flash drives, I give them a printed copy of a work. Who knows, it might just be an antiquated, sentimental attachment which will disappear in 50 years or less, but still: there is something special about the nature of a book.
Having said that, I would love for there to be an explosive expansion of digital libraries, but that's more part and parcel of knowledge and learning as a worthy goal in and of itself, and providing broader educational opportunites. Even then, while I would probably become one with my chair if a large enough online library was established, I would probably still want to purchase a print copy of particularly good books.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
1. Sell inventory for 1$
2. BURN it if it dosen't sell!!!
3. ???
4. Profit!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
What is the best title for the preceding post?
a. Re:won't RTFA
b. Wooden Food
c. Fighting Fires with Books
d. Fahrenheit 824291
e. The Cowboy Neal Code
George Bush.
Uh, isn't this exactly what the illiterate would *want* to do?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
and thereafter the sewer had a nutty, currant and chocolate bouquet while still expressing a good turdy nose.
That brings new meaning to the term fire sale.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Not trying to be a flamebait here, but I've never seen slashdot responses so off the mark before. Does anyone listen to NPR? Anyways, the BBC was interviewing the bookseller, because book burning is quite... an odd thing to do for a bookseller. He explained how he has a truck trailer absolutely packed with used books (he's a used book seller for one thing) - imagine, that's a ton of books there. He's spent the past five years trying to get rid of the books - not in a bad way like throwing them away, but actually distributing them to the populace. The problem was, though, that no one wanted the books. He's actually tried giving them away - he's spent countless hours and days going throughout his country trying to distribute them. He and his partner have realized it's a cultural, literacy problem we're having in the U.S... people just don't like reading books anymore. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but he cited a government study showing how from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of the U.S. population that read at least 1 book a day for pleasure went down 10% (from 54% to 44%). He hopes that this 'book burning' will start a dialogue in this country about reading... high hopes of course, but hey - you gotta try. So don't give this guy such a hard time - he's done as much as he could have done to get this books distributed - we're the problem, not him. Remember, the only thing worse than burning a book is not reading one.
The attitude of "books will be obsolete in the future" disturbs me.
Reading the news on the internet works, because it takes so little time, and you can generally sit at your desk or whatever and eat something while you cruise through absolute-up-to-the-minute-real-time world events.
Reading books on the internet? On cell phones and PDAs and iPods and whatever portable device you like? A book is a big thing, and I hope I am not alone when I say that reading off of a screen for too long gives me terrible, terrible headaches. What's so wrong with a book? They fit into your pocket. They are cheap (if you hit up the local used bookstore). They can be written on. They can be given to others to read. And they require no electricity, no machines, no batteries, nothing. How come books are suddenly old hat?
Maybe wanting to read books made with dead trees makes me a luddite. How depressing.
Funny you should mention that. At the Science Fiction Forum at Stony Brook University, there was a fire a while ago, burned a large portion of the collection. One of the few books spared was Fahrenheit 451, there's a small blurb about it on the 4m's site.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I can put ANY piece of "trash" out on the curb on trash day and its gone before the trash truck comes. Here's a list of things in the last couple of months: 2 broken chairs, a half burnt curtain, deadbolts without keys, an obviously broken TV(cracked screen), a plastic broom handle, etc. Just straight trash and its picked up by guys in pickups. I'm sure they can fix some of the stuff like the chair, or maybe salvage parts from the TV or something, but apparently people have uses for all sorts of things. IF this guy had put out what we in big cities call "an advertisement", the books would be gone pretty damn quickly. He lives in Kansas City and can't find even ONE person who wants that shit? TFA mentioned antique children's books and some stuff beyond Clancy and Harry Potter, like a book from the early 1900s. He's a huge egocentric prick for burning books; hopefully he had enough brains to keep the rare stuff out of the fire. RM
Protesting declining literacy by... burning things people would read?
It'd make more sense to destroy televisions or something. At least make your publicity stunts not look self-defeating.
> Whereas, printed media ... requires nothing more than a pair of Mark I eyeballs
Just to add something you forgot: this is a big advantage to certain religious sects. I don't think printed editions of the Talmud or the Amish Bible are going to go out of style in the near future, no matter how good the electronic equivalents get.
Somebody will go on spree shooting in the school claiming to protest against school bullying. Or wait...
There is a saying in some countries: "Where they burn books, they soon burn people."
One more reason not to travel to Kansas City, I guess.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
It's a waste of good recycling paper for more books (hopefully not Harry Potter or Ann Coutler), or just plain toilet paper, as well as contributing to the pollution just to make a statement is irresponsible too. A publicity stunt that stinks all the way.
Their aint no dekline in literasy. I 4 1 dont know what there talkin bout.
But I'm skeptical that computers/electronics will take much of literature-reading from books. Books are cheap to the point of being disposable. I have books that I picked up used and I've had for 20 years--economically, they're worth nothing. But as far as the experience of reading, they beat my Macbook or the Palm Tungstem I used to have. I have read a couple of long books on a Palm, and even with a good screen it still isn't that great. The battery life, fragility, cost factor, all affect your experience. If I leave a book on a train I'm out $20 (sometimes a lot less, down to less than $1 for used books), and I've lost just one book. If I'd lost my Tungsten I'd be out $350, and even with all my ebooks backed up and in non-DRM formats so I could easily replace them, it still takes work and time to get another unit and upload all the software and files.
I love tech as much as the next guy. But old-fashioned books are not going to go away with just a few more technological advances. I just moved into a new house, and no, I didn't like unpacking ~2K books, but a thumbdrive full of pdfs isn't a good enough replacement, no matter how good the screen or how long the battery life.
Now, music and movies, yes--to me, music cds are just wasted space, and I don't feel much differently about movie dvds. I'd much prefer a HD full of mp3s (or ogg files, whatever) to a large CD collection.
First they burned books, then they burned people.
And Qur'ans. Mustn't forget the other theists.
Long-term they will take over primarily because you can store an entire library in a unit the size of a single paperback. But the publishers need to accept progress, otherwise the market is going to be dominated by pirated books that have simply been scanned, OCR'ed, and shared via P2P.
I personally like to hunt down hardback copies of books I like, even books I already own. A hardback set (with dustjackets intact) of the 1981 Random House edition of Proust might be garbage to some, because it isn't a first edition and isn't an investment, but I paid over twice what a new paperback set costs. Want a hardback edition of Finnegans Wake? How about a single-volume India-Paper edition of Shakespeare's works, with dustjacket? Hardback editions (Everyman's Library doesn't count) of all the Dostoevsky works translated by Pevear/Volokonsky? None of these are financially valuable, so they probably fall into the "garbage" category to anyone looking at books as a business, but as a reader, well, I love that stuff, and I'm willing to pay for it. I love sites like addall.com. There is still money in books, but small bookstores who expect to be able to charge cover price for new release bestsellers are going to falter.
I'm picky as hell about books. I'm a self-identified literary snob. Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, the whole bit. I found the Harry Potter books slow going at times (everything prior to the first day of school, usually) but the fact is that I read them, one after the other. Partly it was to have some common ground with my kids, but frankly the books were good. There is plenty of overrated tripe on the shelf (the Left Behind series comes to mind) but Harry Potter isn't bad.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v287/nicholaus/m isc%20shit/1243127050_l.jpg
and...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v287/nicholaus/m isc%20shit/235630955_l.jpg
Yes, I'd still buy one, and use it for technical books, reference books, stuff like that--assuming that battery life is very very good. I'd love to have one with an encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, unix books, and so on. But for novels and pleasure-reading, I'll stick to musty paper.
Sounds to me like a reverse fire sale... instead of selling items burned in a fire, they are selling items to prevent them from being burned in a fire. Hey, if they unloaded books to people, maybe it was worth it. I've seen thousands of people go into bookstores, read a book, and leave before a few actually buy the book. Anyone that's been to a Borders or B&N recently knows what I'm talking about.
stuff |
If you don't get down here in the next 30 minutes and buy a car from me "I'm GOING TO CLUB THIS BABY SEAL! That's right! I'll club a seal to make a deal!"
If a book is burnt in the woods and no one sees the flames does it really burn? If some guy was burning a bunch of floppy disks it wouldn't make the news. If he was burning a bunch of VHS or cassette tapes it wouldn't even make the news. When I first heard this story I said, this is stupid no one will get the point. I was wrong, people have got the point, look how many places this has shown up, digg, /., CNN, Foxnews, Drudgereport, NYT...his point to read more books is getting out there but I do think it will have no effect. I think it brings out a large prejudice to the burning of books. People see this as some violation of the rules. Anything can be burnt except books, flags, effigies, and my Starbucks coffee.
I believe this was a publicity stunt; the books were in large part worthless or not of interest to anyone. Also, judging from the material offered on their website, it looks like many of the books they sell are poetry/literary art, things not very popular today anyways.
As for me I've been cleaning up on buying old books, however almost none of them are fiction. With wikipedia and the "print-it-quick" mentality, reference and technical books are also getting very, very cheap. Many of the Time-life series of books, which make for informative if not exactly scholarly reading, are available for $1 each. How about a box of National Geographic? Old album books on World War Two, airplanes, the Civil War, etc.; all loaded with pictures and still historically correct, are under $10. Encyclopedias and reference books on things from fish to dogs to the big cats of Africa are also available for almost nothing.
Just like with web sources some books can be pretty bad (my degree is as a librarian, so books were my life at one time), but the majority are better written and more informative than someone's freebie website. Plus, I don't have to get online to research.
As for the merits of Harry Potter vs. Charles Dickens, quit bickering, history will decide that one.......
But that does not mean that it necessarily had a technical, artistic or aesthtetic value any worth mentioning.
The use of the English language in the HP books is pedestrian to say the least.
When you read "The Great Gatsby", "Lolita" or "In cold blood" you know you are in the presence of genius. When you read Harry Potter you are grateful for the good entertainment, but frankly would be mad to compare the output of JK Rowling with any masters of literature in the English language who can provide more insight into the human condition in a couple of pages than JK Rowling does in a complete book.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
THis is so contrived that is completely useless.
You have to define more riguroulsy what is a "good literary work" and a "good book".
As long as you only refer to your own taste, any explanation you give is completely useless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If they cared, then why dont THEY donate to local school's or prisons?
... this is getting any attention is that the headline contains the words "book" and "burn" together, even though it has nothing to do with suppression or censorship.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
F*cking for Virginity
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Please. Now excuse me while I go club something for dinner.
even a Kansasian can do it.
Mark Twain defined a literary classic as a book that people praise but don't read. You want a classic? I give you English as She is Spoke .
...once used. Film, DVD, Video, Computer Games etc. The value of them is only in their initial novelty e.g. _nobody_ has a copy before it is released therefore everyone has to buy it. If you want a giggle try selling a copy of 1984, Zelda:Ocarina of Time or Mean Girls on DVD. I believe this initial novelty is why the film and book industries guards so carefully against copying before release e.g. night vision goggles in cinemas.
Once the experience is done with only the die hard will go back and reuse their media.
After that the media/medium only becomes valuable once it has, once again, become relatively rare. This only happens if the work is considered "good" and the unfaithful (one off experiencers) have discarded, destroyed or lost most of the copies.
As it becomes ever easier to copy and store word and pictures only the packaging (medium) is _actually_ worth (monetary) anything and its value is its collectability (seems to be intrinsically linked to its rarity where rarity is a function of how many people want it versus how many are still available).
Anyhow, this is only my impression. I'd love to hear more from others.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Cowboy Neal's Backdraft
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
However, for the last several years, the US Government has caused the deaths of thousands of people, many of them Americans, for no good reason. We the people, have been lied to repeatedly. Our country will not be able to recover financially for at least a generation. We are making more and more enemies across the globe and have lost what respect we did have in the eyes of the world.
All of this happened in just a few years - and there is no end in sight.
Sorry to be brash, but fuck you and your book burning. There are bigger issues at stake right now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Highlandish!
One other thing to consider here- Libraries also have limited space, and lets be real- they don't want to take all the random crap you have in your basement. I am going to take this one step farther- not every guy who wipes his ass with a piece of paper should be read or put in a library, even if he manages to get published. That biography about that stoner guy who traveled across the country in 1972 or that fairly popular band might have been a decent story in the 70's, but now... no one really cares. Am I saying that the entire record of this story should be wiped out? No. But I don't think local libraries have any obligation to take this stuff in either, especially if it is going to push other titles off the shelves.
In Soviet Russia the clod insensitives YOU.
(I think I need more coffee...)
A classic has been defined as something that everyone praises as a classic but no body reads. A good thing to, because I think if everyone that praised them read them we would have fewer classics. For a point I used to praise Lolita because my english teacher did. Then I tried to read the damn thing. It sucks. Not because of the subject material, which I won't go into, but because Vladimir Nabokov can't fucking write.
Same with Moby Dick. Holy Shit! The was the most painful thing I've ever been held at gun point to read. My literary grade was riding on it. fucking hippy teacher
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Farenheit 451 anyone?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
... Man, the owner of that pet store was SOOO pissed!
1. (From this post) ead /. come up for arithmetic.
2. (From an earlier post) righting
3. I hate to see what
I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign.
I don't think I could bring myself to patronize a store whose owner burns books. The idea that it is right to burn books in any situation whatsoever is a tiny but critical element that enabled Kristalnacht (nazi book burning). Any bookseller who knows the book Farenheit 451 (which is also temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts) and still does this is one of the most unethical creatures around. Perhaps he eats babies too.
people just don't like reading books anymore. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but he cited a government study showing how from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of the U.S. population that read at least 1 book a day for pleasure went down 10% . . . He hopes that this 'book burning' will start a dialogue in this country about reading... . . . Remember, the only thing worse than burning a book is not reading one.
This all looks pretty good to me. There are, of course, three things he and way too many other people are ignoring in their rush to judge that the world is going to pot:
o That's PRINT books that have declined. I'm currently working on an electronic copy of Xenophon. Plenty of younger people take online books for granted.
o The eyeballs gave partly gone to blogs, which have a rich and much more interactive intellectual life unto themselves. This IS reading.
o Other eyeballs have gone to games, which have also become intellectually rich and interactive (and, did I mention, also involve reading?).
So where's that crisis of reading?
To me, it looks like he's saying, "pay attention to me and give me money because I'm not paying attention to changes in society and don't want to think hard to find homes for my books." 2-3 good suggestions have been made in this thread for what he could've done with them.
Reminds me of Earl Muntz of "muntzing" fame.
m l
http://www.national.com/rap/Story/0,1562,17,00.ht
For example, Muntz would advertise a particular car with a special price as the "special of the day" - a car that had to sell that day. If the car was not sold by the end of the day, Muntz vowed to smash it to bits with a sledge-hammer, personally, on camera. Needless to say, with tricks like that he was able to generate a lot of publicity and interest, and sell a lot of old cars, too.
There are bigger issues at stake right now.
There are bigger issues, but you yourself even seem to point out that root cause:
However, for the last several years, the US Government has caused the deaths of thousands of people, many of them Americans, for no good reason. We the people, have been lied to repeatedly. Our country will not be able to recover financially for at least a generation. We are making more and more enemies across the globe and have lost what respect we did have in the eyes of the world.
Many critics of US policy, both European and American, will say the major root cause is due to the ignorance of the American people. This is illustrated when the only piece of reading *most* Americans will do is on their myspace blog or the recent copy of People Magazine in the newsstand aisle.
I've skimmed through a lot of the posts, and a few bright souls seem to hit the nail on the head about people going to Barnes & Noble to read, but few rarely buy the books. I'd go a bit further than that to point out most of the people I see at B&N tend to lurk in the magazine section, reading (you guessed it) nothing but tabloid and automotive stuff.
I'm sure the book store did this to get some publicity, but it still makes me cringe when I see most Americans don't take the time to read about the outside world. We need to fix that!
He isn't donating the books because the recipients have no space to hold them. The shelters, hospitals, "old-folks homes" etc are simply as disinterested in storing books - books that people aren't reading regardless of where they are - as the owner is. In the end, someone has to pay to store these books, either directly or indirectly.
This was not listed in the linked article, but the owner of the bookstore is quoted as saying that in other AP versions of this news story.
Books for Baghdad, a site soliciting textbook donations for Baghdad University.
>> Does Lord of the Rings, one of the most horrendously written classics ever created, qualify as having literary value?
> Nope. Great book, tho. Read it 7 time already, in 2 languages.
I find that to truly appreciate Lord of the Rings, you need to read it in its original Klingon.
I like Moby Dick, you insensitive clod! Of course, it's no Flatland ...
they are all specific oriented to abandoned software and dated papers...
We got every month "old paper" for recyclage here in Belgium; maybe that might be a good deal for you
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
it's not buried yet *evil grin*
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I'm sorry to hear that. You have my condolences....
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If my memory serves me correctly, William Burrough's is actually *buried* in St. Louis. But he lived quietly, and well protected by the community, for many years in Lawrence. We had Langston Hughes as well, though he got out of here as quickly as he could.
Yeah, Phelps, BOE creationists, Kline (who is also abusing his *current* office as an appointed DA in Johnson County) -- I'm not saying Kansas (or some percentage of Kansans) aren't asking for some of this. But the extent to which Kansas has become *the* symbol of yahooism gets a bit wearing at times and, for example, one could argue that in many ways, Colorado is as bad or worse (their politicians are much crazier than ours in general but they don't have Phelps, and they do have mountains and ski resorts...)
Well, keeps the place from getting too crowded, and the housing prices down, and one can get direct flights to SFO for $300 or so round-trip, and at this moment I'm writing from Monterey...
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon