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New York's Last Remaining Independent Bookshops (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Guardian, written by Hermione Hoby: Michael Seidenberg, pictured kingly in his throne of a wicker chair, feet spread, pipe in mouth, is one of around 50 New York indie booksellers featured in a series of portraits by Philippe Ungar and Franck Bohbot, a pair of bibliophilic Frenchmen who met and befriended each other in Brooklyn. The two, writer and photographer respectively, have taken great pleasure in traveling across the city, to neighborhoods in every borough, to meet and photograph booksellers in their habitats. Despite their diversity, the way their distinct personalities and passions are reflected and amplified in their shops, they are all, says Ungar, "looking for the same thing -- a generous vision of sharing culture". Ungar mentions Corey Farach, owner of the scruffy, adored and longstanding feminist bookshop Bluestockings. Farach, as Ungar recounts with admiration, encourages those people who can't afford to buy a $40 book to take a seat, make themselves comfortable, and just read it in the shop. "That is to me," says Ungar, "the spirit of the indie booksellers." Because, as he sees it, "a bookstore is much more than a bookstore, it's much more than selling books. It's a public shelter. Whoever you are, you don't have to buy anything, they won't ask you for your ID. You're free -- you can stay for hours and browse. There's a generosity, an optimism. And that's what we wanted to enhance." "[I]ndie bookshops are outposts of idealism," writes Hoby. "And if they seem like the most romantic places in the city, it might be down to this -- to the way their owners and customers might all be engaged in the same project, a kind of sanctuary building in the unsheltered world."
She goes on to mention Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, "a small space crammed with vintage titles," as well several closed bookshops "which have fallen to astronomically rising rents." "Three Lives & Company [...] narrowly escaped closure in 2016 after an upswell of neighborhood support," writes Hoby. The group that owns the building decided to "provide it with stability," given how well-loved it is in the West Village.
She goes on to mention Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, "a small space crammed with vintage titles," as well several closed bookshops "which have fallen to astronomically rising rents." "Three Lives & Company [...] narrowly escaped closure in 2016 after an upswell of neighborhood support," writes Hoby. The group that owns the building decided to "provide it with stability," given how well-loved it is in the West Village.
the remake, not the original. Sorry, it was the first thing that popped into my head.
If people want to fund nonprofit nerd shelters, cool, do that. Sell some books for additional fundraising too if that helps.
There's no need to bemoan the loss of bookshops for the small group of people who valued bookshops over more books if the goal wasn't ever to be a bookshop; if that was the excuse rather than the purpose.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've had the pleasant experience of coming across "green activists" who are gung-ho about "saving the environment." That's a great thing, but when these same people then talk about how they're upset that digital books are ruining America and that people need to go back to reading print...I don't get it.
I love that place! I used to stop by whenever my old band was in NYC. My copy of Snow Crash came from there. Last time I was there I went to another cool bookstore called Book Thug Nation that had a massive amount of used sci-fi at surprisingly reasonable prices. It really saved my ass because I forgot to bring any books on that tour.
Looking for a cool, community-accessible place where anyone can walk in, pull a book of the shelf, and start reading without being pressured?
Try the library!
If, like the article, you think "a bookstore is much more than a bookstore, it's much more than selling books. It's a public shelter. Whoever you are, you don't have to buy anything, they won't ask you for your ID. You're free -- you can stay for hours and browse. There's a generosity, an optimism." What you are looking for is a library. Many will even let you check out books on exchange with other library systems, not just other branches.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
If I'm ever homeless I'll pee at the indie bookstore.
Yes but you don't really have black people in Russia. I suppose the Chechens are your equivalent. The police in Russia are different too, much easier to bribe (unless they grab you for something 'political').
It offers the only book club, and organizes meetings with authors. There is absolutely no other business that provides these services for roughly a million pleople
As you say, roughly a MILLION PEOPLE live around there, and yet can only (probably barely) sustain one tiny book store. What real value then are they providing? I don't mean money, I mean real human value, because if there was tremendous value there would be other similar stores, or people would find a way to make them work.
There are already book clubs all over the place (there is no way in all of Brooklyn that is the "only book club"), and authors may find it harder to find stores to sign material in can still be seen at conventions and the like, or even online AMA's...
It's nice to maintain cultural traditions but over time some things will go away, and small bookstores are juts plain going to be one of those things. I say that as an avid reader that has spent many, many enjoyable hours in small bookstores... but I can clearly see that time is past, and I don't see value in hanging onto archaic traditions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Methinks he doth protest too much.
Did you fall for that troll or just use it as an excuse?
Either way, your 2nd paragraph makes no sense without explaining what the "anti black crime" narrative is.
I love how my conservative friends complain about liberals. Oh, liberals are a bunch of namby pampy snowflakes. They're everything that's wrong with America today. One even told me how he "fucking hates liberals". I laughed, being perhaps the most liberal person he knows.
I remind my conservative friends that America's founding fathers were the most liberal men in the world. I remind them that their favorite Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was the most liberal public figure of his time. I remind them that Teddy Roosevelt was a liberal.
I ask them, if we had a time machine, how far back into the past would we have to send them before they'd be a liberal. They get all agitated because it's only a few decades. They get all agitated when I tell them that over 6000 years of human history, it's been liberal positions they support. The usual response is something along the lines of "well, it can't be true that liberals were always right." Sure, you can think about it a long time. Do some serious research. I'm sure you can come up with an exception here and there. I guess that's why they think they're exceptional thinkers. "Liberals have been right 99% of the time for 6000 years, but liberals suck!"
You mean like you just did?
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Your posts, including this one, strongly indicate your own ideology, but, in your knee-jerk objection to someone who has a differing opinion, you seem to be reading rather more into his post than (afaict) was ever there.
So ... your complaint is that people who are liberty-minded complain about people who call themselves liberals ... And you hate them for it.
His comment related his amusement with his friends' cognitive dissonance or lack of historical perspective. There was no hatred displayed. I'd have thought the multiple instances of the word 'friend' would have been a bit of a giveaway as to how he felt about the people he was talking about.
Now, for what it's worth, I pretty much agree, to varying degrees, with everything you wrote about the current breed of 'liberals', although it's worth pointing out that this breed are still relatively rare, just damn noisy and therefore more prominent that actual 'laissez faire' liberal people. I've met and debated several of this new breed of 'liberal' and they have been some of the most unpleasant, shrill, divisive and intolerant people it has ever been my displeasure to interact with. However, rather than fall into the trap of playing their game, I don't assume everyone who thinks of or describes themself as liberal is a raging asshole like the members of this new breed. Labels can mislead as much as they can inform.
Sometimes, for example you responding to GP's comment or me to your's, it's worth taking a deep breath and asking: "what, from what's just been said, can I find to agree with?" rather than "how can I express my disagreement and displeasure with what's just been said?".
A knee-jerk rage reaction rarely improves a situation, for anyone, for all that it might feel cathartic at the time.
Even cheap paperbacks last longer than digital media.
Doesnt matter because you can copy digital content from one medium to another with as close to zero cost imaginable. You can easily make backups on multiple forms of media and easily have those backups self propagate to new media when available thanks to the internet. Not just backups either but perfect identical backups. Not true with paper. Paper has it's charms to be sure but if we're comparing the potential for longevity the only way paper will beat digital is the event of an apocalyptic EMP. Paper is kind of a least common denominator technology which will likely always be around and be useful but it isn't generally speaking more durable unless you are confining digital documents to a fixed medium which isn't really what happens these days.
People tend to forget that when they pull out decades or centuries old books as proof of how long books last that they are experiencing survivorship bias.
I'd say that overall the infrastructure to handle ebook readers and all the electronics associated with them including batteries and all the energy in producing all the infrastructure (servers, electronics, rare earths, global shipping, etc.) have a far worse ecological life cycle assessment than printed paper.
Then you have evidently never researched the issue. Paper accounts for about 25% of all solid waste. Paper production is hugely polluting and accounts for about 5% of all industrial pollutants. It also has issues with deforestation, evidently consumes about 35% of harvested trees, contributes to monocultures of planted trees, and uses more water to produce a ton of product than just about anything else we make. While at the end of the day your statement may be correct it isn't obviously so. Paper production isn't eco-friendly like many imagine it to be.
With no special care or handling, books will easily last a century or three.
Hogwash. You are suffering from survivorship bias. The vast majority of books experience no special care or handling and demonstrably do not last anywhere close to that long.
As a counterpoint to your preference for digital, I have a copy of the first software I developed back in the early 1980's. It's construction accounting software. I printed out the source code and documentation and also have copies on 5.25" floppy disk. I can still read the hard copy, but the digital copy is unreadable for me. You may have some old hardware available to you, but I'm not a collector. I'd have had to convert the format of that stuff several times over the years to keep a readable digital copy. I don't think I've had a machine with a 5.25" floppy drive in more than 20 years.
Again survivorship bias. Much data from that era has been transferred to other media. It's trivial to search on the internet to find software even older than yours and to copy it trivially. I can easily find software that perfectly replicates computers I used in the early 1980s. Yes some was lost but that's no different from paper. And once it is available online it is comparatively trivial to make innumerable perfect copies. Good luck doing that with paper.
Paper is hugely useful and I'm not arguing for or against it. I just think your arguments in favor of it are flawed. There are good arguments for continued use of paper books but you aren't using those arguments.
Not only that, but do you realize how few books are actually available as eBooks? Sure, most titles being published today are, but I seldom read new books.
So because you don't read ebooks they don't exist? Despite you admitting that they do? Despite the fact that it's unusual anymore for books to not be electronically available?
Had this conversation on a plane, once.
Wow, one conversation! That's proof if I ever saw it.
I walked into a library a couple years back and it had no fucking books. Fine... but the surreal shithole should either be replaced by a webportal or at least serve beverages and call it a "Public Internet Cafe." But "library??" Crazy, ignorant fucks.
I got a good chuckle how you proudly proclaim your ignorance of what libraries are and what they do. As if they should somehow be forced to conform to your preconceived and uninformed idea that they are merely repositories of paper books.
Please tell me that I can still pick up stuff for the coven at Ray's Occult Bookstore! If he shuts the doors, I just don't know what I would do.
Despite a fancy phrase (survivorship bias) everything you said is still bullshit hand-waving...
A "fancy phrase" that you apparently are incapable of understanding. If a "fancy phrase" scares you then maybe go somewhere with a dumber crowd more your speed.
You can't 'explain away' or handwave the FACT that books will outlast all the format-shifting.
SOME books might. MOST books will not. I suggest you study the difference. Using the few books to survive hundreds of years as evidence that books as a whole are profoundly durable is a dumb argument. It takes fairly heroic efforts or incredible luck to keep paper in readable condition for hundreds of years. Most of it decomposes long before then.
The fact that some things can be emulated doesn't mean they will be or that it will be done well. It also utterly fails to address the role of DRM.
DRM does not affect most digital content in any way. And had you bothered to actually read you would have noticed I explicitly said that regardless of format (books or digital) some of the content is going to get lost in the sands of time.
Oh and just like homeboy, I have *many* books from the 1800's and turn of the century. They are in fine shape and perfectly readable. So.... bullshit flag thrown.
You have a FEW books from the 1800s (assuming you aren't lying). Far more books from that era are residing in landfills. You have the fortunate few that survived. That does not constitute proof of the durability of books as a general proposition or that it is superior to digital data.
East Lyme Connecticut has a huge used book store that takes up several buildings. My husband likes to take my son there. They have used kids books for $1.00 and paperbacks for $1.00. Its great because they even have areas in each of the bookstores with toys for the little kids to play with at the store.