Paper is better for the brain.
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Just a passing thought. Rather ironic that a champion of paper should devote their time to expounding their view on the internet — instead, for instance, of writing articles for publication in the paper Socialist Standard.
I had in fact asked to be removed from the forum, but no one would oblige and ignored my request.
But to concentrate on the thread instead of on me, you’re not bothered by the destruction of old books, are you?
Of course I am. As it happens, there is an article on just that subject in next month’s Socialist Standard, the paper edition of which was sent out yesterday.
You made a hash-up of my last piece in the Standard by jumbling two separate pieces together, making it incoherent.
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You wrote a good piece about scientific socialism.
I translated it, and it has been published on different sites
It was my fault, actually, that the piece referred to doesn’t work . My apologies to ALB.
I do not know which piece you are referring to, Ciudanado.
Answering your question on the Jesus thread about books. I buy books from different places.
Abe Books sells rare books, but their shipping charges are too high. I buy on eBay from sellers who are running a personal business or charity organisation without shipping charges from international publishers (CPUSA), and I buy from Buscalibre. Revolution Books ( Libros Revolucion, RCPUSA ), Pathfinders (Trotskyists), and Barnes and Noble; there is a wide selection of bookstores out there
I look at the printing style and the font size first; sometimes they just scan a book and glue a new cover. It is a low-quality book. I was a linotype operator (typist) and a bookbinder at the university. Gemco is a company that sells librarian and library supplies, and I buy supplies from them too to cover my books with clear contact paper or supplies to repair old books.
I prefer new books because they have better fonts. They do not use newspaper paper and ink, and they are PDFs. And PDF is a better format than the old format; they use Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader, and WordPerfect, the same tools used by book writers and commercial newspapers, and they use Grammarly for grammar editing.
If I buy used books, I send them to a friend of mine who owns a bookbinding company; he does a very good job, and he inserts three ribbons to be used as bookmarks, and they can be covered in different colours.
There was a bookstore named French and Spanish Bookstore and Macondo that had an extensive collection of books, but they went out of business; most classical bookstores are gone forever, and universities do not have bookstores anymore; everything has been infested by the profit system, and people love it, because they did not enjoy the old days of good bookstores, old classical music stores and vintage stereo equipment which I used to collect too were gone, but they are coming back again.
I purchased all my Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Trotsky complete collections when they were cheap, and they were printed by Progress Publishers, sold by China Books and Periodicals, and other socialist printing shops, but they are all gone. I have them in three different languages. Now they are very expensive, and some commercial publishers are claiming copyrights. Pathfinders has copyright over the English version of Trotsky’s works; two British companies have copyrights on the works of Marx, Engels, Stalin, and Hoxha; I am keeping my collection of Peking Review and Mao’s collected works. Xinhua bookstores sell Chinese books. You can download the whole collection of Marx and Engels from a British company; the whole collection is in PDF.
Puerto Rico, Mexico and Argentina have a lot of bookstores, and Mercado Libre sell many books. I can travel by car to Mexico and buy good books,( new and used books ) and most universities ( UNAM books network has an extensive collection of books ) have bookstores, and UBA ( university of buenos Aires ) sells many books and professors lectures summary, the city of Buenos Aires is surrounded by bookstores, the University of Chile, has the whole collection of Marx and Engels online, in the USA it would be capital sin and the library of the devil, intellectual backwardness and advanced military weapons.
Amazon is selling books printed by xhglc and other publishing companies who are printing good quality books, good fonts, good covers and in pdf, Spain, and Mexico till have very good books printing companies like Editorial Grijalbo, Siglos XXI, Fondo de Cultura Economica ( they have the best edition of Marx Capital ) Grupo Planeta, Sexto Piso, Ediciones Era ( better than URSS Editorial Progreso ) I do not think that all books sold by amazon are ad quality, they sell good medical and law books in softcover and hardcover, many books on demand use good papers, good fonts and good covers and they do not have any grammar and punctuation mistakes, they are double checks with Grammarly.
Amazon sells a tablet named Fire that can be used as a book reader, and it has good fonts, and it has a Retina display, and it is a little better than Kindle, and cheaper than Apple iPad.
Amazon is selling the whole collection of Spanish classical literature, called Spain golden age of literatures
And I avoid anything that looks like it’s print-on-demand. I do research first on the publisher. I’m furious when I end up with a shoddy excuse for a book.
I’ve had some stick from some comrades for using Amazon to publish my book series. That’s print on demand. To my mind, it’s a bit like the debate in the Party a few years ago about investing funds.
The thing is, though Amazon has a bad reputation for various (well-founded) reasons, from the point of view of a writer wanting to self-publish and not having the funds to publish, Amazon was the only realistic option. As a writer, you don’t pay anything. Although,h by the same token, en you earn very little in royalties (although that doesn’t bother me because that is not why I wrote)
However, I would reject the suggestion that the quality is poor. It’s a paperback (so you will like that), but I was very surprised by the quality of the cover and the print. Much better than I expected, and it was done by a printing firm in Italy
Sorry to be cheeky (and doing a plug LOL), but you can get some idea from the front cover of the book (vol 2), which is reproduced in this thread
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Many Print-on-demand books are good; they use good paper and good fonts, and they have good artistic covers. A company named Staples is doing spiral books; many college students use their service
This is a very well-written article
¿Qué es el socialismo científico ?
WordPress, Partido Socialista Mundial, Bluesky, Mastodon, and X (Twitter) blogger and in Portuguese too
Even as I pick up a book of short stories, or a novel – even what used to be called “pulp fiction” – of the mid-20th century in hardback, with nice rough paper; let alone a 19th or 18th century classic with engravings lovingly reproduced in the 1960s, I now see them being sliced and shredded, leaving us digital screen-bound for everything – and I feel sick.
I’m reading now: a simple little 1950s hardback of Cornell Woolrich mystery stories, and this nauseating thought hits me, spoiling my pleasure. I can only say, “This is my book, and they can’t have it before I’m no more, at least.” But then, under capitalism, any man-made disaster can strike, and everything can be lost.
How to enjoy anything? How could I have known, even only thirty years ago, that books, my one go-to that had always been constant, would be threatened?
https://mindmatters.ai/2026/08/its-time-to-buy-old-books-before-ai-destroys-them/
1984 should have been entitled 2026.
AI Overview Yes, copies of books by early 20th-century British author Thomas Burke (known for Limehouse Nights)—along with works by thousands of other authors—have been purchased, scanned, and shredded by AI companies.
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