Paper is better for the brain.
- This topic has 115 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 2 days, 21 hours ago by
.
-
Posts
-
ALB
Keymaster
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.
——————————————————–———————————————————
The article should have also mentioned that millions of those books are turned into digital books, and they are being sold by Kindle and Nook, which are owned by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, combined with the industry of books e-reader devices such as Kindle Paper white, Nook, ipad and Samsung and all of them are making billions of dollars, besides that they have subcriptions for free book reading. Some of those devices have been technologically fixed, but they produce eyes stress to the readersSmall bookstores can not afford the competition, and used bookstores of rare books are vanishing or filing for bankruptcy. Still, some thrifty bookstores can sell only used books on the internet. Some students violating copyright are publishing their own textbooks online for free.
These books are downloaded to a desktop, and they are printed ( personal printer or commercial printer ) and turned into hardcovers or spiral paperbacks; this is similar to print-on-demand.
Because of budget cuts, several universities are closing their library or information science majors, and libraries are hiring clerks with no knowledge of library science. I went to look for a book, and the so-called librarian sent me to the movies section; they do not know anything about cataloguing. I was an assistant librarian, and I learned everything by practice, including book binding, cataloguing, offset and pockets for the books. There are PhDs in information science or library science
I love ‘proper’ books too and my wife and I have ones on our shelves which we bought as far back as the 1950s, and much older ones – some of them real gems – we inherited from our parents.
We have a local library and I am dismayed when I go in and see the number of books shrinking. Libraries these days are more social centres than places for borrowing books. Not that they can be blamed. The latest thing they have done is to merge the science fiction section with general fiction. The ‘classics’ section is down to two short shelves. It’s a good job I like the odd detective thriller because there are plenty of those.
That said, the Sunday Times has a weekly bestsellers section with four categories, two hardback and two paperback, so they are being printed and someone is buying them. I don’t know if the readership is shrinking but they are not cheap. New hardbacks are typically £20-£25 and paperbacks £10-£15, though ebooks aren’t cheap either.
But the important things are what is said, not the medium used, and who reads it, so I’m not altogether upset about ebooks. Sometimes they are very convenient. And of course, much as I love them, paper books take up space, which not everyone has. Though of course I don’t destroy them when I no longer want them, I give them away.
Penguin books is publishing and selling good classical books, good paper, pdf format, good softcover, and nice artistic presentation
And Everyman’s Library continues to print beautiful sewn hardbacks.
————————————————————-
That is how I learned to do bookbinding ( hobby and student part-time job). It is a beautiful artisan art that is dying in some countries, except in places like Mexico, Spain and Puerto Rico, where most of my bookbinding for textbooks has been done.
A company named Gemco sells all the supplies, tools and devices for bookbinders and libraries.
Most of them inherited the training from prior family generations, like carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, or saddlers; that is the reason why the USA can not replace the construction workers quickly, and many of them have been deported; nationalism is backward and retrograde.
Most of them are foreign people who learned their careers or trades from relatives and old shop teachers, like my father, who was also a fine woodworker (called Maestro) before becoming a business owner; my mother also worked with him. All those artisan trainings have been lost, and it takes years to become a professional worker.
Mexicans are experts in construction work, cuisine, and agriculture because they were trained by their parents, who owned shops, small farms, or worked in the industry since they were little children; there were correspondence schools who teached those trades, including mechanics, radio repairs, and tailoring (they were called Corte Inglés e Italiano), such as Hemphills and National schools.
New York had many tailor shops owned by Italians, and women dressmakers became factory workers during the boom of the textile industry; they lost their jobs when industries were moved to other countries, and now they are blaming the workers instead of the capitalists
Most traditional trades have been thrown away; we are not as modern as we think that we are. Probably in a socialist society, men/women would have more freedom to revive those trades, as Paul Lafargue wrote.
The industrial bookbinding companies are glueing the spine of the books using machines, but real bookbinders are artistic people; they know how to use leather covers like a saddler, and they have special tools to stamp artistic decorations and letters on the book’s hardcover, and they use leathers of different colours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnz0rB77YeM. The video has English subtitles or closed captions. They use medieval bookbinding techniques, showing what TM has always said: that the Middle Ages were not the Dark Ages; we are not living under a real dark age with the development of capitalism and rightwing populists leaders and Christian craps.
In the old days, universities had a bookbinding and newspaper printing department attached to the library department, and it was part of the library science training; they had a manual guillotine instead of electric guillotines, book spines were sewn using needles and cotton strings, and cotton fabric spine covers; some people have PHD degree in Librarian sciences; it is a beautiful career. Mao Tse Tung was an assistant librarian; he was not a professional librarian, as his followers have always said. Under the old Johnson plan (the so-called Great Society), many students worked as part-time assistant librarians. USA president Lyndon Johnson was a teacher before he became president
I have no problem with a balance between print and digital. It’s the destruction of books, the substituting digital for everything, the digitalist bravache about “the end of print”, and the disappearance of print magazines etc. that I hate.
That is totally correct; that is what I am doing.
When I can not find a physical book, I buy the digital version, and I transform it into a physical book, and sometimes it is much better than the original one.s
We can not hold the bull by the horns; it will kill us. Only toreros know how to handle them, and sometimes they get killed too.
I printed all the works of Julius Martov, and I transformed them into a book, and it has middle age spine. They only published his works in English, and I have translated them into Spanish.ish
Left-wingers hate Martov because he was able to prove that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were wrong, and they do not want to propagate his works; they are opportunists.c
They are doing the same thing that Amazon is doing, which is to destroy literature, but at least Amazon is turning it into a digital format.
They tried to kill Martov completely, as they tried to do the same thing with Luxembourg, and now Rosa has been published in 5 volumes, including her letters, and it is a beautiful collection.
I have the 42 volumes of Lenin ( physical and digital format); only 5 books are important, and they are a distortion of Marxism too. The only important book of Stalin is Anarchism and socialism, and he wrote 13 volumes, and I have them too ( physical and digital books ). The only important book from Trotsky is The History of the Russian Revolution, but his biography was written by Isaac Deutscher. In My Life, he does not cover everything; therefore, we must look to both worlds. Mao Tse-tung is all crap, and he published 5 volumes. I had read Donald Trump’s book too
From Selling to Erasing Books: Why Amazon Is Destroying Original Literature
From Selling to Erasing Books: Why Amazon Is Destroying Original Literature
Emerald Book Publication
August 19, 2026
8 min read
The company built on selling books is now destroying them. A new investigation reveals Amazon’s industrial-scale operation to slice, scan, and shred rare literature for AI training data—exposing the tech industry’s desperate, multi-front panic over running out of human-written text.————————————————
Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, started as a bookstore
Profit is more important than history. Jeff Bezos started selling books in a garage, and now his company is destroying books, the same commodities that turned him into a billionaire
Another format to preserve old books is spiral book binding. It is a good format for big textbooks; they can be opened completely on a school desk and placed on top of a book holder.
A softcover book can be converted into a hardcover book by getting hard cardboard that can be placed on top and on the back of the book and glueing the old artistic cover on top of the cardboard
Digital books can be printed, and they can be turned into spiral books
Nice ideas, but they are all about “making do”, aren’t they? Why should we have to make do?
My books each hold for me memories and stages, emotional as well as merely intellectual, in my life. I don’t see why books should all be relegated to text alone and why we should have to make do with computer print-outs, no matter how they are put together.
In socialism we would all have free access to the means of production and have real books made traditionally should we want, even a minority of us. We can have spiral textbooks but also bound and sewn traditional books. We wouldn’t be expected to make do.
I don’t think people in a world that is our own would want to be sat in front of screens for the most part. I think they will want the tangible in life in preference to the virtual. And if not, then the minority who do will have the tangible as our choice; a real choice. We won’t have to make do.
It is only a suggestion; nobody is placing a gun to your head. It is a cheap way to do bookbinding. Some companies make spiral bookbinding. We have to survive in the capitalist jungle. I have done several spiral bookbindings for several textbooks, and I keep the original book on my bookshelf to preserve it
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.