I'd originally intended to simply argue that short form print never went anywhere and therefore had nowhere to return from, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to wax poetic ^.^
As someone who contributes to a zine, goes to zine fests often, and has a lot of friends who do conventions with short form print - I agree.
In general my opinion is the waves are more or less outsiders who stumble into it, or a certain IP, and they are introduced to a whole other medium they didn’t really experience. Unless of course, they frequent a very awesome local book store in their city with a dedicated zine section.
I'm sure there are surges around conventions featuring zines rather than focused on zines as well, right?
Can't remember the last Queer Pride event I attended that did not have many many zines. Hell, one of my gender affirming care clinics used to have an entire zine library in the waiting room.
Until publishers thought “huh, we can increase our margins AND increase our prices too for ebooks?!”
Then again, even that doesn't worry me too much, since I almost never read a book twice anyway. I think the only book I've read more than once is the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
For now, in my experience, ebooks have always been cheaper than print versions of the same work. I suspect that if one calculated the resell value of a printed book, the prices would come out about equal. Which is why I chose eBooks for their convenience.
There are some books I absolutely buy (and I have a rather large library myself, entirely physical), but there are many cases where borrowing makes more sense.
I am a creature of comfort after all!
This sounds unnecessarily reductive. By "own" I would mean that I can re-read the book again and again and again as many times as I want as long as I take good care of the book and prevent it from disintegrating.
But the DRM e-books can't be used like that. That was their point.
I find that despite print no longer being the fastest place to get news, the physicality of it connects neighbors in a way online publications or social media cannot replicate. It’s pretty special - if you’re interested in getting your own zine off the ground or want to contribute, reach out!
I'm probably going to get rid of my dead tree books and replace them with PDFs or text files (thank you Project Gutenberg for making plain text available.) I am suspicious of the Amazon Ecosystem and find text or pdfs read on a modern tablet preferable. Do not get me started about epubs. How can professional organizations make epubs that are so wrongly formatted.
Which is to say... I will buy your print book, as long as it also comes with a PDF or text version.
But I am very happy to see there's a corner of the world where non-trash, non-ai-slop is still valued. I only wish there was a happy medium between printed books and non drm digital documents for litzines.
I am not entirely ready to part with the books, but I'm also unable to bear watching them get thoughtlessly destroyed by my kids. Digital has made it very easy to get copies of all of them; plus others I didn't manage to hold on to.
A few of them were about how economically alienated Millennials are and why. One book with a broken piggy bank on the cover blamed boomers.
I mention this because I don't know how accurate my next claim is about to be because I put the books that may support my claim back on the shelf. If I hadn't then I would've just hedged my argument with "I need time to read these books but..."
It's a shame that Millennial's are yet to be able to turn what I'm going to call "The People's High-Brow Culture"—half-low-brow-half-high-brow—into sustainable media.
I think Tumblr was peak 'what I'm referring to'. No, don't call it mid-brow. This is different. I think. Who am I kidding. I don't actually have to prove my point. If I can get enough people to wax nostalgic about how everything they consumed online, particularly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, had just the right blend of dilettante mediocracy...passionate exchanges about art and culture without the professional affect is what I'm struggling to describe.
It's probably less a matter of economic alienation alone but an institutional kind as well. Maybe they're correlated. I did not get popular economics books that would help make my case here.
Vice may have been the closest real outlet to what I'm trying to describe but we should all know how that turned out.
I'm imagining a dilettante mediocracy...people who were too naive to know that the people working for the actual publications parallel to them could afford to loaf around and try to get paid for covering the things they wrote about.
It seems that alls left of this era is "BookTok" and "BookTube" and somehow apparently...Anthony Fantano.
This is not a good explanation of what I think. Sorry.
I'm tired of puffy stuffy "Bequest betwixt the classics, my dear" sort of media that Portico represents to me.
When do I get be middle-aged and affect my good taste on younger generations who are desperately in need of it. I don't wanna read about Myrtle Beach and Dean Martin or Marcus Aurelius!
Portico??? I don't even own a house!
If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.
I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.
(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)
> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!
One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
So, you're praising a sort of cultured counterculture, and mourning it because you think it's gone away.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/516/278/c19...
Edit: Substack is mid-brow.
It is? I thought Substack was just Wordpress with a paywall.
