I’m reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time ever. Can you believe I am 48 years old, a horror literature junkie, and never read it? It’s true. I’m enjoying it a lot.
I think it depends on if you feel it’s keeping you up or causing eye strain. I find a backlit Kindle has a decent amount of brightness and is easy on the eyes.
Using an iPhone I’d be more worried about distractions than anything else
I’ve been reading on an iPad mini for years, dark mode, and I have no complaints, never had any sleeping issues. For me the e-ink reader really shines at the beach, irreplaceable there.
I like the part where they point out that writers probably have more leverage than they think about having a say - but then maybe many writers don't consider the ebook side of things when thinking about getting their work published.
It's obvious that 'they' are out to demonise IA as something like Pirate Bay whereas it really, really isn't. Aside from the massive amount of obscure reference material, I found BBC documentaries on there from the 80s about some history which is otherwise unobtainable. I can understand if there's some legal points which need to be worked out between both sides in order to keep the site going... but that obviously isn't what the publishers are going for.
Since I’m seeing Libby mentioned a lot: for those in the US, check the libraries in the large cities in your state, too. Sometimes they have digital-only cards available for statewide residents. You can have several library cards on Libby so you have lots of options!
Also check your area for Little Free Libraries, which are free “take a book, leave a book” boxes!
Yes, and there are libraries with cards for non-residents, too! That's what I use on Libby. These are typically not free, but some are low-cost. If you don't have a library card already, this is a great way to get one without having to drive somewhere. For example, according to this list, Fairfax VA charges $27 per year for access to a catalogue of "over 50,000 ebooks and 21,000 audiobooks".
The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully. The underlying goal is to make them want to smash their phones with a sledgehammer.
“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly reading for information at best. At best. At worst it’s like a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post,” said Steven Shafer, Perelandra’s current reader-in-residence. “It is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve gotten to experience here.”
Yeah ok, no. Like I get trying to get more people to read books. I’m a reader and it’s a lot different than doom scrolling or whatever. But you’re never going to get people to not value their phones. We have a computer in our pocket that cannot be replicated by even the Library of Alexandria.
If it wasn’t for work, I would toss my phone in the river. I often leave it purposely at home to enjoy a walk, ot games with friends (way netter with a no phone rule)
The use of AI should be disclosed to readers “where appropriate,” the guidelines read, though, as with so much else, precisely where that line is drawn is left to the author.
I would appreciate a disclaimer like this, because I’m not interested in reading books written by AI. But that does beg the question of where to draw that line and where the distinction between authors using AI as a supplementary tool (e.g. to fill in a description of a room like the writer mentioned doing), and where the AI is doing big chunks of the writing itself lies. How much AI assistance to too much?
While there are really bad things about goodreads, the article/interviews give me a vibe of "boohoo, we want to decide what people like and now they decide it themselves and we don't like that."
Seriously. I'd love an alternative that's anywhere close to basic functionality, but this article is beyond stupid.
Yes, allowing people outside whatever stupid circle to review books and have their reviews considered by other people is a good thing.
Now, a lot of the reviews are trash because a lot of people have stupid opinions on books. Some people just want something to trash and have reviews that reflect that. But that's equally true of "real critics" and their opinions are often just as bad.
Edit: I wonder if I could make a browser extension that recognizes book objects on one of the alternatives and lets you bulk select and make changes that way, replicating the flow or function calls they use now.
It doesn't have lists at all, and while the tag sorting is nice, adding your own tags in bulk to replicate a list is entirely untenable.
I don't consider anything short of Goodread's table of all your books to select and make bulk changes remotely viable, and even that took me well over an hour the first time.
There is definitely an element of that from the article and I agree it’s ridiculous. Some authors and their followers attack those who give poor reviews (because they can’t accept criticism, instead arguing that a ‘professional’ review would give them a much better score) and on the other side you have people reviewing books that aren’t even out. In many cases it’s no longer a place to find genuine reviews, but an unmoderated wild west with crap at both extremes (a bit like Twitter in that respect). It’s a shame because there are plenty of people leaving great reviews, but it’s becoming much harder to find them.
I think sorting out actual quality reviews is harder than people think. Even something like Steam, where the cumulative user rating is relatively respected, surfaces a lot of junk reviews, because people respond to meme-ing and jokey shitposts more than actual high quality reviews. The signals even for a behemoth like Amazon to train an AI on just really aren't amazing. I know fakespot looks for outright fraud Amazon doesn't, but I think part of their success is that they're not the benchmark cheaters are trying to beat. In any case, "genuine" reviews and "quality" reviews aren't the same thing, and the latter is really hard to measure.
I think a more robust set of curation tools would have some value. Flipboard has been mentioned a bit lately for articles, and while I haven't used it, my impression is that the premise is that you subscribe to curated lists of different interests. Something like that for reviewers who catch the eye of curators could be interesting for a federated book platform.
My main issue with the article is the premise that "professional" reviewers are objectively any higher quality on average than user reviews. A sizable proportion of them are very detached from what real people care about. I absolutely critically read non-fiction, and am somewhat judgy if a certain rigor isn't applied, but for fiction? How is that fun? It's OK for a story just to be cheap fun. It's OK for different authors to have different writing styles and different levels of attention to detail and different levels of grittiness to their stories. There is absolutely actual bad writing out there, and some gets published, but a story not being for you doesn't mean that voice doesn't connect with someone else. A lot of book critics are huge snobs.
Great points. Does Steam get around this slightly by having different tags intended for meme reviews? I.e. I think I’ve seen ‘10 people said this review made them laugh’ or something along those lines. That at least makes it a bit easier to filter out the ‘actual’ reviews. I wonder if the cumulative total (on both Steam and Goodreads) averages out the joke/genuine reviews, assuming that a) enough people have left a review and b) there hasn’t been any review bombing.
And yeah there are plenty of books, games and shows out there that I’ve absolutely loved but they’ve been reviewed terribly by professional reviewers. I think on the whole people assign too much weight to arbitrary totals - “Oh this book is a 6/10 so I shouldn’t waste my time on it”. But if you think like this, you’ll miss out on so much.
They do have more that just the thumbs up/down, but for the most part I have to read several reviews and pick out the ones that actually tell me what I care about. Even high effort well done reviews just might not mean anything to me if they're focused on elements that I don't care about. I think the joke reviews still are "accurate" in the sense that the reviewer goes up or down based on how they feel about the game; they just don't have useful text.
I personally tend just not to review fiction. I will absolutely tell you what I like about an author or a series, but I have no interest in breaking down the plot or picking apart individual books. (As an example, my favorite author is Karen Rose. I think all of the books in her Romantic Suspense series are straight up masterfully done, own them all on audiobook, and listen 3+ times a year. I will happily give a couple paragraphs about what traits draw me to her writing. I won't pick and choose between the books and say "this is four star, this is five star". I happen to find Into The Dark particularly compelling out of the Cincinnati arc, but I'm not going to ever individually break down books in the series to give individual reviews. I basically consider them a single work and read them as such.)
I almost never give fiction less than 4 stars, either. 4 stars is my baseline. 5 is standout. There are some (including wildly popular or cult classics) that I just don't find interesting, but I'll just not rate/review them if I don't have anything to say. On a semi-related note, I see "overrated book" discussions every once in a while and so many of the comments are people falling into the same trap critics do. In a lot of cases they're picking apart books clearly targeted for kids to maybe YA and reading them like they're grad students analyzing some classic in an era where every line had 15 different allegories thrown in. You don't have to pick everything apart like that.
Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.
Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.
A 2019 report on the racial diversity of the publishing industry showed 76 percent of the staff are White, primarily cisgender, heterosexual women. Only 6 percent of the publishing industry is Latinx, despite representing 19 percent of the U.S. population.
This author is ravenous about diversity. It’s unsettling. If there was… Just an article about what cool trans or Latin sci-fi I could read, I’d buy a book. Right now.
What these meta diversity journalists forget is that I buy books and read to relax. When I find out a world is written in a closed-minded (ie. White guy who’s never dealt with any bullshit in life) lens, it puts me out of my comfort zone.
The point of reading a book written by someone like me actually isn’t about politics. It’s actually about getting back to that comfort. The fantasies they can spin up are realistic to how I see the world. I can sit back, relax, and be immersed.
As is the norm, there's no mention at all of, or effort to even attempt to investigate, the demographics of the applicant pool/people who wish to pursue the field as a career.
You can't even have a cursory analysis of whether discrimination exists without it.
I read every single night on my phone with a black screen and white letters. It helps me to fall asleep every single night. I usually only get about halfway through a chapter before I pass out with my phone in my hand. Really It’s just up to how it affects you.
I follow Mercury Stardust (aka the Trans Handy Ma’am) on TikTok. She has a book coming out at the end of the month, but she had someone steal her name and the book title and start selling a book filled with utter nonsense. It apparently took forever for them to take the copycat down.
Brian Jacques, of Redwall fame. I feel so lucky to have grown up on such a lovely collection of adventure stories. I have such fond memories of my mom surprising me with a new book. I picked one up the other day and read a snippet, and it was just as lovely as it ever was.
In the 1980s, Jacques worked as a milkman, on a round which included the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind.[1] He got to know the children there, and volunteered to read to them. However, he became dissatisfied with the state of children's literature, with too much adolescent angst, and began to write stories for them. So that the visually impaired children would be able to picture the scenes he was writing for them, he developed a highly descriptive style, emphasizing sound, smell, taste, gravity, balance, temperature, touch, and kinesthetics.[6] From these short stories and reading sessions emerged Redwall, an 800-page handwritten manuscript.[7] -wikipedia
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