At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.
There was no "word of mouth" because I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.
As a kid who already hated school, and used reading as an escape from a pretty shit childhood, I was clocking in 5 books a week.
The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether.
Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
> Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
Lessons learned:
a) Incentives matter (economy 101)
b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them.
c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free.
d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.
Don't try to cheat the system. Follow the spirit of rules obediently instead of attempting to use the wording of the rules to your advantage.
In high school we had to make a list of 12 books we read in the year. I was reading a few a week. My list contained 12 books.
(Side note, we lived some distance from the library in elementary school, but we got through the books -fast- so the librarians gave us extra library cards to reduce visits to like once a week. I also got adult-cards pretty young (like 10) because I'd read all the kids books and was already reading older fare. This was in the days before YA was a genre :)
Of course you had a poor teacher because they obviously desired to teach you something, but forgot to tell you what the lesson was. Other than they were a bad teacher, but i guess you may already have known that.
the lesson is that overachievers are often not welcome.
All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff
At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.
As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.
You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.
My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.
I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.
I'm still trying to get my first proper apartment instead of renting =) And know I make more in a year than both of them combined in 2-3 years.
Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.
IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.
Agreed, LLMs are an issue and will probably reduce the amount of written content published in the open (or at all).
> I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.
I specifically remember that when the first Harry Potter (I was a child cut me some slack) came out I bounced off it because I didn't like it, and then one of my friends at school couldn't stop talking about it and got me interested enough to pick it back up.
And don't even get me STARTED on the LotR books. Or Star Trek novelizations (which I still consider books).
If they did, they didn't tell me about it. That might tell you how much the other kids talked to me. Not much of a brag now is it? :-D
However, I have good reason to believe it. I went to the public library every weekend when I was in elementary school. I never, ever ran into anyone from my class there in all those years. If the other kids in my class at age 9 read for pleasure, they weren't anywhere close to me in volume.
It's not a brag, and not a real achievement. The tallest kid in a class at age 14 might only be of average height in a crowd 10 years later. This is the same thing.
Crazy gender stereotype based on just anecdotes (nothing wrong with saying it tho, its always awesome to hear about different experiences)
Most of the books that changed my life, got me into tech, programming, got me into business, entrepreneurship, hustle, etc.
All the books, podcasts, etc were either shared directly to me by my male friends (im male too) who insisted i read those books for my betterment cuz those books were acc. to them : “Awesome” , or books that i discovered while exchange discussions about what books are we reading right now, exchanging reading lists, etc.
There are tons of girls out there who hate reading books, (my mom included, she always has hated books, outside of school homework and exams),
I do not like reading fiction books much, nor do my peers, we’ve exchanged book suggestions since childhood, now even more with more and more internet friends.
Ive had great books on gardening, or agriculture, or history, etc recommended to me either inside books by authors, or by random telegram groups consisting mostly of nerd men.
99% of the books recommended to me were by men, and im a man.
So i dont think its a girl only thing, plenty of people exchanging book, just go to any major reddit forum on reading and booksuggestions (like r/suggestmeabook) and you’ll find tons of men who are more than happy to give you suggestions, if you cannot find classmates or neighbours to share with
I'm not saying the library doesn't have exceptional value, or that 9 year olds shouldn't be in it, but maybe for younger patrons a "concierge" type service or "first timer group experience" being available would help a lot.
As the article notes, school libraries are getting defunded and politicized, which is extremely sad to me, and disproportionately worrying for the future.
An interpretation is book cos have cut physical benefit advertising for cents on the dollar internet advertisements.