Little magazines are back | Hacker News Reader

Little magazines are back

wsjfreeexpression.substack.com

113 pointsprismatic40 comments

The zine scene's seen weak weeks, certainly, but the gritty ink stays distinct: a permanent link for those who think outside the precinct. It may wax and wane, but for any with an intention to mention the subversive soul, zines offer distinct impressions.

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 ^.^

snap snap snap

thank you, thank you, I'll be here till they kick me out

Fun write.

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.

Thank you!

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.

> A quarter-century ago, conventional wisdom held that ebooks, read on electronic devices, would replace books made of paper.

Until publishers thought “huh, we can increase our margins AND increase our prices too for ebooks?!”

I've made the switch to ebooks.i haven't yet had a problem with pricing like you suggest, but I have been a little worried about my library of purchased books might one day disappear since they all use DRM, and I don't really own any of my books in any real sense of the word.

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.

The resale value of books isn’t that great for most individuals since you have to do at minimum the work of listing it on eBay, and maybe even listing it on Amazon who has much more hoops to jump through, and then pay for shipping and platform fees. But the value to publishers of killing off the used book market by not printing the paper book in the first place is the reason ebooks are so popular with them. Did you know that when libraries buy ebooks, the license automatically evaporates after a set number of loans? Like 10 or 20 IIRC.

My local indie bookshop will buy paper books off me with as much hoop jumping as it take to buy a book, but yah you recoup a small fraction of the cost.

This is why you download the liberated versions from Anna after supporting the author.

I wish more authors or publishers would allow intarweb pirates the option of no questions asked anonymous payments for the digital copy they downloaded from Anna's.

If you don't read a book multiple times, why not borrow from a public library (if such a thing exist in the country you live in)? Here in Sweden they are free, and you can even get them to loan a book from another library if they don't have it locally (though for physical books it will of course take a few days to get it delivered). Remote loans used to cist around 20 SEK (about 2 EUR), but is now also free since earlier this year.

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 prefer the slim device that keeps track of where I am in the book, has a built in backlight that is easy on the eyes and doesn't disturb my wife when I'm reading in bed until long after she's asleep, and that lets me acquire the next book in a series with only a little bit more effort than it is too turn the page, over the heavy physical tome that would tire my arms.

I am a creature of comfort after all!

Many libraries have ebooks. I am familiar with the app Libby in parts of the US.

I've borrowed from archive.org quite a bit in the past several years. but it does require you to be online to read the book, which doesn't always work out for me. Also... Libby doesn't support my preferred 4 year old android tablet any more. I'm also widgy about the data they say they want to upload.

But it's a great option if you have a modern device.

> device that keeps track of where I am in the book

I use bookmarks, often the paper receipt from the purchase of the book itself.

I'd argue that we never really "owned" books. Put aside the mundane physical object and assume that a book is a work of culture, authored by somebody else. What can "own" possibly mean in this context? You don't somehow commandeer its copyright by gaining an indefinite right to consult it. The words "own" and "buy" and "sell" are fundamentally ill-suited to abstract quantities such as knowledge and information and ideas. Perhaps our attachment to this (IMO) egregious category error of "ownership" can be explained by centuries of capitalism and (more recently) consumerism.

> What can "own" possibly mean in this context?

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.

After moving my personal library this month, I think I want to copy all my paper books to microfiche. I would absolutely buy first run books on fiche.

This is about how I feel when people discuss "owning" games, and GOG vs Steam. It's just data, you can make a backup or get someone else's, bypass DRM if needed, and you don't own the copyright either way. Interestingly, though, when you apply it to books here, I feel shocked and even a little resistant to the idea. Mostly because of the physical object you say to put aside, though. Similarly to games, it would feel weird to say I owned an epub or pdf I downloaded. I'd probably say I "have" it, or "read it" or am "storing" it on x or y device.

>when you apply it to books here, I feel shocked and even a little resistant to the idea

As you should, but my comment takes "book" to mean the cultural object, encompassing non-physical (e-)books.

Anna's Archive can help you out with that. Illegal downloading is your greatest entertainment value.

The only reason I ever read HHGTTG as a kid is because it was on a bookshelf at home and I eventually got bored enough to pick it up. I don’t currently have an ebook equivalent of that for my kids

I run a local print-only zine in SF called Lower Haight Local ! We print 1,000 copies a month with a local printer and have 20-30 neighbors contributing art or writing to each issue. We have a block party to distribute it each month.

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!

So I just spent a week moving 60 linear feet of books and I'm done with dead trees. Neil Gaiman has a quote that goes something like "Books are like sharks. There's nothing better at being a shark than a shark. There's nothing better at being a book than a book. But a Kindle can make a very reasonable replacement for a bookshelf."

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.

Unlike Kindle, Amazon can’t shutdown your bookshelf

Kindle and Amazon are the same company.

You should probably read it as "Amazon can shut down your kindle but not your bookshelf"

Right. It makes sense to me now.

I just returned from my mom's house. Visited her with my 4yo daughter. The house is full with old magazines and books, it's a time machine to my youth (and that of my parents). The magazines are full of drawings, annotations, etc, by me and my brothers... My daughter could connect with all that easily, we read together the same phisical comic book, she can see how her father and uncles draw on it just like her... Good luck having that on digital.

On the other hand, I have paperback books I loved as a kid that were my father's when he was a kid. I carefully saved them for decades. One more generation and they could be considered family relics or something. I quickly realized the flaw with this plan as I tried to share them with my kids, who cannot be expected to treat brittle middle-grade and young-adult novels as museum pieces.

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.

You can tell this is yet another US centric post. Once having moved to France, almost five years ago, I've been and continue being pleasantly overwhelmed by the quality and quantity to choose from, of printed journals, magazines and books. Once a week, on Wednesdays, when the closest mediatheque is open the entire day, I go in and dive into reading everything I can, for hours and hours, with a small break for lunch, most of the time until they close.

Today I had a bizarre experience. I went to a library. I spent a good 40+ minutes browsing through the aisles offering a truly intriguing selection acquiring a stack of books along the way and one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed.

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!

Substack?

Yeah? I got Substack for you, pal.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/516/278/c19...

Edit: Substack is mid-brow.

> Substack is mid-brow.

It is? I thought Substack was just Wordpress with a paywall.

Not sure if the writing style is deliberate, but it was confusing to parse. Needs some editing by chat jippity.

I'd much rather read idiosyncratic human writing than text extruded through an LLM

The word was effect both times, noun and verb! Gotcha.

So, you're praising a sort of cultured counterculture, and mourning it because you think it's gone away.

> one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed

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.

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