They need footrests.
But I agree, that is close to my ideal relationship.
If this can become a book thread, that would be OK. I've found the one-two combo of college rape and institutional torture a bit depressing, to be honest.
I've found the one-two combo of college rape and institutional torture a bit depressing, to be honest.
THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!
But where are the children lolling on the couch buried in the latest volume of the multi-book serieses they're obsessed with? (And occasionally whining for the next book to be bought for them. I'm considering telling them both that "You're clearly enthusiastic readers now, which means that I'm not buying any more books about genetically engineered teenagers with wings. Go read some Dickens or get a job and buy your own books.")
Mmm, books.
Recently I liked Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red a lot.
For the last several months I've been holding myself to a policy of reading at least one book each week. This overcomes the unfortunate tendency I was developing to just read lots of work-related papers and the internet. So I've re-learned that books make me happy, and reading a wide variety of stuff makes me less bored with my work, and possibly even more productive.
6: Children? What kind of marriage do you think this is? The photograph capture these two people at their closest.
Guys, just finished A Confederacy of Dunces after having started and stopped it multiple times. Even more recommended now.
Also, I need some good book recs pretty badly.
I just finished 2666, which is good, yet simultaneously long and unsatisfying.
12: Wow, that must have been quite a comment thread!
12: That is sitting on my shelf in an accusing manner, where it has been for a considerable while. Due to a quirk of the alphabet it is not physically close to Infinite Jest, but somehow I feel they're aware of each other.
I liked The Savage Detectives a lot last year, but I've been afraid that 2666 will be horribly depressing.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks deserved every bit of the praise you heard about it.
Oh man. Now that my big test is over, it has been a shameless binge. My fondest hope for the summer is to get my siblings to look like LB's kids, sprawled and whining for more books to be brought to them. I am compiling a list of the funnest action-adventure reads to be left carelessly around the house for my siblings to find.
You've explained this to me before, LB, but why are you buying books? Why can't the kids get their own from the library?
I am going to guess it has something to do with returning the books? I have been forbidden from having a library card since I was very small.
Due to a quirk of the alphabet it is not physically close to Infinite Jest, but somehow I feel they're aware of each other.
Please, don't tell me your bookshelves are alphabetized.
Supervision issues. Buck's not comfortable with them going to the library on their own on weekdays, and on weekends we've usually got too much going on to fit in a library trip, so we don't get there often.
(If I were more proactive about it, we would, but I have a bad relationship with library fines, so I'm not a heavy library user myself.)
Please, don't tell me your bookshelves are alphabetized.
Christ, that would be awful. It's Library of Congress or nothing.
Please, don't tell me your bookshelves are alphabetized.
Yours aren't?
(Recent acquisitions tend to be scattered everywhere, but one has to sort through things every so often....)
18 gets it. In high school, I managed to get library cards under a couple of false names to spread the fines out.
dq, who is stopping you from having a library card now? That's awful.
24: I don't, often, but the internet is everywhere. We get a lot of cardboard boxes in the mail.
My shelves are very, very loosely organized by theme. Probably the only actual rule that obtains in their organization is that all same-authored books occur in contiguous blocks.
I get frustrated with our library because you can't renew online. There are plenty of good books that I don't love enough to finish in two weeks, or I don't get started on them right away, or whatever.
You people are nuts. Data point: the only person I know who alphabetizes her bookshelves also alphabetizes the food in in her pantry.
I only alphabetize fiction. Nonfiction is grouped by subject matter in a way that made sense to me at the time I was putting things on shelves.
Are you still busted by the NYPL (I'm guessing that's the acronym)? Have you come clean and can start over?
It isn't the same as it was for us, when you had to be responsible for your books all by yourself. Now you get pleasant reminder notices by email, and can renew books online, and get glorious, wonderful notices that your books have arrived at your local branch. The incidence of late books is way down for me, and I say that as someone who often has a dozen or more books checked out. My queue is down to six books, though, which is dangerously low.
Here's why alphabetizing your books is nuts: are your shelves all the same height? Are your books all the same height? If not, then put all your short books on a short shelf, and your medium height books on a medium high shelf, and your tall books on the tall shelf. Make sense, now.
Moving every few years is probably a vital part of making sure my system doesn't get overcome by entropy. Each move involves a chance to reorder everything properly.
Each move involves a chance to reorder everything properly.
Yeah, a chance.
14: Due to a quirk of the alphabet it is not physically close to Infinite Jest, but somehow I feel they're aware of each other.
I ended up with 2666 after I went in to my knowledgeable book-store owner bookshop to buy IJ for the summer of. He convinced me that if I wanted to read a long book to go with 2666 instead. Still have not read IJ. He was also the person who steered me to Life: A User's Manual. He is also a total conservative wingnut (hosted a small Santorum rally at his store). He is also going out of business (or gone, not been there in a bit).
I've recently become a heavy library user (for the first time since I was doing book reports as a schoolboy), and am sort of amazed at how wonderful it is. They have a huge selection of books, and they just... give them to you. For free! And remind you by email when they're due back, and let you renew online (along with requesting books, etc.). It's amazing.
I also, and this is weird of me, I admit it, feel bad about taking books written by living authors out of the library. I have enough money to buy them new, and I feel as if I should pay royalties.
My books are arranged like essear's. So if I want something I know where to get it.
And I stopped buying my children books (apart from when I wanted to) when I started giving them pocket money.
Wait, people have lots of books and no reasonably rigorous organization scheme? B-but, the chaos!
They will also give you music and movies and audiobooks. If they don't have them, they'll get them from other libraries and bring them to you. My esoteric requests have come from all the university systems west of the Rockies. Libraries are beyond wonderful.
If I like a book a lot, I'll buy it after I read it. I like to have an in-house collection for lending out and dangling in front of siblings.
2666 is brilliant, much better IMO than anything else that B has written. Life: A User's Manual is also very good.
Tristram Shandy if you haven't read it.
Erving Goffman's books are nice. So are Kapuscinski's, I keep meaning to read more of these. Imperium and Shah of Shahs are good.
I would be very interested in a good history covering later Song and early Yuan China. Also the Abbasid-Fatimid transition.
La Rochefoucauld's maxims and Juvenal are both surprisingly effective for light reading, small doses work. Great matches for portable devices.
Modern poetry recommendations? As a consequence of blogs, I tried and liked Belle Waring and Lizzie Skurnick, but would never have found either conventionally.
Belle Waring
Um, not the same one? Or the same one? If the latter, I had no idea she'd published poetry.
I wonder how book-organizing habits vary with number of books. I would guess I have in the neighborhood of a thousand books in my apartment.
When I was an undergrad, I knew a grad student couple who had every wall in their apartment filled with bookshelves, plus most of their floor space in one or two rooms filled up with three-foot-high piles of books. I think they had given up on organizing long ago. But that apartment probably contained something on the order of 25000 books.
45: Not the same one. This has come up here before.
Modern poetry recommendations?
Get Basil Bunting's Collected Poems.
The OP instantly brought to mind this photo of my parents from their college yearbook. It was taken in the mid 1950's, but just as well could have been last Sunday. Much as I hate to admit it, it could equally be a weekend at the Ruprecht household (though the newspaper woudl probably be replaced by a laptop).
25 is hilarious and amazing. I also want to know details. It has been long enough since I've applied for a library card that I don't remember what's required.
Megan, it's forbidden by me, out of good judgment, though eventually the state probably would have joined in as well. I think I mentioned here before that NYU reported me to a creditor's agency for fines accrued when I was 16? Yeah.
Also, I may have mentioned this as well, but my favorite book organization scheme: a lesbian pair of identical twins who organized their bookshelves by color so as to make a rainbow.
I alphabetize fiction, and keep non-fiction away, organized loosely by theme. I mean, theoretically. Currently books are just escaping their boxes one by one, and finding homes on random surfaces. This is one of the reasons I need recommendations; I can't actually find any of the books I want to read.
All this reminded me that I am sitting on x weeks of overdueness for a thread-unifying book: Russel Hoban's Angelica's Grotto. An interesting and disturbing little book involving art, art porn, internet porn, and specifically someone studying users of internet porn (the protagonist is one of the studied). Also some consent/violation stuff. This erotic(?) Meissen figurine (actually owned by Hoban) is featured (not really unsafe for work).
a lesbian pair of identical twins who organized their bookshelves by color so as to make a rainbow.
This reminds me of one of many events that have convinced me that a sizable fraction of librarians are evil and vindictive. (Some people re-ordered books this way as a prank at my high school, promising they would fix them, but the librarians were bloodthirsty and made the school administrators suspend the students and, IIRC, forbid them to walk in the graduation ceremony.)
53: I thought the first sentence was going to go someplace very different in a occupational stereotyping kind of way. But I see you're better than that. I'm not.
Some students re-ordered books in the library by color, as a joke? Is that what wasn't explained clearly?
51.3 I briefly had some nonfiction arranged that way, but Lee loathed it.
For a kid applying for a card in the 1980s, you didn't really need ID (I think I showed a subway pass, but I was the one who filled my name out on the pass, we got them blank). So I filled out the application in a fake name, went back to pick up the card, and bob's your uncle.
Later, they started mailing the permanent card to your home address, which was trickier. But living in an apartment building, people would put mail that had been put in the wrong box out by the mailboxes. So I put a fake name on the application (Amanda Parker -- I was reading Amanda Cross mysteries at the time, as well as Dorothy Parker) with my street address but the wrong apartment, and watched for the letter to be left out.
(I should say that this was wrong, and I am ashamed of myself. And all the books got returned eventually, but I admit that fines were left unpaid.)
48 gets it right. Also George Oppen and Robert Duncan.
Among modern poets born less than 90 years ago, I like Kevin Prufer and Larissa Szporluk.
59: Good thing I don't know who you are or I'd be bound by the Librarian's Oath to turn you in!
49: The OP instantly brought to mind this photo of my parents from their college yearbook.
My family's equivalent. I think my daughter put this up on Facebook with the caption, "Why no one invites us anywhere."
No! Not (very) wrong, and understandable even for that little bit! There's no need for shame. The library loves you and wants you back. It forgives all! It thinks you are wonderful and misses you. I'm sure of it, but I could also ask. My grand-aunt worked for the NYPL, so if you need confirmation, I could get it from her (with a Ouji board).
You can't let this old wound keep your kids from having a great relationship with the library.
62.2: Yes, but which Lem book is that? (I just read The Futurological Congress, which was pretty funny for something so deeply pessimistic about humanity.)
The library loves you and wants you back. It forgives all!
I'm still scarred by the middle-school librarian who yelled at me for several minutes, on two separate occasions, for checking out a math encyclopedia they had meant to file as reference but hadn't. She took it as a personal insult, thought I was intentionally causing trouble or trying to steal one of their most expensive new books, and kept demanding that I explain myself. "I just wanted to read it" wasn't an acceptable answer.
Damn you, inappropriately knowledge-seeking child!
I've got a chat open with the NYPL about old fines and welcome back policies. I'll let you know what they say.
65: I think it's either The Futurological Congress, or Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, which you should read if you liked the former. A favorite in our family; my daughter and I have read most of his stuff that we have found available in English and my two sons have read a sampling. Teraz has said that the translations are crap ... but we like reading them nonetheless.
68: Oh, I have a current card, and the kids do too. We're all in good standing, I just don't use it much because it makes me jumpy and guiltridden.
I forget how painfully slow people type when they don't chat on the internet all day.
You don't understand. I will just take their books. I know this about myself. I know it is wrong. But I will do it anyway, and will be consumed with guilt and anxiety. I will stop checking my mail for fear of another notice, but I will not return the book. I know none of this makes sense. I cannot have a library card.
I should say that this was wrong, and I am ashamed of myself. And all the books got returned eventually, but I admit that fines were left unpaid.
Plus, we now have a new pseud for you ... Amanda.
Also, I need some good book recs pretty badly.
That is very strange, dq. You are supposed to take their books. They exist for the purpose of your taking their books. You could take their books every single day they are open. All you have to do is bring them back and take them again. You can do that all the time. In fact, I do.
Independent People is pretty fantastic.
I started to (re)read The Axe recently, but I don't seem to have kept up with it. I can say that Quellen des Wissens is extremely … stimulating.
And thanks, Donald, for reminding us all of that.
Hmmmm. The NY librarian wasn't quite as sweet as my own librarians, who remember my name and tastes and to whom I bring roses. But I eventually got her where I wanted her to go.
Megan: My friend doesn't use the NYPL because she feels guilty because she returned books late as a teenager (and racked up some unpaid fines). Do you guys have a forgiveness policy, or a Redemption Day or something like that? I'm a huge library user (although not in New York) so this is breaking my heart.
Librarian: No, The New York Public Library is not offering an amnesty day.
...
Megan: Well, I think the fines eventually got paid, but now she feels bad going to the library. But it was twenty years ago.
...
Librarian: Late fees are part of everyday library (circulation) operation.
Megan: Except that now she feels guilty and jumpy when she goes to the library, instead of feeling like the library welcomes her.
Librarian: As such, there is no reason for her to feel guilty about it, especially if the fines have now been paid.
Megan: Can I tell her that the NYPL misses her and wants her back?
Librarian: Well, the only thing we could say on that subject is that once the fine has been paid, her account record would indicate it as such. There is ABSOLUTELY NO blacklisting or special status of any kind that a patron with previous a late fee that had been paid would be assigned.
Librarian: As far as The New York Public Library is concerned, she could once again use her library card to do what she needs to do or she could visit and use The Library whenever it is open and do what she needs to get done.
Librarian: The New York Public Library welcomes all members of the general public who abide by The New York Public Library's policies and regulations.
Megan: But the library made her feel scared when she was a teen and didn't bring books back on time, and now it makes her feel like a guilty adult. She needs to feel like it welcomes her.
Megan: Close enough. Thanks for your help.
Librarian: You could relay to her that she NEED NOT FEAR The New York Public Library.
Librarian: Anytime, Megan, anytime! All the best to both you and your friend.
Librarian: Thank-you for using AskNYPL's chat service, and have a wonderful evening! Good-bye.
Maybe if I try again, I'll get a more effusive librarian.
I don't think LB ever said she went back and paid the fines: And all the books got returned eventually, but I admit that fines were left unpaid.
Your librarian's welcome seems to be pretty heavily conditioned on that fact...
Of course, Megan is right.
My 61 was purely in jest and completely false.
I believe that some people became librarians because they love order and quiet. For those librarians, library patrons disturb the perfect order of the books and sometimes make noise, and so, naturally, are viewed as the enemy. I hope and believe that this kind of librarian is part of a dying breed.
I use the chat with the librarian function all the time.
Well, I think LB's primary identity is in good standing, per 68. The NYPL will never know.
80: Megan, is that for real?!!?
Real or not, you are amazing!
oops. 84 was supposed to be in the porn thread.
87: ha! does the librarian look like Sarah Palin?
Megan, you should know that your tireless campaigning on behalf of your (our) library system got me to start using it (rather than only the university system) and it truly is as wondrous as you made it out to be.
89: Right, because just like urple says, they give you books. It is magical.
Peep, of course it is real. If I made it up, they'd be extravagantly proposing to LB within two lines.
80:Heh.
Really, a lot of it is just scheduling -- if you're not going to rack up late fees, you need to get back to the library reliably, and we've got a lot of stuff going on on weekends. Our nearest branch isn't that far, but it's outside the normal errand radius. If it were more convenient, I'd use it more.
Megan, you should have asked if a potential patron should feel guilty about using the library to read books written by living authors, if that patron has enough money to buy them new (and thereby get royalities in the hands of the author). I think that's LB's bigger current issue. The fine thing is decades old.
92: I'm guessing NYPL has online renewal.
You can borrow ebooks from the library. The library is truly an amazing thing. Unless it is in Babel.
You could relay to her that she NEED NOT FEAR The New York Public Library.
I see NYPL doing joint marketing with No Fear in our future. I had a great-aunt who worked at the NYPL and she was pretty intimidating: correct, proper and ready and willing to instruct and comment on all perceived shortcomings.
92: Couple more years until the kids can go by themselves, sounds like. Maybe that'll work better.
98:
LB has been sending them around the city solo for years.
98: Should be now, really, but Buck's more careful than I am. They can run around unsupervised in a couple of block radius, but the library's farther than that.
I had a great-aunt who worked at the NYPL. Packages addressed to Grandma Rugelach at her building were delivered to her straightaway.
The Librarians and the Cyclopes, Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them you'll never come across them on your way as long as your mind stays aloft
The other thing about overdue fines is (maybe only in my mind?) they're used to buy more books. I always rack up huge fines (made worse by my current library shortening the lending period to 10 days for a maximum of 10 items!). But even 'huge' fines can really only buy a book or two at normal book prices although I assume libraries get species rates but still. Then I put in requests for books I want that they don't have yet so my fines can be used to buy them. It's like the most brilliant cycle of booky goodness.
If only I could deduct my library fines as charitable giving!
78. 1 gets it exactly right.
781, 105: Hmm, sounds like it might go well with my favorite Jane Smiley book, The Greenlanders, or alternatively make it fall greatly in my estimation
Some people re-ordered books this way as a prank at my high school
A customer started to do that at the bookstore where I worked, and while I appreciated her vision and determination and pitied her for her obvious mental illness, I had no problem with throwing her out. Major pain in the ass.
If only I could deduct my library fines as charitable giving!
I've gotten such appreciative looks by saying that my overdue fines are going to a good cause that I would recommend doing the same to anyone trying to pick up a librarian.
I used to use the library a lot when there was a branch a block away from me. Now the nearest branch (different city) is three or four blocks out of the way of my usual (non-car) commute, and the only times they're open that I could pick anything up are Monday or Thursday nights, which is hard to remember to do. Not having any weekend hours at all is pretty sad (Also, I still want a queuing system so that the dozen books I want to get by inter-library loan don't all show up at once).
If you want to pay $30 bucks a month for use of a library without actually having to get yourself to a library or worry about any late fees, this might be a reasonable option. That seems pricey to me, but, then again, my nearest library is a six-minute walk from my front door. And has decent hours.
Librarian: You could relay to her that she NEED NOT FEAR The New York Public Library.
xox.
||
NMM to Jackie Cooper The Kid
The "Hennesy" sitcom was several notches above average. No laughtrack. Somewhere (Bordwell?) this year I read a close reading on camera angles and placement of characters in a scene.
Had a shot at Rear Admiral, next to Stewart, highest ranking actor.
Nice guy best friend in so many movies 1940-1970
|>
Do others feel guilty about recalling books? I often find my campus library has only one copy of something I want to read, and it is checked out. I could recall such things, but then I think about times when I checked out a book and someone else recalled them before I got a chance to read them, and I decide not to do that to someone else.
Apparently I'm making "them" a singular pronoun even for inanimate objects now.
Re: being afraid of the library. I remember buying Four Past Midnight at the school bookfair in, oh, 4th or 5th grade, and really liking it--probably the start of my reading long books. I guess Harry Potter has kids doing that earlier, these days.
organized their bookshelves by color so as to make a rainbow.
A bookstore in San Francisco made a small splash by doing this did this a while back. Pretty wild.
Also, re: I also, and this is weird of me, I admit it, feel bad about taking books written by living authors out of the library. I have enough money to buy them new, and I feel as if I should pay royalties. - what Megan said. Take whatever you want from the library, and later buy the books by the most deserving/needy/whatever authors, and leave them out for other souls to find and read.
112: I feel guilty because I sometimes check out a book and keep on renewing it (without actually reading it) UNTIL someone else requests it. (Usually some math book, so it's not the kind of thing I'd read in one weekend.)
OTOH, I only do this with one or two books at a time, and I'm not aggressive with recalling books from other people.
112: I don't feel guilty about it. How long is the recall period at your library? I think it tends to be a pretty reasonable period to have a book when other people want it (10 or 14 days), and unless they're very in-demand like best-sellers, there's likely to be a later point when nobody needs it and they can get it back. Plus, they might be doing like in 117. If you want to be especially considerate, you could make sure to read and return it quicker than usual.
I'm serially commenting, but regarding paying royalties to authors: another consideration is that libraries track the check-out rates of books, both in order to determine if they should buy more copies, and in order to decide when to deaccession something. By checking books out of the library, you're actually contributing to the data showing that the book is in demand; you're also contributing to data regarding library patronage, which in theory keeps your local government funding the library.
There's no clear answer to whether patronizing the library or buying the book outright is the better answer. Probably best to do some of each.
117: I have a marshmallow for you.
---
Wherein I reminisce:
Amazon and two day shipping lessened my reliance in libraries. Then the big box stores, so many hours browsing in the bricks and mortar of BnN, Borders,
and the wonderful Stacey's Bookstore. Now iPhone Kindle is well spent $20 a month. Waiting for 16 minutes for weekend subway ? Read a chapter of Atul Gawande.
112: I never did worry about recalling a book when I was in grad school, but I might ask around before I did a request if, as was often the case, I had an idea who had the book.
"Little is known about what may be the nation's most courageous dog."
I don't think I can ever take the NYTimes seriously again.
The former least courageous dog is in an urn at my sister's.
There are so many things to feel guilty about in this life, but in my opinion buying books is not one of them. I will sometimes even purchase a book at full price, and in hardcover; and for this, I feel no shame.
I love the public library too. But I have an NYPL story that still makes me cringe. I'm sorry, but I just can't go back there.
o.p.: that's me and the missus, only she's more likley to hold an ipad than a book, as reading through kindle on the ipad is so much easier for her atm (weights less, can adapt font/letter size etc)
31: if you don't have to organise your books to find anything you have too few books. But if alphabetising is nuts, what's putting your collection on LibraryThing.
34: of course you don't mix and match booksizes, you only buy books in one size put hardcovers by hardcovers, paperbacks with paperbacks etc. Though since we're running out of room, I am trying to buy only mass market paperbacks.
42: libraries are wonderful, especially the one in my old hometown, which got me more good books to read in fifteen minutes browsing than I could get at the supposedly much larger and better Amsterdam library.
82: OOK!
Feeling guilty about getting books by living authors from the library is as silly as worrying about buying them secondhand: in each case somebody once bought the book, so the author got their royalties already, most authors will never or only barely earn out their advance anyway and those that do get humongous royalties won't notice a few "lost" sales due to libraries anyway.
Besides, most authors see this as paying forward: they profited from their local library, now it's your turn. The ones that do have a problem with libraries are all douches.
(In civilised countries and even the UK, authors do get some money for books checked out, calculated according to a formula that makes the Duckworth-Lewis method look easy.)
I have a marshmallow for you.
Can I eat it, or do I have to give it back?
58 is possibly the most cloak and dagger thing I have ever read in connexion with a library.
We have a book that was borrowed from the Musselburgh public library just before we moved to NZ. It still haunts my mother.
if you don't have to organise your books to find anything you have too few books.
False. I don't know how many books I have, I had a clearout, but it's still 3 - 4 bookshelves [6ft high, 3ft wide, stacked/double-stacked in odd ways as the stuff doesn't fit otherwise] plus odds and sods. I'd guess that's probably under 1000 books as some are hardbacks, but not by much. I can usually find stuff just by scanning. It might be easier if it was organised in some way, but it doesn't have to be. Unless of course that still counts as 'too few' ...
42: libraries are wonderful, especially the one in my old hometown, which got me more good books to read in fifteen minutes browsing than I could get at the supposedly much larger and better Amsterdam library.
Ditto. My village library in Scotland was better than any library I've been to in England. Including the big Oxford and Ealing central libraries. I expect this explains a lot.
In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
You could relay to her that she NEED NOT FEAR The New York Public Library.
This is great. I still have a copy of Nineteen Eighty Four that I borrowed at the age of ten and have never got around to returning. Every now and again I feel rather guilty about this.
"How do you make a marriage last?" "Make the baby first".
Thankyou, I'll be here all week.
Libraries do pay royalties. Or they do over here anyway.
132: Every time a book is checked out?
This is great. I still have a copy of Nineteen Eighty Four that I borrowed at the age of ten and have never got around to returning. Every now and again I feel rather guilty about this.
That's one of the books that every used paperback store in America has about 450 copies of, thanks to its prevalence in school syllabi, so I don't think your evil act really had any destructive consequences.
re: 133
There's a sampling process, and then registered authors are compensated annually on a sliding scale based on how often their work is borrowed. It's capped, though, so there's a maximum annual payment of a little over £6000.
133. ttaM describes the principle correctly. If you want to know the details there's a site here.
I still have a copy of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, which the librarian recommended to me when I was 14 (1984). I should really return that!
Of course, if the author is getting capped out, they're probably one of the extremely few authors doing very nicely indeed from book sales, so you needn't feel guilty about that.
This thread petered out this morning, it seems, but it's the book thread, so I had to revisit.
126: of course you don't mix and match booksizes, you only buy books in one size put hardcovers by hardcovers, paperbacks with paperbacks etc. Though since we're running out of room, I am trying to buy only mass market paperbacks.
Putting hardcovers by hardcovers etc. seems odd: are you to remember whether the copy of X that you have is a hardcover or a paperback? I think not!
Most paperbacks I acquire are trade paperbacks, roughly the same size as the hardcovers, so size isn't a problem. They may intermingle.
Mass market paperbacks are generally fiction/literature, and those are separate from non-fiction anyway. You know what's really troublesome size-wise: cookbooks. They're everywhere from full-on quarto to large octavo to regular octavo to mmpb. Silly things.
139: easy enough to deal with, as only some authors get bought in hardback or similar sized trade paperback.
Non-fiction tends to be all smaller sized trade paperbacks (B size if I remember UK sizing correctly?) though of course when you get away from pop science books you get the same problem as you're having with cookbooks. We tend to put the outsized ones on the top shelves, but then my wife can't reach them. But then she has troubles reaching the second shelf up too...
135: wow, that makes a lot of sense.
135 is not true in the USA.
I would favor some kind of system like that, though, for many digital services (compulsory licensing plus statutory royalties) and I think that's likely to be the wave of the future.
I have mixed feelings about systems like that:
1. I really, really hate the "any use = copy = presumptively illegal without a license" underlying principle of the US system. Insofar as either compulsory licensing or tax-financed grants/quasi-royalties puts pressure on that system, especially its more punitive aspects, that's good.
2. I also strongly dislike the way our system incentivizes large-scale for-profit creative works over other modalities of cultural production. More extensive compulsive licensing might aggravate this trend, or it might not; I can see things going either way.
3. More generally: what I fear is an increasingly effective infrastructure for ensuring that every use is a paid use, a principle I believe to be superficially appealing but deeply harmful to culture as a whole.
4. I think I'm most tempted by something like the UK system, but generalized into an attempt to sample and remunerate cultural-consumption, period. But crucially: all carrots, no sticks.
A key worry is how to set up something like that in a way that doesn't lead to massive gaming of the system, when such a huge fraction of cultural production is being done by for-profit corporations which take themselves to have a duty to game whatever systems exist in order to extract maximum revenue.
(A principle limiting individual authors to €/$X per year is far easier to administer when dealing with mostly-single-authored books than it would be for movies, music, television.)
"any use = copy = presumptively illegal without a license"
Not actually the law. Or, indeed, even close.
(A principle limiting individual authors to €/$X per year is far easier to administer when dealing with mostly-single-authored books than it would be for movies, music, television.)
Music and television work (explicitly, in the case of much of the business of music, in practice, in the case of television b/c of how broadcast rights are structured) on a compulsory licensing scheme.
Pay-per-unit systems create incentives to generate large numbers of minimally acceptable units. eg, Soviet consumer goods, produced by factories meeting quotas, or the vast numbers of largely unread an pointless patents or scientific publications. Actually, link spam blog comments are another example of response to similar incentives.
Along with incentives for reading, incentives for writing matter. tl; dr is no joke.
Gawker's pay-per-view experiment for authors is really interesting, I think.
I may not be precisely true to say that lw gets at what I was trying to say, but my concerns were somewhere around that neighborhood.
And Halford, when I said "any use = copy = presumptively illegal without a license," I was taking statutory compulsory licensing to fit within that claim in the sense that refusing to pay the compulsory license is presumptively illegal (you might win a claim that your use was fair, but might not). "Presumptively" was perhaps a sloppy word choice; I meant it in a pragmatic and everyday--rather than legal or evidential--sense.
(More to Halford--I agree that I expressed it badly; what I meant, though, was that with a shift to digital works, the locus of what gets regulated moves from production to--at least potentially--consumption, vastly expanding the scale of what acts "count" in the eyes of the law. Is that a controversial claim, really? The usual Lessing schtick.)
And oops, I'm late to the meetup. Time to log off.
151: Procrastinating on Unfogged will do that.
149 -- I have some thoughts (mostly, you're absolutely right that the digital world is different but that's because it makes copying and hence production a lot easier; if folks simply consumed as in the pre-digital age, the rules would be the same; Lessig's arguments about this, as are most of his arguments, are much more trivial than he thinks), but I'm bored and you're drunk, so.
153: And in the morning, you'll still be bored.