Here’s something I wanna say real quick, while I’m feeling salty: Amazon has totally contributed to the devaluation of literature. Those prices you see, the $13 they’re asking you to pay for a hardcover book? Those are deep, DEEP discounts that they’re able to implement because they don’t collect sales tax if they can get away with it, they don’t contribute money to the communities where they have a physical presence, they have shitty labor practices, Jeff Bezos has more money than god, etc.
They’re so omnipotent at this point that they’ve normalized the discounted prices for books as the standard. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me and tell me what the price on Amazon is, expecting me to match it. The number of times I’ve been told, “Oh, it’s cheaper on Amazon, I’ll just get it there.” Even at author events, where book sales DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE to whether or not that bookstore will be able to get more authors in.
So when you go into a bookstore, and you’re asked to pay $27 for a hardcover, remember: THAT IS THE COVER PRICE. Set by the publishers. The bookstore is not upcharging you. They are asking you to pay the value of the book. Amazon’s low prices come with a cost. Please, just keep that in mind.
(I made a post with options for buying books online that aren’t Amazon. Check it out!)
This is a great post, and I just want to point out: publishers aren’t upcharging you either.
The cost of the book is the advance for the author, it’s the salaries for all the people who work on it (including editors, yes, but also designers and marketers and publicists and lawyers and accountants and everyone else who makes sure publishing works). It’s the cost of printing the books and the materials to print those books on and the warehouses to store those books in.
It’s keeping the literal lights on.
No one in the book business, from the author to the publisher to the bookseller, is making themselves rich off your money. This is the cost to survive. Amazon is running at a deficit because they can make up the cost with other things they do, and because once they run everyone else out of business, they’ll be the only game in town and can charge whatever they damn well please.
And please, please do not ask a bookstore (especially an indie bookstore) if they “price match.” It’s so insulting.
Amazon routinely sells books at or *below* wholesale cost. Meaning that when you ask a bookstore to ‘price match’ Amazon, you’re literally asking them to give you the book for free, or even take a financial loss on it.
‘So how can Amazon do it?’ you ask? The answer is Amazon does not care about losing money. It sells goods at a loss continuously. (Don’t believe me? Just search “Amazon quarterly losses” and you can find article after article about this) Why? Because its goal isn’t to sell the most things, it’s goal is to be the only place where you CAN buy things. They gouge prices on goods to a point where brick and mortar retailers absolutely cannot compete and they do it with the singular goal of eliminating competition.
Things have value. They represent many people’s time and labor. For books, specifically, they represent tremendous cultural worth that extends far beyond the value of the paper they’re printed on. We have to appreciate the value of goods and be willing to pay a fair price that will support and nurture industries.
It’s ok to be upset that you can’t afford $26 for a new hardcover, but make sure that that anger is directed, not at the people whose labor makes books possible, but at the people on top (like Jeff Bezos) who have devalued your own labor such that you can’t afford it.
whispers hey you can’t use the same critical framework on works by individual lgbt creators that you use for works by corporations looking for profit from lgbt stories written by straight people because the context and consumption of that content exist in completely separate spheres thannnkssssss
you can’t deride a depressed lesbian’s work for having the sad lesbian trope in it
you can’t tell a trans woman writing about being trans that she’s just writing the stereotypical trans narrative
those are their stories to tell and they’re not stereotypes they’re real lives and reducing them to the boxes het media puts us in is reproducing their oppression
And the God-tier is when people criticise individual LGBTQ people for being “stereotypical” in the way they live their lives X___x
I was going through useless facts and trivia to fill my brain with shit and I learned in feudal Japan the term for a bisexual man was something along ”wields swords in both hands”
Good Backwards World Building: In the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game, your player character must learn the charm Silencio, which causes the target to temporarily be unable to make any sound,during their fifth year at Hogwarts. During the class, it is revealed that one of the side effects of a failed Silencio charm is for the target of the spell to begin to swell uncontrollably. For players who are clever and remember the books, this will ring a bell- it was never explained why Aunt Marge in The Prisoner of Azkaban started swelling up when Harry got angry, only that he accidentally did magic. This reveal shows that in anger, his subconscious was likely trying to “shut her up”, causing a mis-cast Silencio charm, and therefore the side-effect of swelling. The reveal doesn’t change anything about the characters or their motivations, or add anything in particular to the plot. It’s just a neat bit of trivia.
Bad Backwards World Building: JKR tweets that [x] was part of [x minority group], even though there was no indication of such in the text, simply because it adds representation in hindsight.
ok. i had to look this up, because this seems just too ridiculous. and wiki does not disappoint: “…
the hognose snake will often roll onto its back and play dead with its mouth open and tongue lolling, going as far as to emit a foul musk from the cloaca.
Emission of cloacal musk is considerably less likely than in many other
species. If the snake is rolled upright while in this state, it will
often roll over again as if to insist that it is really dead.”
I want to point out this particular one is a baby. It’s still learning how LONG to play dead, that’s why it keeps waking up to check if it worked. It’s doing it’s best ok?
Knowing that “confirmed bachelor” was 19th Century gay slang: mildly amusing.
19th Century authors who honestly didn’t know that “confirmed bachelor” was gay slang using the term to describe their male protagonists without the slightest awareness of what they were implying: priceless.
