luvmytoolz
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I'm also self taught and left school at 14, at around 30 or so I went back to UNI to do electronics after a redundancy, and to my shock found the sentence above summed up the bulk of the fellow students surprisingly well!
Barnes & Nobel is doing well lately and adding 25 new stores for 2025–but…
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tjbnwi
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For some reason, don’t know why, I quit reading books about 8 years ago. Before that 1000 pages a week was not uncommon. Like CRG I come from the automotive field and lean to the technical. I should give it a try again.
Ashley is my finisher, she reads a couple of books a week and listens to audio books while she is at the shop.
Tom
Ashley is my finisher, she reads a couple of books a week and listens to audio books while she is at the shop.
Tom
Packard
Member
There was one of those “Take-a-book-leave-a-book” libraries in the local Starbucks housed in a small IKEA shelf cabinet. The cabinet was falling apart and I volunteered to repair it. But it was too far gone to repair. Instead I replaced it with a shop made cabinet using some white melamine clad particleboard I had in stock.AND THIS ^^^^^ is how many of the Outdoor Book Boxes work around us here in our part of Chicago. Books flow to and from the boxes. My wife comments on how a book will make the rounds from box to box to box. Some people also dump books that no one apparently wants to read in a box, and they're there for months unless someone else does some 'Editing" and removes the book to make space for some OTHER book....We saved a book box that was in front of a house being demolished, the Contractor actually posted a sign on the box for someone to save it since they knew it would be trashed otherwise. So, I dug up the 4 x 4 post after removing the box from the post- took the whole affair home and did some rebuilding on it. New coats of paint, new door made of MDO, with fresh plexi-glass, and now it sits in front of our house.
Retail is an incredibly hostile and abusive environment. The cabinet was built in my “no fastener” phase. Just dadoes and glue. The structure held up OK, but they mop the floors several times a day and there was water damage. I took back the cabinet and clad the base with polymer molding, and replaced the damaged white edgebanding with wood edgebanding. I have not been back lately. It would be in place for about 15 years now. Now I need to check up on it.
mino
Member
This is changing with the youngest generation a bit.
The smarter of those are coming to realise you cannot censor/wipe/rewrite a paper book ... but that covers /makes-valuable-enough-to-own/ only those books that have some inherent value included. Not something you would buy just to read once .. like 99% of the stuff found in a book store.
Besides, for the exact same reason libraries are of not much use .. it is too easy to enforce "political correctness" on but the biggest ones.
A personal note ... our home library is due for some proper culling come think of it, good half the space is still used up by exactly that 1x reading-is-more-than-enough junk acquired by the granma well before the Internet was a thing.
EDIT
Wholeheartedly second the comments on making public libraries a place one actually wants to hang in. Every single one over here is still that same pompous sterile place hostile to anyone but a bookworm. When I was a kiddo, no internet around, a library was a place I had to go to get some scientific books and related ... despite it being such a hostile environment to a teen, I did endure it.
Being a teen today with the same needs, I cannot imagine I would have willingly gone for that path, not with the availability of info online. Well, possibly to check out a raunchy librarian or something. No wonder the local ones are mostly dying..
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Packard
Member
One of the reasons I had to go to the library was to use the Encyclopedia Britannica for a school research paper. Encyclopedias, if they even exist today, are pretty much obsolete.
luvmytoolz
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With 4 kids going to school I made the expensive mistake of purchasing a set of encyclopaedias, as I thought they'd be handy reference material having relied upon them in my school days.
Turned out to be more useless than a hanky for a boat sail! I could barely give them away in brand new condition.
Now of course you can see the Britannica sets that were upwards of several thousand back in the day, being sold for $50-$100, or just given away mostly.
Crazyraceguy
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I could listen to a biography, since it could be playing, while I do something else. However, fiction holds no interest for me.
Retail is indeed a war-zone for semi-permanent fixtures. Most of the damage is not even deliberate, it's just normal neglect and apathy, with a little weather thrown in.
Much of the decision making for the things I have built, over the last couple of decades, is in the choice of materials. It can very well determine the longevity of those projects.
Until about 10 years ago, I thought the same thing. Libraries are useless and dying. At that time, the shop went through a big phase of library remodels, plus some new builds. Apparently, there was some resurgence in them as WiFi hubs and public computer access points. They all have specific children's reading areas, as well as play places.
The card catalogs are gone, everything is digitized. They are modernizing into a friendlier environment.
With the rapidly advancing technology, it's just a waste of paper, to even try to keep them relevant. I remember encyclopedias that were out of date, when I was a child, and that was quite some time ago. It seems to be exponentially faster, as time moves along. All of that data is right there on their phones/tablets now. My point, from the beginning though, is that they will choose a video, rather than reading it.
Vondawg
Member
The sad part is the youth are useing AI - ChatGPT, sampling over 50% Wikipedia and Reddit, Google(Profound) sampling -Reddit 20%,youtube(which is goggle ?) and a sprinkle of LinkedIn and single digits of Wikipedia, Business Insider,Forbes ect. Note; Business Insider allows its journalist to use AI and today over half of the articles we read today are written by AI (original thought?) so when someone’s degree, BA, Masters, ect. Is put out there Does it mean the same as us old farts who spent countless hours with the Britannias of late nights ? There are many I speak with (younger generation) that are sharp as a tack .. brilliant! But common sense …not so much lol I hope for the best It’s a different world as to where books/and reading will end up
Crazyraceguy
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That is sad. There is no independent thought there at all. Schools used to teach us how to learn....not what to know.
These kids are being primed for propagandism.
I remember the beginning of the whole "teaching to the test" concept. I did not inspire them to actually learn or embrace the subject. It's just like I described before, they cram it all in for the test, hoping they will never need it again.
It's very much like the difference you can hear, when someone tells you a story about something they have lived through, rather than what they heard from someone else. It hits different when you know
luvmytoolz
Member
Working in IT the last 25 or so years I see this increasingly with the new guys, they have all the certificates like some people collect baseball cards, but can't actually apply the knowledge as they lack most of the basic understanding of "what it is" and "how it works".
Some of it's so boneheaded you have to wonder if they dress themselves in the morning, but it is what it is. The fact that when entire classes do badly, to maintain funding and not look too bad they average the results in lots of courses here to ensure passing rates also doesn't help.
When I was at UNI on a 2 year course, they dropped the passing rates gradually from 95% to 80%, and then just closed their eyes dropping it to 50% for some, as probably 80% of the class couldn't muster more than 50-55% at any given time.
That was the eye opening moment for me, realising the course and content and exceptional grades didn't matter at all, just the fact you had a certificate was the be all and end all to allow someone in HR to check a box on an application.
mino
Member
Actually, Encyclopaedias /of old/ are one of the things valuable to have on hand. Stuff from the 1980s and earlier and all one needs is to understand the publisher context.
No, not as a primary source you go to .. but as something that is authentic to its time. WP and co /and even online version of Britannica/ are too prone to "suitable" modifications to be trusted these
days.
Just last week I went to check something about one Central Asia place a friend is from ... let me just say that the 1980s encyclopedia entry of the place was more than valuable in putting the /half false/ narrative found on its WP article to context ... yes, the old paper thing matched what the friend was noting .. WP .. did not.
The second big group are scientific and in general education materials. E.g. 1960s J.Moore Physical Chemistry is such a joy to read. Sure, it is outdated as a reference, but the presentation is soo much better than anything contemporary. The same with the school books of my youth versus what is available new today. And no, it is not nostalgia. The old stuff is into "here look about the data, do what you want to do with it" while the new is "we tell you only what supports the interpretation that we want you to believe".
Without having that old book around to show to a niece the full context, she would have eaten some of the shifted garbage presented to her in school ... same as her /younger/ teacher does. The sad part, she immediately told me "Thanks, but I cannot use this at school." .. Smart chic.
Packard
Member
E-books sometimes have glitches. This one on an old John Sandford novel I am reading (it sounds like I have a lot of pages left to read. Without commas, I cannot even read the number):
Addendum: I just googled “20 digit numbers” and found that this is over 18 quintillion pages. It is going to take a while to finish this book.
Addendum: I just googled “20 digit numbers” and found that this is over 18 quintillion pages. It is going to take a while to finish this book.
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