affordability, ¢25 (the price of each of Pocket Books’ titles) went a lot further in 1939 than it does now but was still a consumer-friendly price point. It was just slightly higher than what our great-great-grandparents would have paid for a gallon of gas and slightly lower than what they’d have paid for a dozen eggs. In 2024, the format’s last year of full national distribution, a new mass-market paperback would set you back three times as much as a dozen eggs or a gallon of gas.

I really can’t justify the price of a new mass market paperback anymore. It’s so much for what an inconvenience they are. The font size, spacing, and margins are all small and cramped, and they get so beat up with transport and use, and they’re thick so they both take up a lot of space on a bookshelf and don’t fit as well in a backpack compared to a slimmer, taller hardcover or trade paperback, both of which tend to be more durable, have larger margins and font sizes and line spacing. It’s legitimately a better reading experience, for free, to pirate ebooks and put it on an old cheap used kobo ereader.

I’ll still buy books but they have to be nicer than mass-market PPBs, and then I prefer used because of course those are way more expensive new.

idk, I got banned from repeatedly and more often than that, mods silently removed my comments without making it clear. I’ve never had anything like that happen on Lemmy.

AA has many books that are not on MAM and vice versa

Wow what a pathetic loser

Who is this guy and why do people hate him?

Nothing major, just curious

What happens that makes you have to restart it? What OS?

What OS?

lol, punny on two levels, I like it ;)

Centrists wouldn’t like me, I’ve been told I’m “not boring” so there goes any hope of a centrist grifter career

I normally don’t like AI stuff but this guy uses AI tools to make fun videos and you might like his Democratic Penguin’s Republic series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

Sorry, guess I’m scabbing on you all because nobody pays me, I just do it for the love of the game.

I did, long ago, dream of exiting the rat race so I could fulfill my dream of being a left-wing demagogue getting paid to spit fire in the faces of the powerful. Alas, I had no idea how to get started, then I read something by Nathan J. Robinson, the most prolific socdem essayist ever, where he said all his work gets him about $15K in profit a year, and I concluded that my dream would not come to pass. Man is at least 10x more prolific than I could be, writes less confrontational and therefore more accessible and publishable stuff, and is the editor and owner of a magazine. All for not enough to live on in any big city? Shit, the problem is that the left is the side of the people who don’t have money. Only way to make a good living doing politics is to work for the right wing which I obviously couldn’t so because while I may be a spineless cuttlefish, I still have a hard aragonite core that cannot bend and betray my principles.

Cute cute cute cute cute!