I love the idea of owning books you can’t find anywhere else. One of the main reasons I don’t bother going to bookstores is because I know everything there is just gonna be on Amazon anyway, and with reviews.
But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!
I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.
Pretty much all of the physical books I own are like this: rare and impossible to find online, in digital format or otherwise. People really overestimate how many books have been digitized.
- Paradigms Lost by John Simon. A lot of these older cultural/writing commentary books don't seem to be digitized, but are absolutely worth reading
- Some older tourism books. For example, I have a little pamphlet book on visiting Yugoslavia, written in Polish.
- Unique/interesting formats. For example, I have a book of "useful words for dealing with capitalists and their markets" that was written in German during the DDR. It has about 2,000 words written side-by-side in 8 languages, including English, German, French, Czech, and some others.
- Older magazines, especially fashion magazines. Very hard to get a hold of or find online.
What I want is some easy way to print any website as a book. Some web serials would be best read as a physical book, but it’s often hard or impossible.
But the idea of coming across a strange book few people have read, and finding unconventional wisdom and writing inside that no publisher would ever put out, sounds exciting!
I think more people should write books and publish them in small quantities and just give them away for others to discover some day. Let the books circulate through the world, growing old and more mysterious with time. It’d be better than keeping some static blog site that will disappear after a decade.