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JnnyThndrs posted:I used to drive 45 miles to go to Dark Carnival. It was so good. 
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Jan 6, 2018 04:55
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JnnyThndrs posted:I used to drive 45 miles to go to Dark Carnival. weird, icp told me its in your nearest bible
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Jan 6, 2018 06:09
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Xaris posted:I give them props and they did a good job trying to hang in with there their own ereader and embracing ebooks more OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 06:48
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7yiTGTHfZo Dan Bell caught one suddenly closing.
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Jan 6, 2018 08:25
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As bad as the current CEO of Kmart is, people like Charles Conaway just made sure it became a tradition for Kmart. http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20100225/FREE/100229913/former-kmart-ceo-charles-conaway-ordered-to-pay-millions You know it's pretty drat bad when the SEC wants to ban you from ever being high up in a company ever again. The guy was corrupt as hell, using the expense account without a thought, stuffing management with his cronies, and lying to shareholders. I remember one of the things he got in trouble for was that he wanted to beat out Walmart by undercutting them, to the point where they would make either no or barely any profit on the items they sold, hoping that once customers came back to Kmart they'll stay there. Everyone on the board told him it was a horrible idea that was completely unsustainable and forbid him to do it. Well, he did it anyway and Walmart simply just forced their suppliers to lower their wholesale prices, and since Walmart has that power over suppliers, and then undercut Kmart while still making profit. So, people kept going to Walmart and the sales that Kmart was getting were unprofitable. When the board found out about this, they were pissed as hell and I think that was one of the many things they sued him for after kicking him out. I'm pretty sure if this thread existed since the beginning of SA then Kmart would be a pretty consistent topic year after year.
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Jan 6, 2018 08:50
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skooma512 posted:I mean, I'm sure everyone figures Amazon is holding the smoking gun, but Amazon was just as big of a force last year. If it's true that people don't want to buy books, then it's a new trend. Younger people read more than older generations, so if there's some overall decline in reading that's happening then it's something unique to the last year or two quote:Some 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers' relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities. So people are both reading more and more likely to buy books than borrow them from a library.
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Jan 6, 2018 08:53
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Paradoxish posted:If it's true that people don't want to buy books, then it's a new trend. Younger people read more than older generations, so if there's some overall decline in reading that's happening then it's something unique to the last year or two. stores that only sell books are done. barnes and noble already has a media section, but really the more likely future are physical media stores that sell books, movies, music, etc. for folks who want to have tangible media vs. digital media
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Jan 6, 2018 08:55
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boner confessor posted:stores that only sell books are done. barnes and noble already has a media section, but really the more likely future are physical media stores that sell books, movies, music, etc. for folks who want to have tangible media vs. digital media No disagreement here. I was just saying that B&N isn't in trouble because there's some overall decline in readers. People are reading books (whether physical or digital), they're just not buying them at B&N.
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Jan 6, 2018 09:06
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Freakazoid_ posted:I don't suppose you're talking about the everett mall sears? Went there early last month looking at overpriced mattresses. I'm beginning to think corporate misplaced its phylactery. They left it in the Starbucks HQ in Seattle.
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Jan 6, 2018 09:37
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B/N slowly expanding the space occupied by crappy figurines the last few years has been depressing, and they always have tables loaded with hardcovers of the latest poo poo for idiots
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Jan 6, 2018 09:51
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I think I know the answer to this one. Few years ago Waterstones which is the UK version of B&N was tanking fast even though people were buying more books in general. New CEO came in and immediately realised that having a system where all the stores had the exact same books on the shelves and were pushing the same authors and managers specials simply wasn't working. A shop in a student area is going to have a radically different customer base to a retirement town. What he did was make each store tailor itself to it's own area and customers. For example if you have an area like Ross on Wye, which is well known to be an area for art people and hippies, they started selling more art books and putting organic cook books in the shop window. Waterstones saved, hurrah.
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Jan 6, 2018 10:32
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learnincurve posted:I think I know the answer to this one. Few years ago Waterstones which is the UK version of B&N was tanking fast even though people were buying more books in general. New CEO came in and immediately realised that having a system where all the stores had the exact same books on the shelves and were pushing the same authors and managers specials simply wasn't working. A shop in a student area is going to have a radically different customer base to a retirement town. Listen here, STEMlords. You will buy our books on 13th-17th century naval poetry and you will like them. 
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Jan 6, 2018 10:43
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Paradoxish posted:If it's true that people don't want to buy books, then it's a new trend. Younger people read more than older generations, so if there's some overall decline in reading that's happening then it's something unique to the last year or two I find it very interesting that it ignores the third option for getting a book: just plain pirating it. For a dedicated eReader or on a phone, tablet, or computer, it's easy, quick, and people talk about doing it all the time.
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Jan 6, 2018 15:45
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Online shopping makes everything so much easier, but I'm worried about ensuring humane treatment for the contract employees. I don't know what to do besides boycotting companies that have ignored public backlash against their working conditions for drivers/warehouse employees/etc. The main companies I avoid are Ubereats and Amazon, although I'm sure many of them are pretty bad. My fear is that any of us could be working in an Amazon warehouse if our jobs are automated away over the next couple of decades. Several of my friends work part-time for Favor/Instacart/Uber/etc to supplement their primary income, including degreed people with full-time employment in their industries. Everyone just has so much debt between student loans, housing and healthcare... 
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Jan 6, 2018 17:40
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suck my woke dick posted:Listen here, STEMlords. You will buy our books on 13th-17th century naval poetry and you will like them. The cool kids listen to navel poetry sung by improvisational jazz singers... https://youtu.be/HJsfaZdlRgI
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Jan 6, 2018 19:39
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fishmech posted:I find it very interesting that it ignores the third option for getting a book: just plain pirating it. For a dedicated eReader or on a phone, tablet, or computer, it's easy, quick, and people talk about doing it all the time. Xaris fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 20:12
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Yeah, ebooks are relatively cheap and ebook piracy is non-trivial unless you're looking for something so popular that you can find it just by searching on Google. You basically need to use IRC or have access to one of a handful of really good private ebook trackers. It's more trouble than it's worth unless you literally can't afford to buy what you want or you're a digital hoarder that needs thousands of ebooks in your collection to feel satisfied. The last time I seriously bothered was years ago for college textbooks because gently caress the prices on those things.
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Jan 6, 2018 20:19
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Xaris posted:Eh, it's not that surprising really to ignore it. I'd imagine it's generally avery very small percentage that bothers, and likely an order of magnitude less than music or movie piracy. Probably mostly poor but savvy college-students stemlords at most. I'll pirate a book for my kindle if its' something I don't exactly want to give author money for, or if its not on Amazon. But drat it's really nice just clicking a button off Amazon and having it show up on my kindle instantly, best way to defeat piracy is always making it more convenient and they do a good job at making it as simple and reliable as possible. In general, ebook piracy is fairly complicated for the average person and often hard to find what you want. I still use IRC and pop on undernet for it with dcc transfer but I could just be an incredibly out of touch old goony goon who doesnt know what the cool kids are up to so maybe it is really easy now idk No you just go to a certain website, search for the book you want, and click the download links, it's very simple and relatively centralized ever since the thing took off with academic journals being available for free and of course attracted a bunch of fiction and other such books. Most anything popular is very quick to pirate these days. Paradoxish posted:You basically need to use IRC or have access to one of a handful of really good private ebook trackers. This is, again, completely untrue. Look, when reading books is up with the younger generation, library attendance is down, physical book sales are only up marginally (and the only national scale physical book retail store had sales outright down) and ebook sales are down somewhat - isn't it obvious that people are reading pirated books to make that happen? fishmech fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 21:10
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fishmech posted:No you just go to a certain website, search for the book you want, and click the download links, it's very simple and relatively centralized ever since the thing took off with academic journals being available for free and of course attracted a bunch of fiction and other such books. Most anything popular is very quick to pirate these days. Books are very very easy to pirate but still are harder to do so than literally every other type of media. Getting an epub is trivial but still requires knowing what an epub is. Pirating simpsons just means typing "watch simpsons online free" in google and clicking play on whatever comes up. Pirating all media is super easy in 2018 but books are probably the highest (but still really low) barrier. A barely literate kid can type naruto into google and watch all the episodes, getting an epub still requires some bare minimum of computer literacy to know things like what a file is and how to get it onto a device and open it.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:16
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Books are very very easy to pirate but still are harder to do so than literally every other type of media. Getting an epub is trivial but still requires knowing what an epub is. Pirating simpsons just means typing "watch simpsons online free" in google and clicking play on whatever comes up. Pirating all media is super easy in 2018 but books are probably the highest (but still really low) barrier. A barely literate kid can type naruto into google and watch all the episodes, getting an epub still requires some bare minimum of computer literacy to know things like what a file is and how to get it onto a device and open it. A ton of people pirate PDF versions. Every modern computer, tablet, and phone OS will open a PDF for you. Furthermore Windows 10 opens EPUB files natively since early 2017 (using Edge). And tons of people have had to install ebook reading software for their college classes or even high school classes, because they bought ebook editions of such texts or needed to interact with a digital supplement. It's hardly a huge barrier.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:39
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fishmech posted:This is, again, completely untrue. It's weird that you cut out the part of my post where I say that pirating popular books is relatively easy to tell me that pirating popular books is relatively easy.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:46
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fishmech posted:A ton of people pirate PDF versions. Every modern computer, tablet, and phone OS will open a PDF for you. Furthermore Windows 10 opens EPUB files natively since early 2017 (using Edge). And tons of people have had to install ebook reading software for their college classes or even high school classes, because they bought ebook editions of such texts or needed to interact with a digital supplement. It's not at all a huge barrier, but in the list of types of media it's still the one with the largest barrier. If you want to watch pirated rick and morty or avengers or something youtube will just throw "live streams" of it in your face even if you aren't asking. Like having to know even literally anything makes it the last on the list of "how easy is it to pirate this type of media"
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Jan 6, 2018 21:49
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Paradoxish posted:It's weird that you cut out the part of my post where I say that pirating popular books is relatively easy to tell me that pirating popular books is relatively easy. I'm not just talking "popular" books, it's obscure stuff too. All the stuff on your special IRC channels and usenet groups has been getting dumped into those website based libraries usually run out of Central Asian countries that don't take down sites for much in the way of copyright violation. Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's not at all a huge barrier, but in the list of types of media it's still the one with the largest barrier. If you want to watch pirated rick and morty or avengers or something youtube will just throw "live streams" of it in your face even if you aren't asking. Like having to know even literally anything makes it the last on the list of "how easy is it to pirate this type of media" Sounds like Rick and Morty has a pretty huge barrier, you have to know what a "youtube" is, how to type a query into a search box, and how to click a link.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:52
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I know tons of people who can't bother to install adblockers because it's "too technical". These are people who live on their phones and computers but have absolute no knowledge or interest in learning anything more than the most basic out of the box user experience. Downloading a torrent of a book or a movie or something is like crazy dark net hacking, way too advanced and way too dangerous. They buy everything "legally" not out of ethical reasons but out of feelings of absolute terror at having to "do technical stuff" or learn a new program. If they can't get the content officially through itunes or netflix or what ever came pre-installed with their phone or TV or book reader it might as well be impossible. It's enough of a barrier for a shockingly large amount of people, maybe even a majority.
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Jan 6, 2018 21:58
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fishmech posted:Sounds like Rick and Morty has a pretty huge barrier, you have to know what a "youtube" is, how to type a query into a search box, and how to click a link. I think you think you are being ironic but you are absolutely right and there is a ton of people that don't even know how to pirate stuff that is that simple. Ask anyone over like 50 or so if they could pirate an episode of rick and morty and they absolutely can't and books are even harder than that. (while all being extremely easy for anyone that is internet literate.)
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Jan 6, 2018 22:02
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Pirating games is still the hardest, you also worry about patches and vid card compatibility, etc.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:02
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fishmech posted:Look, when reading books is up with the younger generation, library attendance is down, physical book sales are only up marginally (and the only national scale physical book retail store had sales outright down) and ebook sales are down somewhat - isn't it obvious that people are reading pirated books to make that happen? If you're willing to wait a few years, you can get used physical books for basically the cost of shipping(whereas ebooks don't tend to fall in price as much during that span of time, if at all). But that's (probably?) not going to show up as a 'sale', since none of that money is going to the publisher or author. The exceptions tend to be obscure books and/or books old enough that used copies are legitimately rare.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:25
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Bad UIs, proprietary players, platform restrictions, DRM, et al of legal media distribution are more of a barrier than pirating. I think it's just the scare tactics that keep people away, and the torrent search sites look a little sketchy. Heck, in the time it takes me to navigate to a Netflix show I want to watch (or more likely, find out that it's not there), I could have simply downloaded all seasons on PC. E-Books are worse if you don't use the right device or service. Feeling virtuous, I bought a DVD of the Angry Birds Movie just to learn that I couldn't play it on a PC drive. The included online version could only be run from a webplayer, was low resolution, had 10 minutes of unskippable ads at the beginning, and was missing the special features. I mean, always pay for your media and whatever, but I'll be darned if I'm not just going to throw the legit copy away and watch the pirated version.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:31
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There's a really great non-profit in my neighborhood that's basically just a warehouse filled with used books, free for the taking. People donate them, volunteers sort them into categories, then they open the doors to the public (who are encouraged to be as greedy as possible) on the weekends. You may not find exactly what you're looking for, but you'll find something cool, and spending an hour or two browsing there isn't the worst thing you can do on a Saturday afternoon. I  that place.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:51
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Baronjutter posted:I know tons of people who can't bother to install adblockers because it's "too technical". These are people who live on their phones and computers but have absolute no knowledge or interest in learning anything more than the most basic out of the box user experience. Downloading a torrent of a book or a movie or something is like crazy dark net hacking, way too advanced and way too dangerous. They buy everything "legally" not out of ethical reasons but out of feelings of absolute terror at having to "do technical stuff" or learn a new program. If they can't get the content officially through itunes or netflix or what ever came pre-installed with their phone or TV or book reader it might as well be impossible. That's nice and all, but there's also hundreds of millions of people who can handle going to a website and clicking a link for something that their computer already knows how to read. Focusing on the most incompetent part of the population is utterly irrelevant. Haifisch posted:There's another thing you're forgetting: Used books. I'm not. It's unlikely that's particularly gone up to match the supposed rise in young people reading books. got any sevens posted:Pirating games is still the hardest, you also worry about patches and vid card compatibility, etc. Well yeah that's for sure. Preen Dog posted:Feeling virtuous, I bought a DVD of the Angry Birds Movie just to learn that I couldn't play it on a PC drive. The included online version could only be run from a webplayer, was low resolution, had 10 minutes of unskippable ads at the beginning, and was missing the special features. Sounds like you bought a Blu-Ray copy instead of a DVD copy and then tried to use the "digital copy" DVD? If you'd had a proper Blu-Ray drive it would have played fine (since your drive would have come with the software to play Blu-Rays). That or you ended up buying actual pirate copies unknowingly.
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Jan 6, 2018 22:51
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re: pirating ebooks Is it my imagination or have kindle prices for new books jumped in the last year. Originally amazon made a big deal out of new books allways being $9.99, then $10.99 and $11.99 books started appearing gradually. In the last year or so it seems like newly-released books are allways in the $15-$17 range. That is definitely getting into the "better to just pirate it" range. Also ebooks should not cost the same as a new paperback. withak fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 23:04
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withak posted:re: pirating ebooks Big publishers have been pushing that for many years now, even though they had to stop enforcing it as hard as a result of the massive antitrust cases against them and Apple from when they started doing it. What the publishers have always wanted, and still really want, is to go back to the way the nascent ebook market was in like 1999 when the ebook price was simply the hardcover list price and you had to sit there and take it as a customer.
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Jan 6, 2018 23:15
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fishmech posted:That's nice and all, but there's also hundreds of millions of people who can handle going to a website and clicking a link for something that their computer already knows how to read. Focusing on the most incompetent part of the population is utterly irrelevant. Not knowing how to do a thing isn't just the domain of drooling morons or something, many people don't know how to bake bread or change a spark plug or knit or a million other things that are only a minute or two of education to learn if you have the general toolkit in of the knowledge domain already learned. The recent wacky news from oregon showed that a pretty large number of people that are probably perfectly fine drivers don't actually know how to put gas in their own car. People just don't know stuff sometimes. Everyone posting on a forum is certainly going to be computer literate to download an epub and put it on a tablet to read but a lot of people aren't even going to know what an epub or pdf even is. Learning what file format you need isn't hard, not any harder than knowing what brake fluid your car takes but it's not like everyone knows that either.
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Jan 6, 2018 23:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Not knowing how to do a thing isn't just the domain of drooling morons or something, many people don't know how to bake bread or change a spark plug or knit or a million other things that are only a minute or two of education to learn if you have the general toolkit in of the knowledge domain already learned. The recent wacky news from oregon showed that a pretty large number of people that are probably perfectly fine drivers don't actually know how to put gas in their own car. People just don't know stuff sometimes. Everyone posting on a forum is certainly going to be computer literate to download an epub and put it on a tablet to read but a lot of people aren't even going to know what an epub or pdf even is. Learning what file format you need isn't hard, not any harder than knowing what brake fluid your car takes but it's not like everyone knows that either. Yeah but most people actually know how to use their computers fairly well. It's not 1978 anymore, you don't need to be willing to spend the equivalent of $80,000 and have a soldering iron ready just in case in order to use a computer or use two of the most common file formats on the planet. Stop assuming everybody else using a computer is too incompetent to know that a PDF is a thing you can read, which is all you really need to know these days. poo poo if you can't handle PDFs its often going to be hard to do a ton of things online that normal users do all the time.
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Jan 6, 2018 23:28
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fishmech posted:Yeah but most people actually know how to use their computers fairly well. It's not 1978 anymore, you don't need to be willing to spend the equivalent of $80,000 and have a soldering iron ready just in case in order to use a computer or use two of the most common file formats on the planet. Stop assuming everybody else using a computer is too incompetent to know that a PDF is a thing you can read, which is all you really need to know these days. poo poo if you can't handle PDFs its often going to be hard to do a ton of things online that normal users do all the time. There is tons of things people could learn to do that they don't. Like tons of stuff with cars. Or cooking. Or even the way you mentioned soldering like a huge barrier when soldering is a thing anyone could learn in 5 minutes. If you asked 100 people to pirate a copy of jurassic park or something I bet less than 20 of them could. Even if 95 of them could if you gave them a ten minute lesson on how to do it.
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Jan 6, 2018 23:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is tons of things people could learn to do that they don't. Like tons of stuff with cars. Or cooking. Or even the way you mentioned soldering like a huge barrier when soldering is a thing anyone could learn in 5 minutes. If you asked 100 people to pirate a copy of jurassic park or something I bet less than 20 of them could. Even if 95 of them could if you gave them a ten minute lesson on how to do it. And? What makes you think people don't know what a PDF is when it's something people are using every day? Also it was a pretty huge barrier to be expected to have good soldering skills and tons of expensive parts on hand like a late 70s home computer enthusiast often needed. You might as well claim music piracy could never have been widespread because it's simply inconceivable to you that people would know what an MP3 file is.
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Jan 6, 2018 23:47
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fishmech posted:Sounds like you bought a Blu-Ray copy instead of a DVD copy and then tried to use the "digital copy" DVD? If you'd had a proper Blu-Ray drive it would have played fine (since your drive would have come with the software to play Blu-Rays). There is no way I could have made that mistake. No, it was the disc that was wrong.  Yeah, I put the BD in the DVD.  Next time I'll just watch the pirate copy and mail the producer $24.99 in pennies.e. the shipping would cost about 20 bucks but it would be worth it.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:19
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fishmech posted:You might as well claim music piracy could never have been widespread because it's simply inconceivable to you that people would know what an MP3 file is. That seems like a super reasonable claim as well. Like napster peaked at 26 million users worldwide and that is a pretty big number, because again the barrier isn't so high that it's some impossible thing that only ultra hacker elites can do but it's also not some ultra amazing super shocking high number. It's no where near the number stuff like streaming fan uploaded songs off youtube is. Like napster was slightly more popular than nintendogs and slightly less popular than linkin park's best selling album. It hit a good solid success without reaching any sort of supernaturally high penetration. Lots of people were held back from using it by not understanding it, especially compared to now how easy it is to type a song in youtube and listen to it and not even know if you are listening to a legitimate official copy or a fan upload.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:21
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/06/pirated-ebooks-threaten-future-of-serial-novels-warn-authors-maggie-stiefvater This was a good write up on an exact instance that pirating is kinda a big deal especially in the young adult genres. At my work I’ve given up on explaining that that we have access to a great elibrary...my coworkers find it easier to pirate stuff than get a library card.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:33
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems like a super reasonable claim as well. Like napster peaked at 26 million users worldwide and that is a pretty big number, because again the barrier isn't so high that it's some impossible thing that only ultra hacker elites can do but it's also not some ultra amazing super shocking high number. It's no where near the number stuff like streaming fan uploaded songs off youtube is. Like napster was slightly more popular than nintendogs and slightly less popular than linkin park's best selling album. It hit a good solid success without reaching any sort of supernaturally high penetration. Lots of people were held back from using it by not understanding it, especially compared to now how easy it is to type a song in youtube and listen to it and not even know if you are listening to a legitimate official copy or a fan upload. 26 million users worldwide was a rather huge number for an internet application in mid-2001 when it was shut down. That's a full 5% of all the estimated internet users in the world at the time, for something that was fairly complex to use correctly (among other things you had to figure out just how to word your searches, you had to pick the correct people to pull from who wouldn't disconnect before you downloaded, and it was being actively attempted to be blocked by various legal authorities). There were barely even mass market MP3 players at the time Napster went down, or things like mass availability of CD players that would read MP3s off burned discs. And the successor piracy networks, your Kazaas, your eMules, your Soulseeks, your Limewires, things like that each individually had many more users than Napster at its peak, let alone different peer to peer services that were popular outside the anglosphere. And of course you also had people individually just asking people to copy them the songs they had off their own music libraries on an in person basis. Face it dude, music piracy was rampant, and people were in fact able to figure out the monumentally difficult concept of "the MP3 has the song in it". Lokar posted:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/06/pirated-ebooks-threaten-future-of-serial-novels-warn-authors-maggie-stiefvater But, how could the hoi polloi possibly figure out how to use a PDF. Only computer brain experts are supposed to be able to! 
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Jan 7, 2018 00:36
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