Jury duty is a faff and a half, but when the trial is on the longer side, A) You know it’s something on the more serious side, and B) You surrender your life to the justice system for the duration of the trial.

Seriously, as much as juries decide the fate of others, their own fate is not only determined for them by outside forces for the duration of the trial, it’s pretty narrow. Nobody really tells you anything that’s going on, you have no idea if each side is going to call one witness or like 50, you don’t know how long the questioning will go, if there’s video evidence, the video could be hours long or 5 minutes. When you come in on day 5, you may be about to hear closing arguments, or you may be just getting started.

And the chairs aren’t even comfortable. C’mon, guys. You can’t get comfy chairs for the jurors? I could hook you up with a nice Demco or Brodart catalog, they’ve got plenty of durable yet comfortable options.

Or maybe just a gamer chair. That seems futuristic and serious-minded, yet comfortable.

Although I guess you wouldn’t want jurors fighting over who gets to sit in the Minions chair.

Anyway, in these newsletters, I talk a lot about intellectual freedom and the importance of reading things to see what the other side says, and I usually think about this in the abstract. And I say it knowing full well that very, very few people actually take the opportunity to read a book that disagrees with what they believe, myself included.

But here was a case, a LEGAL case, where a material I’d disagreed with and read anyway came in handy.

Dun-Dun [Law & Order noise]

I’m not going to get super into the case out of respect for everyone involved, suffice to say it was a toughie, not the most pleasant thing, there were lots of families involved and affected, and the deliberations were on the intense side.

But I will say that a key component of the case was a police interview with a suspect, and a key question was whether or not that suspect was being interviewed/interrogated in a coercive way.

And a big bone of contention, which ended up in the jury being unable to come to a unanimous decision, was whether or not the detective doing the questioning was being coercive or not. Because he wasn’t being angry or violent, he wasn’t even yelling.

I think most of the other jurors, and most people, think of coercive interviewing as being the way you might see it in movies, where a cop is slapping the shit out of a cuffed suspect, maybe torturing them like in that Rambo movie, or dangling them off the edge of a building the way Batman would.

Quick aside, I don’t have a problem with Batman doing this in comics. Because Batman is a fictional character inhabiting a fictional world, he’s always correct. AND, I don’t believe the confessions Batman might get from criminals are likely admissible as evidence in court.

I suppose we could talk more about Batman being a pop culture figure that perpetuates this kind of idea, but the lon g er I thnk bou t it…..

Sorry, fell asleep there for a second.

Look, I don’t think bad cops want to be Batman. They want to be the Punisher. Because:

I don’t see coerciveness this comic-book-y way, and in fact, I think it’s far less effective to question someone super hard than it is to coerce them in a slightly different way.

Why do I think that?

Allow me to take you back to the past for a moment:

When I was a baby librarian, not that I was doing library stuff for babies, and not when I was a baby myself, but when I was early in my library career, I had an idea to try and learn some interrogation skills to improve my reference interviews.

In librarianship a reference interview is something you do when someone comes to you with a question, and you ask them additional questions to try and figure out what they want, exactly.

Because one thing people are really, shockingly bad at is telling you exactly what they want.

Sometimes they tell you they want a thriller. An inexperienced librarian would hear this, pull up a list of the current bestselling thrillers, and suggest a few. A more seasoned veteran would ask some questions: Are you looking for a particular book you heard about, or just something in the thriller neighborhood? What kind of thriller are you looking for? Is there a thriller you’ve read in the past you really enjoyed that you can tell me about? If you can’t tell me about a thriller novel you’ve read before, how about a movie? Is it okay for the book to have some graphic violence and/or sex, or is that something you prefer to avoid?

My first step in improving my reference skills was to look at the professional literature. Which was super boring, so I moved onto step 2 and checked out a book on questioning suspects in interrogations.

Now, let me be clear, I wasn’t trying to get people to confess to things that weren’t true, but I DID find that, as a young man, there were some library users who were reluctant to tell me what they wanted. In particular, women looking for something spicy gave me the impression that they didn’t want to just come out and tell me they liked books where boss orc bitches threw their lovers around the ol’ bedchamber every 15 to 30 pages.

It wasn’t that I wanted people to tell me their dirty reading habits so I could shame them or talk about it decades later in a newsletter, it just made my job a lot easier if people told me what they wanted, and I thought that maybe, if I could make them comfortable or ask questions in a way that helped build trust, they would be more willing to tell me, and everyone would leave happier.

I thought that if interrogation tactics worked to get confessions from people, who REALLY didn’t want to tell the cops anything, surely they’d be useful in a situation where the person does kind of want to tell me things, and where it’s to their great benefit to do so.

What I Found

The book I picked up on interrogations was…interesting.

Unsurprisingly, interrogating terrorism suspects is pretty different from asking a library patron what they want to put on a job application cover letter so that you can help them give it shape.

My first BIG takeaway from what I read was that “enhanced” techniques don’t work. They don’t work because they very often lead to false confessions. Basically, if you’re torturing someone, they might just tell you SOMETHING for the simple reason that they’d like to stop being tortured. Even for just a little while. If they give you something to check out, that probably buys them at least a short reprieve, and a short reprieve for them spells you wasting time you SHOULD be spending disarming a bomb somewhere.

Instead, the preferred methods of interrogators today is to be friendly, to be more passive, and to let the suspect do most of the talking. They do still use techniques like minimizing the crime (“Lots of people have done this, it’s really not a big deal as long as you can tell me,”) or trying to flatter the person in certain ways (“You seem like a person who is really honest, and I want to make sure you have the opportunity to be completely honest with me,”).

Think about it this way: If I want something from someone, I could try and intimidate them, but it’s not the best tool in most situations. I’m not a huge guy, I don’t hold power of many people, really, so for me, if I want something from someone, it goes MUCH further if I’m nice, polite, and charming (as I’m able, given my, you know, abilities in terms of charm).

If I want an extra BBQ sauce from McDonald’s, and if I don’t want to pay for it, I’m going to explain what I want and be super, extra nice about it. “Hey, I’m sorry, I should’ve asked for this when I ordered, but I forgot, my mistake. Can I trouble you for an extra BBQ sauce?”

That doesn’t sound coercive, does it?

But it is! IT IS COERCIVE!

Instead of shouting, I’m putting the blame on me, which also tells the staff member that I’m aware how this is supposed to go. I’m relating to the person, saying I’m forgetful. I’m reiterating that I’m not angry, that it’s totally my fault, which is something I can tell you from experience that McDonald’s employees don’t hear a lot. I’m acknowledging that I’m asking them to do me a favor. AND, I’m not even outright asking for it for free, I’m trying to be so polite that the person may just let me skate, either because polite people SHOULD get a free sauce now and then, or because, fuck it, who wants to work a register for less than a dollar? I mean, if the person is an asshole, hell yeah I’m ringing it up because it’s not about the money, it’s about them being a jerk. But if they’re nice? I might be inclined to say fuck it.

Whether it’s getting a sauce or getting someone to say something they’re hesitant to spit out, being calm, speaking softly, and minimizing the harm really is a better route.

But the biggest, most important thing I learned from the book was that you do not want to lead the suspect. Because if you do, there’s a good chance you’ll get the wrong answer, maybe because the suspect will just latch onto something you said, or maybe because you will misunderstand or accidentally misdirect your questions. And that is something I was able to apply to my work in reference interviews.

If I asked whether someone wanted a “political thriller” instead of letting them describe thrillers they liked, they might think they want a political thriller when what they really want is a John-Grisham-style legal thriller.

Which makes sense because most people don’t have the wide range of book descriptors that a library worker does. It’s sort of like the way most people have a pretty narrow range of words they use to describe their emotions, or sort of how when you’re negative, you have a wide range of words to describe negative things, a principle demonstrated often in this newsletter.

It’s really, really important, when questioning someone, to use their language, adopt their terminology, and keep it on their level at all times.

If what you want is the actual answer, anyway.

Back in the Jury Room

During deliberations, which is the fancy word for “deciding time,” I did see the police interview we watched as part of the case as coercive, and I saw it this way because I’d read a material, YEARS ago, that explained how interviewers can poison subjects by inserting too much detail of their own. Even subconsciously, an interviewer can influence the answers in an interview by changing just a few words around.

From what I could tell, few people on the jury were very attuned to this or seemed to ascribe any real value to it.

And here, finally, we get back to intellectual freedom.

How important, how critical was it, that I was able to view a material that perhaps law enforcement wouldn’t want me to see, a material that, in a society without intellectual freedom, would never be on library shelves, never able to help me see how coerciveness can take a lot of different shapes?

If you were in that Defendant chair, and if you’d been interviewed by police in a way that was coercive, how much different could your life be if someone on the jury is very aware of the small difference between asking a question like, “Did you do XYZ?” versus asking you, “How many times did you do XYZ?”

I didn’t read a book on interrogations because I wanted to hold power over people, I didn’t read it to become a cop, and I didn’t read it because I thought it was likely I’d be interrogated at some point (holy shit, BTW, if you’re ever, EVER questioned by police, get a lawyer. Don’t say anything, get a lawyer).

I read it for a completely unpredictable reason, a reason that, if someone came up with it as a hypothetical, I would dismiss as kinda silly, more than a bit of a reach.

And yet, here we are, and I was able to say my bit in that deliberation room about why an interview can be coercive and lead to false statements, even without any yelling and screaming. It wasn’t a gamechanger, I didn’t pull a Runaway Jury or anything, but it did help a couple people see things in a different way.

Intellectual Freedom is not only about being able to access materials, it’s about being able to access materials without scrutiny, without being questioned as to why you might want them.

Because you might not even know why! You might just have a hunch, or a desire, or you might just see something and be intrigued, and that’s a key right, a critical facet of what makes you free and helps keep you free.

Your intellect needs to be free to roam. Free to explore. Like the chickens who lay the eggs I buy supposedly are. I say “supposedly” because while I can scan a QR code and see the farm, c’mon, who has time for that shit?

Readers, I have a question:

Why isn’t there a simple, functional, actually-good book light on the market?

Why hasn’t this technology evolved in the last 40 years?

Look, for real, this is an 80s book light:

This is THE SAME SHIT you can buy today, and not because they perfected it in the 80s, but because there’s just been no forward movement. Well, okay, you had to plug this sucker in, so I guess battery technology has gotten better. Which is great because we can read about how we’re all dying of terrible tumors we’ve grown as a result of all the heavy metals all over the place from batteries, even if the lights are out.

Where is the hero of booklights, where!?

Why can’t people just yell answers into this newsletter so that I could hear them? Why doesn’t that technology exist?

Sorry, let’s stay focused on book lights. One thing at a time.

What I Need

1. The book light must be mounted on either the book or to me in such a way that adjusting my position, turning the page, or moving my head do not cause me to have to fuck around with the light.

2. It must be bright enough to read with, but dim or focused enough to not keep my bedmate awake.

3. It should not flood the room any more than is absolutely necessary.

4. That’s it! I put a fourth because I thought what I wanted was complicated, but it’s really simple as hell. Easy and hands-free, appropriate light level and no more, and…that’s everything!

Types of Booklights I’ve Used

This lil guy!

He’s super cute, being a mummy and all. I have no idea why he’s a mummy, but that’s okay, I’m into products that don’t come with lore pre-installed, I’ll provide my own terrible backstories, thank you.

They even have other options, like this robot friend:

Which…it definitely looks like he’s holding the page with his robodick, right? That’s not just me?

I find these difficult to use on certain books, especially mass market paperbacks. And not just for arousal reasons.

They don’t tend to light the pages very well towards the crease, and unless I want to read like a goddamn animal (which I DO sometimes, I DO like to do that, I just don’t like to be told when to do it by a book light) and pull the pages apart quite hard, things get mighty dim towards the center crease. The good news is that I only have to read words close to the crease ON EVERY SINGLE LINE OF EVERY PAGE.

I also end up feeling like they’re difficult to use as you approach the end of the book and the page weight is mostly on the left. There’s less for the robot’s lil dick to grab onto, so the light tends to flop around and just be kind of annoying. You can move him to the left side, but then you have to hold the book open in a specific, two-handed way that nobody does outside of ads for booklights.

I’ve used lots of variations of this light, and they’re just a bit of a faff.

Oh, and they take batteries, COIN CELL batteries. No thanks.

I’ve used one of these necklace lights, and the issue is that unless you stay COMPLETELY still for the duration of your reading, you have to readjust it. It’s not great for laying down and reading up, reading on your side. Basically, if you are upright in a chair, it’s perfect. And if I was upright in a chair, I’d just read upright and in a chair in a well-lit room, probably downstairs because that’s where the snacks are.

Searching for Answers

I began my search for the low-bar perfect booklight on Google Images. I figured that’d be a fast way to browse options, see what sorts of booklights are out there.

I mostly came across things I’d seen, so then I switched to tactic #2: Ask reddit.

I started with r/books, and here we take a brief diversion.

The mods of the books subreddit decided my question, a request for a booklight that isn’t shit, was specific to me and me alone, so it needed to be posted in the weekly questions thread.

I object to this because you’ll find plenty of posts outside the weekly questions thread that don’t seem to have super wide appeal:

What is it with this trope of the MMC that just wants casual relationships or in some cases has a sort of exclusive relationship with a woman that he doesn’t treat very well but that all changes when he meets the FMC and suddenly he wants to settle down and becomes totally husband material..

For some reason, THAT is main page material, but this:

i’m reading a book right now where the main character reminds me so much of chandler bing it’s distracting, do you ever mentally cast sitcom characters into novels?

Is weekly questions thread material.

In fact, let’s play a game: Main Page or Questions Thread:

Anne of green gables is a wonderful book. It practically felt like healing.

If you said Questions Thread because a book that’s 120 years old and extremely popular probably doesn’t need to be discussed to a great degree in its own thread that spouts nothing approaching a hot take, you’re wrong.

Would you consider Leslie from Bridge to Tarabithia to be a manic pixie dream girl?

Should I be bitchy and correct the spelling of Terabithia, or should I be bitchy and say nobody cares and that, of course, this is main thread stuff. Yum yum, gimme THAT, r/books!

ANYWAY, because my post was banished to the questions thread, it received only one response, and it was the most insane option I’d ever seen:

The way you use this thing is that you lay it over the page you’re reading, you read that page, then you flip it over onto the next page. Then you read that page, and THEN you…I don’t know, hold it in your teeth, turn the page, and set the book back down, then spit the booklight out onto the open book?

Many, many people reviewing this booklight said that the surface can get smudged or scratchy. And a lot of them say the light isn’t really all that great.

What madman would choose this option? I’d rather just lay in bed, shut my eyes, and imagine what a book is probably about, based on a brief description, than fuck around with this thing. Seriously, is this for adorable lil hedgehogs who read a single page every night before turning in, their snores pushing up the ball on their lil nightcaps?

I’m angry someone even invented this.

Having exhausted r/books, I switched to the flashlight subreddit. I thought, Hey, these nerds might have some ideas for me.

I found my use case was somewhat unique for the flashlight world.

It seems that what most people want, in almost all situations, is a flashlight that is as bright as possible, and also that has a good spread. Nobody really wants a flashlight that lights up about two square feet, 1 foot from your face, and nothing else. Which is reasonable, if you were camping, and if you could only see that, you’d be in trouble.

Nobody also seems interested in a light that is JUST powerful enough and no more. Which sort of makes sense. Sort of.

Having been camping a few times, in larger groups, I have to say, headlamps really don’t need to be BLINDING, and I would go so far as to say that it’s less safe for everyone to have super bright headlamps than it is to have pretty bright headlamps. Because every time someone looks you in the face, you lose 100% of your night vision.

It turns into a Cold War against the darkness: You blind someone with your headlamp, then they need a brighter light in order to see anything after being exposed to a very bright light shot directly into their eyes, and that brighter light shines in your eyes, and the Countdown to Extinction continues.

Little camping tip for you: Set your headlamp either so that it tilts down, because you need to see what’s on the ground a bit ahead of you anyway, or, if it doesn’t tilt, set it off to the side of your head so that when you look at someone, your light isn’t shooting straight into their eyes.

My DIY Solution

I have an old, old camping headlamp. I bought this around 2003 to go on a backpacking trip with some friends along the Olympic coast in Washington. Which rules, if you get the chance to do that, I recommend it. I even got the chance to get some styrofoam that washed ashore, carve it out, and use it as a toilet.

Now, this fancy boy came with three lights: A bright LED, a red light, and a traditional flashlight, which is the one I decided to modify.

First, I stuck a sticker over the light. Just a full-on sticker I got along with some kind of item I’d purchased because everyone sends a sticker with everything for some reason, I guess to make you brand loyal to things that I wasn’t even aware were branded.

Then, I made a barrel for the light out of some index cards.

Between the sticker and the barrel, I both dimmed the light and focused it, and I was pretty happy with the results.

I say “pretty” happy because I did have to adjust to having a horn in view all the time. Is this what it’s like to be a rhino? Cursed to always have some of your vision blocked?

It kind of felt like that thing where people modify their cars and then definitely can’t totally see what’s in front of them.

But I lived with it. Until the goddamn thing ran through fresh batteries in about 30 minutes. Probably because it’s over 20 years old and maybe not the most efficient, all complaints that could be levied against the wearer as well.

Why Doesn’t A Good Light Exist?

I think it’s possible only old people read in bed, so maybe that’s why these are all so goddamn bright.

I think it’s possible most people have moved to Kindles and other eReaders, which are, admittedly, a good solution, except that I have LOADS of print books that I’d like to read. Besides, the eReader is great, the eBook market is shit. Especially the used market because there isn’t one.

I suppose I could buy a copy of a book, then sail the seas online and download a copy of it, confident that I HAVE paid for it, I’m just converting it to a usable format. Sort of. I doubt this would hold up in court, and I don’t have Sam Altman money to pay for my book piracy should I be on trial. Plus, pretty embarrassing for a librarian to be on trial for stealing books.

With a lot of library things, I have a frustration, and that frustration is that we sometimes work with products, software, things that aren’t really designed for us. If someone would jump in and make ONE pretty decent catalog, I think there’d be a good chunk of money in it. Not Google money, but definitely enough to make a decent living, and one that doesn’t involve testifying before congress or adopting a new persona to replace Persona V 3.2.

And I think booklights might be the same deal. There’s a tidy profit to be made making a simple booklight headlamp that works, that’s easy to use, and that doesn’t treat reading in bed as though it carries the same illumination needs as spelunking. Not billions, probably not even millions, but enough to buy a used Corolla every so often.

Isn’t that the American Dream? A chicken in every Fil-A, and a reasonably comfortable sedan in which to sit for 20 minutes while you wait to receive those tendies?

Or is it a custom Porsche minivan?

I don’t know who’s wrong here, me for my naiveté, or Zuck for spending the money to have a one-of-a-kind minivan.

Can We Achieve My Dream?

Please? Can we please do that?

Is there someone out there reading this who can recommend a booklight to me?

Is there someone out there who can build it?

Could this newsletter achieve the impossible dream of actually making a positive difference in the world?

I needed help with a couple things, simple things. With the bank, I was supposed to get a new debit card in the mail, and I never did. So I needed them to cancel the first one they sent out and send a new one. Pretty simple, right? You understood what I just typed and, if you worked for the bank, would probably be able to get that rolling?

The newer wrinkle on the ballsack of customer service is the Virtual Assistant, usually powered by…what I guess we’re calling Artificial Intelligence, but I would like to refer to as Artificial Doltishness. Because this thing not only can’t replace a human, it can’t replace a really, really stupid human who doesn’t really know the basics of what’s going on.

What Is An AI Assistant?

You’ve seen this. It’s a little chatbox, usually with a short, human female name to give it that soft touch, retro-futuristic names like Athena or Diana, never names like Agnes or Irma or Milfy.

It sort of pretends to chat with you, but really it’s just a search engine for help topics on the website.

And they’re useless. We all know these things are useless, right?

It may be the case that Claude or ChatGPT can do some amazing, useful things, but these lil’ fuckers just have nothing for you.

The AI Assistants Are Coming To Libraries

If you haven’t already, I can just about guarantee you that you’ll get an offer to add an AI assistant to your website or catalog within the next couple years. It’s happening everywhere, from medical portals to universities to package delivery services.

And I’m begging you to NOT utilize one.

Let’s talk about how a company is going to try to convince you to pay for one.

The 90% Argument

The person trying to sell you on the AI assistant is going to tell you that 90% of the calls, emails, and messages you get are very simple. Renewals, retrieving lost library card numbers, shit like that.

And this is almost certainly true.

But let’s consider the two most likely types of library users who will call.

One is the type of user who is probably not very tech savvy, not going to learn, and just wants to do something as simple as renewing their books. For this person, an AI assistant is useless because that involves just as much typing and computer shit as logging in and renewing their own stuff, things they are unwilling or unable to do.

The AI Assistant does not solve their problem.

The second type of person likely to call or message with a question is someone who is reasonably tech savvy and tech willing, but is trying to do something they can’t figure out.

This is the kind of person I am most times. I know that I need to have the bank send me another card. I know that I need to inquire with the post office as to why we’re not getting a bunch of mail.

And it’s been my experience that, despite knowing exactly what I need, and despite being pretty good at digging through menus on websites, I often need help locating a simple contact form or doing a specific sort of thing. And it’s been my experience that AI assistants are not much help in these scenarios.

When my problem is that I’m not receiving all of my mail, I’m directed to lots of help topics related to not receiving a specific piece of mail, or not receiving ANY mail, but there’s really nothing about receiving some mail.

AI Assistants are not helpful for something that has some nuance to it.

While 90% of your questions might be simple, that doesn’t mean they will be adequately answered by the AI Assistant.

Saves WHO Time?

Someone trying to grab a budget line for an AI Assistant will tell you that it will save the library tons of time.

AI assistants save companies money because they reduce the volume of people who call. But the cost is paid in time by the consumer because it almost always takes longer to get where you want to go with an Assistant.

If time is saved by the staff, but if that time is saved by passing the work back to the users, the community is not saving time, it’s just redistributing whose time is wasted.

In the library world, this means that we’re passing the time costs to users. Which means A) Our community, as a whole, isn’t saving any time, and B) We’ve shifted work from paid staff whose job it is to perform these duties to library users, who are not on the clock when they engage with the library and should not have to spend more time than necessary to accomplish simple library tasks.

Consider The Reasoning

Are you getting an AI Assistant because it’s the answer to a specific problem, or are you getting one because it’s a thing you can get?

Unless you have been having a serious problem returning digital messages, you probably don’t need an AI assistant.

It’s like this: When I buy a new phone, I should be buying a new phone because doing so solves a problem, such as my phone being a completely spiderwebbed piece of junk that can’t even handle being dropped out of a car window and run over several times.

I should NOT buy a new phone if the new phone doesn’t solve a problem, but it’s just something I could buy, and that’s reason enough to buy it.

Technology should, generally, solve a problem. It should not be adopted because it’s neat. It should not be adopted because it solves a problem that SOMEONE is having, but you’re not. It shouldn’t be adopted because it solves a problem you may have in the future if you grow a lot or start seeing a higher call volume.

It shouldn’t be adopted unless it’s solving a specific problem you’re having right now.

People Arrive At The Same Place, But They’re Pissed Off

In my experiences with AI assistants, I get where I want to go eventually, but by the time I arrive, I’m pissed. I’m annoyed. I’m frustrated. I do my best not to take it out on anyone, but I’m human (at least until some servos come in and we’ll see what we can do about this whole “being human” thing!).

I have my doubts that AI assistants are good and effective, but I have NO doubts that they are super annoying.

The One, Correct Question To Ask:

If we do this, when it comes time for voters to decide whether the library should have more or less money, will this make them want to vote for the library to have more or less money?

Maybe Another Good Question To Ask:

I we don’t use an offsite call center now, why would we adopt an AI assistant.

Some Good Questions To Ask The Company Pitching The AI Assistant:

We hold privacy in very high regard in the library. What happens to the data, like the questions people ask, after they end their session with the assistant? Is that retained? Does the AI assistant train on questions it’s asked?

Do you have hard data for us regarding the percentage of satisfied customers who feel the AI assistant adequately answered their questions?

Can you direct us to some sites already using your AI assistant so that we can ask it questions and see how it performs?

What’s the advantage of your AI assistant over someone choosing to use ChatGPT to ask the same questions? In other words, what sorts of things could your assistant do while integrated into our catalog that ChatGPT could not?

If You Feel You Must

Do me and you a favor: When you implement your AI assistant, when it pops up, give patrons the option to immediately be switched over to a human assistant. Track these numbers, see how many people select that option and how quickly.

How are there 9 answers to this question? What could possibly remain to be said after, I don’t know, 5 responses?

Reddit seems to be at least slightly, marginally better than Yahoo! Answers when it comes to finding good info, probably due to the fact that there’s SOME attempt at moderation, and there’s a type of question I see come up a lot when it comes to non-library people asking library questions.

from Reddit:

What do you do when you damage a library book? How should you handle the situation?

BTW, it’s VERY cute to call this “hurting” a book.

Priorities

First of all, when stuff like this happens, we get it.

If you had a wildfire in your area, good chance your library dealt with some problems, and several other library users may have also had books at home. You’re not going to be the only one who brings in a damaged item, and I think most decent libraries are going to cut people a break.

But more than that, we get it, even when it’s not a community-wide thing.

Most of us have dealt with a car accident on some level, and maybe a book got damaged or left on the roadside somewhere. Or maybe you knew it was in the back seat, and now you have no fucking idea where it ended up after your car rolled over a couple times.

This is the time to remember that librarians are actual human people. We get sick, we take care of loved ones going through tough times, and our humanity is like yours. Well, slightly better than yours. C’mon, at the very least, that Masters degree should be good for making the occasional intellectual superiority joke.

Whenever someone brought in a halfway decent sob story, I did what I could to give them a pass. Because I can think to times when someone gave me just a little bit of grace in a tough time, and it can make all the difference.

How Librarians Relate to the Collection

Look, I don’t want you to hurt books, but, it happens, and we’re not precious about it.

I don’t mean to sound jaded and awful, but it’s not like you’re borrowing a book from my personal collection.

As a librarian, I like books a lot, but it’s not a personal attack when one gets damaged. We certainly don’t prefer that books are damaged, but this is real life. Things happen. SHIT happens! If a library book being damaged is the worst outcome of a disaster, you got off lucky.

People have this image of librarians, that we know where all the books in the collection are at any given moment, that the day your book ticks into overdue territory, we know about it. That we probably have a wall of Polaroids featuring people with outstanding overdues.

We don’t do those things.

One of the plus/minus things about automation is that it has depersonalized aspects of library service. Might be a bad thing in terms of my ability to recommend books you might like, just on sight, but it’s a good thing in that I don’t have to make it a personal crusade to get the books back from you when they’re overdue. I don’t even really need to think about that. I just let the machine do my dirty work.

What to Do, In Order

I want to just lay this all out so it’s in your brain should something unfortunate happen.

The goal here is basically to give you a good shot at getting the fines waived, even if you encounter a librarian who is being kind of an asshole (or, as likely if not moreso, an organization that kind of forces library staff into the role of Asshole).

I can’t guarantee you won’t have to pay for a book, but here’s what I would suggest to maximize your chances:

1. First, if there’s theft, fire, whatever, get the books on the insurance claim, police report, whatever documentation is created. You may or may not need it, but it makes it incredibly easy to waive a fine if you can show us that your car was broken into in an attempt to get at your collection of Quiet Riot cassettes. Joke’s on you, thief, that cassette has been jammed in the tape player of this 2000 Corolla for like 7 years now. You’d be doing me a favor if you managed to take it out and abscond with it. Not a major favor, Metal Health is an extremely underrated album.

2. Next, contact the library. If possible, go in. Tell them your story. Just give the person at the desk the opportunity to potentially say, “Okay, we’ll just waive that.” That’s what I always did. If you have the material, bring it with you, but put it in a large plastic bag if you can (if it was exposed to water, better to not let it touch anything else). If there are potentially shards of glass or something like that in it, please warn the staff before they touch the material so that they don’t get cut or end up with glass shards on a desktop.

3. If the person at the desk stares or asks something like, “What would you like to do?” don’t be shy about saying, “I’d like to see if you’d consider waiving the fine.”

4. If that doesn’t work, I think it’s okay to politely say something along the lines of, “Is there someone I can make my case to and potentially have these charges waived?” Be very careful how you say this, be incredibly polite, you don’t want “Let me speak to your manager” energy, but it’s completely reasonable to ask. A lot of times, whoever’s working at the desk has a limited ability to waive large fines, but they have a very high level of ability to bring out someone who can waive the fine-y-est of fines.

5. As you talk to this next person, start with the same story. And if you’re in a tough financial moment, TELL THEM. It’s okay to say, “Normally I’d like to just pay for this and have it done, but this has been a really expensive time due to the disaster, so that’s going to be tough for me right now.”

If You STILL Have To Pay

If you want, talk to the library board. Tell them your story. Tell them that you think it’s wrong that you were made to pay for something that was damaged through no fault of your own.

My recommendation, though, is that you pay and move on with your life. Don’t stop using the library, don’t vote down the library when they look for a tax increase.

As an analogy, we’ve all had a shitty Wendy’s trip. One shitty Wendy’s trip shouldn’t turn you off of Wendy’s forever. Think of all the joy you’ll miss out on, all the Double Stacks. THE DOUBLE STACKS!

Likewise, by not using/helping the library, you’ll mostly be missing out on your own opportunities for enjoyment.

A Message to Library Staffs

My dudes, let’s cut people a break.

Are some people full of shit when it comes to their sob stories? Of course. But…are some people going through a time? Yeah. Yeah, they are.

Look, if someone is willing to lie about a relative being in the hospital just to get out of a library fine, you’re not going to be the person who finally makes them see the error of their ways and encourages them to change their ways. More likely, you’re going to briefly enter this insane person’s personal hell, which they’ll take you on a tour of, and you’ll get spit out the other side with, at the very least, your day ruined.

More than that, consider what’s more valuable: Getting recouped for this item, or:

• Your time

• Your energy

• This person’s good vibes towards the library next time a vote comes up

• This person’s continued use of the library

Because the truth is, when you work in a library, you have to love books, but you have to love readers even more.

THANKS, OBAMA!

and just for good measure, here’s the text of a post by the Raised by Her podcast’s creator that goes along with the video:

Turns out: legacy historical archives requiring giant stone vaults and tons of restricted physical paperwork wasn’t necessary. The launch of the Obama Presidential Center on Juneteenth 2026 completely disrupted that entire setup, and honestly, it’s about time.

The project took over ten years of constant setbacks, contractor stops, space challenges, and logistical delays to finally manifest. But, Obama’s exact directive was to make the building the complete opposite of every traditional presidential library in existence. Instead of hoarding massive rows of dead trees and exclusive letters, it is the first library to go entirely digital and open-access.

The logic behind it makes total sense. His entire political trajectory was driven by regular, everyday community organizers, so he wanted a repository that directly mirrored that democratic access. It forces a complete rethink of how we store public history.

Do you think this 100% digital model should become the structural baseline for every future administration, or do we still need physical paper storage?

Sigh…okay, let’s—no wait, one more.

Sighhhhh.

Okay, let’s talk about this for a bit.

It’s As Simple As It Doesn’t Seem

When it comes to the items in the archive, 95%, or about 1,500,000,000 of the documents, were “born digital.” Meaning there never was a physical, paper version of them, and in order to have paper versions, the archivists would have to print ‘em out.

Which sounds simple, but take it from me, it’s not. Formatting things like Tweets to be printed out on 8.5x11” sheets is a slog, and pretty quickly you’ll run out of steam when it comes to preserving access to 144-character fart jokes.

These born digital documents don’t translate well to paper because they were never meant to be on paper.

The most important point, however, is that both the physical and digital records will be managed by NARA, the same organization that manages all Presidential documents:

NARA will maintain ownership and management of these records and make them available under the same standards and practices under which they have always administered records, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

Just as with other Presidential Libraries, NARA will have a distinct staff dedicated to preserving, reviewing, and providing access to the Presidential Records of the Obama Administration. They will help the public, including historians and other researchers, find and access the born-digital and digitized records.

For the 30 million pages that will be digitized, the original paper documents will be preserved by NARA at a facility they administer, and made available to the public under the same policies and practices as other digitized NARA collections.

So it’s not like we’re relying on Twitter staying afloat, and should it go down, there go all of Obama’s records.

Because the bulk of documents and items in the collection were originally digital creations, I don’t know that it’s a loss, per se, to preserve and present them digitally.

In fact, to me, it would be less true to their original creation and purpose to create print versions of them if those versions exist only for an archive.

It’s Even More Less Complicated Than It Seems

Let’s not forget that the last President before Obama was George W. Bush, whose term ended in 2009.

Here’s a lil chart that shows Twitter users over time from 2007 to 2009, and you’ll notice a MAJOR peak in early ‘09:

Twitter is one small example, but basically, the number of “born digital” documents from Bush’s terms and Obama’s are incomparable.

So, yes, a mostly-digital archive is a new thing for Presidential Libraries, but at the same time, it’s a little bit like saying the Clinton Presidential Archive was innovative for including mostly computer-typed documents as opposed to things done on typewriters or by hand.

Overall, the switch to digital archive is probably less about wild innovation and more about following the natural course of progress.

I mean, shit, how many of you have printed copies of all your important documents, like your taxes, from the last 7 years? How many of you print out an archive of your photos?

I Don’t Like Conflating This With a Green Thing

The idea that other Presidential Libraries are “killing a bunch of trees” is stupid.

In theory, most Presidential Libraries are archiving already-existing documents. So we’re not really killing MORE trees in order to create a paper trail, we’re placing already-dead tree corpses with crap scribbled on them into a place where they are publicly available.

And, guys, tech right now is not green, not by any stretch. It’s not paper mills gobbling up water and power in small towns all over the U.S., it’s data centers.

Tech isn’t green, it’s not clean. So let’s not pretend that a digital archive, living on connected servers, which continually demand resources to continue operating, and which will probably end up using one of a few providers of web hosting and searching, is the greenest of the green.

Let’s not conflate a Presidential Library with a Public Library. It’s not really the same thing.

A Presidential Library is more like a museum devoted to one person, like a Paisley Park or a Graceland but way less interesting and cool and cult-y, and I’m guessing with shitter merch.

The fuck?

And a $16.99 keychain? In this ANY economy?

Shifting over to Paisley Park, A Purple Rain umbrella? Now that’s using the ol’ noodle!

And just an Oh Hell Yes to this:

Anyway, I don’t think the Obama Presidential Library is comparable to a public library and/or archive. And it probably shouldn’t be. It doesn’t serve the same purpose.

A+ For Access, F+ For Spin

I’m seeing zero sum game being played: It’s not a matter of needing to either have digital items that are accessible online OR print items that are locked behind glass. Print items can absolutely be digitized and made available to all.

It seems like the message is massaged here, a massaged message, which is that being digital = being accessible. Which is true, but at the same time, having paper records which are digitized does the same thing, and it’s a thing that’s being done and has been done, it’s just that nobody really gives a shit.

Did you know that you could see a photo of George W. Bush’s china:

I didn’t even know Presidential china was a thing until I looked it up in the online archives. There’s LOADS of stuff in there that nobody is looking at. Which doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, I just mean to say that before we talk about how great digitization is, we should probably recognize that it’s already happening and has been happening for decades.

It feels a little like we’re pretending that this is a move about radical transparency, but to me it feels…pretty standard. In 2026, I don’t think there’s an issue that we can’t see Presidential documents.

Well, PAST Presidential documents that don’t concern whether or not the sitting President is a sex pest.

Why We Like Print

We like preserving and archiving print documents when those documents were originally presented or created as print documents because you may be able to learn other things from those physical objects.

For example, you might learn something from the adhesives, the paper itself, the binding. If there were limitations when it came to producing and reproducing a document, those limitations may not be obvious at the time of the document’s creation, but may be incredibly informative later on when we have better, easier options.

If we have something like audio of Lyndon Johnson describing how he needs his pants tailored so that they don’t cut his ballsack, a description during which he belches and uses the word “bunghole,” the way he talks, the sound of his voice, these are all valuable. And hilarious.

Library people like paper because in a lot of cases, that was the original format of things we deal with. But when something was never on paper, I don’t think you’ll experience resistance from librarians and archivists in terms of passing on committing it to pulp and ink.

Aren’t You Freaked Out That Digital Records Are More Vulnerable To Attacks, Edits, And Erasure?!

No.

I mean, I get it, I understand the concern, especially because this is Obama’s stuff, and we probably want to remember what it was like to have a goddamn human being as President, that we did that a couple times, but let’s break this down just a bit.

Pretty standard archives practice is to keep 3 copies of something, in 2 different media types (this could be a portable hard drive and network storage, as long as the hardware is different), and to have 1 copy in an alternate physical location. This is known as the 3-2-1- rule.

This is fulfilled by, say, having local hard disk storage, cloud storage, and a third copy on a remote server.

Some digital archivists will add another 1 and a 0 to the scheme to make it 3-2-1-1-0, saying you should have 1 air-gapped (disconnected from any network or remote access), immutable copy, and that you should test your archives every so often to ensure there are 0 errors in the files or when you try to access them.

The 0 is definitely a good addition because I know there are concerns that certain files types may become inaccessible over time, so keeping up with those possibilities makes everything click into place.

I’m quite certain that NARA is doing a good job of following archival rules. Unless it’s a department that’s been gutted like so many others and is being run by a former pro wrestler or something.

While having a printed copy of everything in a warehouse somewhere would add another layer, I see it as a situation where maybe good enough is good enough. You can add infinite layers and backups, and at some point, you have to accept that you’ve done what’s reasonable, and if aliens blow up the planet, well, we won’t be around to lament not sending a copy of the records into space.

And, look, if we’re in a situation where the entire electrical grid goes down, we’re in a post-apocalyptic wasteland fighting for survival, nobody is going to give a fuck about seeing that someone gave the Obama this handsome banjo dubbed Bluegrass One. It’s a beautiful piece of craftsmanship with a hilarious name, but in a situation where we no longer have flush toilets, just not all that high a priority.

In Defense of the Obama Presidential Library

The Obama Presidential Center presents a contrast to other presidential centers. Most are libraries that hold a president’s vast collection of documents, plus a museum. The Obama Center is not a library at all. The National Archives and Records Administration, the government agency that typically handles archives at presidential libraries, retains no on-site presence. The records of the Obama administration will be available digitally.

But the difference runs deeper. The Obama Center is not just a museum, either, but a community center. It consists of five separate buildings spread over 19.3 acres shaped and planted to blend into Jackson Park. It includes an NBA-sized basketball court, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, a café, and a restaurant. It also has a vegetable garden, barbecue grills, a playground, and a sledding hill.

I think that it’s important that there’s a Chicago Public Library branch on the grounds, so there is access to materials that you’d typically find in a library there. And in fact, this is probably better use of the space than a Presidential archive, considering that Obama’s library is in the city of Chicago.

I…kind of love it. I love that there’s a public library. I fucking love that there’s a sledding hill.

I love that this library is going to be a community hub, not just another museum to a man, a building stuffed with things that nobody cares to sift through.

Plus, Obama is probably the best President, by a wide margin, in terms of promoting books and reading. He had a top books list last year with 21 titles on it! Not too shabby, clearly a reader.

C’mon. This is the Reading Room in the Chicago Public Library on the campus. It’s great.

Now, this is most likely engagement-bait, something to boost this guy’s profile on Twitter and so on. Because why would someone named Alex & Books with an emoji of books require reading habit advice? I don’t even know how you make those lil book emoji guys.

But like a good fish, I’ll take the bait, however I’ll turn the tables by answering ON MY OWN NEWSLETTER, BWAHAHA! That sweet delicious engagement is now mine!

I feel qualified to give some advice here as an English major and librarian and reader of things, and I do want to give advice specifically about the LASTING part, because that’s probably the toughest part and the one almost all of the people who replied to this ignored.

Be bad at it.

I think most people who want to build a reading habit will struggle most at the very start and, like the Postal Service album, Give Up.

One of life’s many unfairities is that the initial phase of things is usually the least fun and the most challenging. Everything works this way except for love. See, I brought up an indie/emo band and now I can’t help but talk about feelings.

As you begin to build a reading habit, remind yourself that it’s okay to not be good at something you don’t do much, something you’re not in practice on, even something you used to be good at.

Maybe you’re a slow reader, maybe you aren’t hitting it every day like you mean to. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

Find someone to talk books to. Failing that, someone to talk books at.

We talk to each other about movies we see, meals we eat, trips we take. I’m going to the Mall of America, expect a report back as to whether they have any bookstores. My mind is telling me no. My body also thinks no, with a side of hunger for French fries, which is usually what my body tells me in any scenario.

Talk about books with people you like talking to. Make it a part of your life.

If nobody is willing to talk with you, find someone who will tolerate hearing about books for a portion of a meal you prepare or pay for.

I have a buddy who loves talking comics, and it’s always exciting to get to talk to him about what I’ve been reading and to hear about what he’s been reading.

I talk to my brother about books, I talk to my mom about books.

Make it a thing that just a little bit of your life revolves around, something that matters when you talk to people you like.

Be critical. In a useful way.

When you hit a book you don’t like, quit it, but also decide why it sucks, go beyond just the simple fact of its sucking.

This isn’t just so you can write hot take book reviews on goodreads, it’s how you avoid making the same mistake again and again.

Learning about your taste and why books don’t work for you will help you avoid books that just aren’t going to help you keep up reading momentum.

It should rarely feel like homework or a chore.

If it sucks, you’re probably not going to do it.

Read things you like.

A good way to judge that is by reading things that you’re excited to get back to, at least to some extent.

People will say you need to expand your horizons or really challenge yourself, but let’s remember the goal here: building a lasting reading habit. Not reading the classics, not necessarily to become a better person through books, just to read more and with more regularity.

Those other things are good and fine. But they’re different goals. I’d recommend different methods for those goals, just the way I’d recommend slightly different training for a competition hot dog eater and an ultramarathoner.

Start small, and don’t feel like you have to grow.

Everything seems to be about growth these days, but your reading habit doesn’t need to grow and grow and grow like a Liver King with an unlimited steroid budget. You can start by reading 10 minutes a day, and if you’re happy, stay at reading 10 minutes a day. You’d still easily put away almost 2000 pages a year, which would probably be something between 5 and 7 books unless you want to Robert Caro it up and spend your reading time on one (very interesting) cinder block of a book.

If you try to grow constantly, you’ll hit a wall before long, possibly a wall you hit because you’re trying to read while driving, a thing a guy I went to college with actually did on his commute to a rural community, a practice that seemed incredibly stupid and also like something someone from a John Irving novel would do.

10 minutes a day, that’s a reading habit, and a sustainable habit is a happy habit. Shit, that’s going to be the title of my self-help book. Nobody steal that!

Take it easy on the challenges.

I know some people want to read every horrifically sad Russian novel committed to print, but, again, that’s a really different goal from building a lasting reading habit.

Challenges can be a way to shake up your reading if you’re a little bored, but they can also be a rut of their own. Will you read some new stuff? Sure. Will you also plow through some books you don’t really care for? 100%.

More than that, though, I think if you want reading to be a regular part of your life, it probably works best to make it a part of your regular life. If you want to be a habitual runner, you can’t just do a weekly 5k, no matter how much you enjoy wearing sponsor logo tees. Instead, your habit will be a lot stronger if you manage to run on normal-ass days, if you get to know the joys of a small dose of monotony and come to appreciate looping the same park three times a week and noticing the changing colors of the leaves, bullshit like that.

Make it simple, routine, maybe even a little boring. Not the actual book selection, just the reading process.

Make books a part of your life.

I like to buy a book whenever I’m on vacation. Find a cool bookstore in a city, and you’ll probably be in a fun neighborhood.

I still have regrets about not buying a glow in the dark cover of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love in Los Angeles

My favorite place on the planet for many years was one little section of Powells in Portland.

Make it a quest for yourself. I have. I decided to try and buy a book from all 50 states before I’m dead. I know I just said take it easy on the challenges, but…do as I say and as I do. Spend a lot of time interpreting my meaning. It’s worth your time.

Give yourself a break.

Look, whatever it is, we’ll go through peaks and valleys, highs and lows, people who have a modicum of sense and RFK Jrs.

When your reading habit falls off for a bit, give yourself a break. I think a lot of good habits die hard because we miss a day, a day turns into a week, and before long it feels like there’s no point in going back, the streak is broken.

This is terrible, all or nothing thinking. If you break your running streak, and you’re out of the game for 3 months, when you go back, it’ll be easier than when you started up the first time. You’ll probably be back in shape a good deal faster, and with less struggle.

A little downturn, a quick slip, it’s no biggie. If you read 300 days this year out of 365, that’s goddamn great.

Hate Hate Hate that plant placement. Look at that dog, look at that plant. You cannot convince me that plant lives in that spot on any days there’s no photographer in the house. There’s no fuckin’ way that dog never tears around the corner, knocking that plant all the way the fuck over. That dog appears to be napping, but it’s probably pouting because it got screamed at for the 10th time about knocking over the goddamn plant. BUT LOOK WHERE IT IS! There is no reason to put a plant around the corner like that unless you just want to have a reason to scream at your dog.

Have we learned nothing about room decor from all that Dick Van Dyke gave us?

Let’s try another one:

Wall sconces serving the aesthetic, but not serving the purpose of providing light to the reader.

I mean, come on, why am I seeing this when I google, “DIY reading nook?” It’s got a window box, built-ins, unstained floors, tasteful colors, a chair that probably was not scavenged after walking through a neighborhood, seeing it with a cardboard sign that says “Free” on it, jogging home in a panic to get your car, then driving back, cursing yourself for not removing the “Free” sign, and then feeling intense relief that it’s still there, at least until you try and load it in your car, and with your face close to the fabric, diagnose the main issue with the piece.

How about this?

Who staged this photo while balancing a mug on top of an open book? Straight to jail.

This is a pre-cozy space with some stuff thrown on the floor. Very beige stuff. God forbid you get some color in there, maybe a cool poster or something.

One more?

I’m a very, VERY amateur woodworker. VERY amateur. Just want to make sure you all know I am NOT good at it. And even I know, and I’ll share it with you, that pallet wood isn’t something you want to get involved with. It’s shitty. It’s not lumber, it’s packaging. I know sometimes it’s sprayed with chemicals or may be used to transport hazardous things, but the odds aren’t great on that, I’m more concerned with you all thinking of making something out of pallets and getting frustrated because that will suck out your soul.

Listen, there are a lot of terrible examples of DIY reading spaces online. They are expensive, they rely heavily on having architectural features in your home that lend themselves to this sort of thing, and they are definitely not renter-friendly.

So what are some good options for the rest of us?

Tip 1: Start with what you’ve got

I’m renting, my place is plenty spacious for me, it fulfills all my needs nicely. BUT, I don’t have like a whole extra room to turn into a reading nook. I don’t have cute built-ins or a window seat because no apartments or condos have that shit because, I mean, come on, I can feel cold air blow into the kitchen through the outlets in winter.

I toyed with using the closet as a reading nook. We have very small walk-in closets, which would accommodate a book nook, but that would mean finding alternative storage for a buncha bullshit as well as most of the upper half of my wardrobe, and that’s just not realistic.

This is what I’m talking about: Start with what you’ve got, not what you’d have to rearrange your entire life to make happen.

I like reading, I love the idea of a reading nook, but having nowhere to put my clothes would make the reading nook pretty short lived.

Tip 2: Abandon the Need to Have Your Entire Library in Your Reading Nook

It’s a great way to reduce the space needed. All them books, they take up a lot of space, but you don’t NEED all of them to be in reach all the time. How many books can you read at once? Even Johnny 5 did one at a time, and he’s MUCH faster and cuter than you.

Tip 3: Bring the Nook to the Place You Read Instead of Reading In…The Place You Nook?

If you read in your car during breaks at work, sad and alone, like some people I’ve heard of but certainly don’t know personally and am not myself, I’d suggest adding some comfort, some cozy-fying items to your car.

If you read in the bath tub, bring in a lamp or something, preferably uncorded. Bring in something for ambient noise.

If you make a room in your house for reading, and if you do all your reading during the middle of the day on breaks at work, you’ll never use your reading nook.

Tip 4: Don’t Worry About What It Looks Like From Outside

Did you know former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser used to write in a big cardboard box he set in the corner of a room? It’s true, in the early days, living in an apartment, he made that his “studio.” And he produced some pretty damn good poetry in that humble space.

If it serves, if it motivates or encourages you to read, don’t worry about it being photo-ready.

Y’all, I’ve seen some House Hunters lately, and the amount of mental energy people spend making their homes work for hypothetical, highly judgmental guests who will hypothetically be there very occasionally, it’s kind of bonkers. You’ll be in your house EVERY DAY. Make it work for you.

If the space is pleasant from inside, if it puts you in a reading mood, it’s the right one for you.

Tip 5: Specifics

Okay, maybe at this point, you’re wondering about a specific example of what I’m talking about:

Sometimes, you can make a space a cozy reading space just by creating a lighting situation specific to reading. Use it for reading and nothing else, and when that specific lighting is used, you’re in your reading space. That’ll cost you however much you wanna spend on a lamp, maybe a warm light style of bulb.

Normal Mode:

Reading Mode:

Perhaps your reading nook is outside of your house. Bars, coffee shops, LIBRARIES, all great spots to read (depending on the place and the time).

It’s goddamn summer, the season you all claim to love so goddamn much, so why not get yourself a nice blanket, make one of them adult Lunchable boards people are always on about, maybe use some headphones with some noise cancelling, and make THE WORLD your reading nook.

Here’s what I did:

I bought a bed tent.

These come in standard bed sizes, work on almost any bed frame. You take your mattress off the frame, throw the tent on, slide your mattress in (with a lot of swearing if you’re me and remember how heavy mattresses are). You don’t even need a mattress if you don’t want to use it that way, you could just make a nest of blankets and so on inside.

Then I used humble binder clips to put up fairy lights inside.

And…that’s it! It’s just a tent with some lighting.

Now, if you want to go an extra mile, useful additions for me include:

• A dryer vent hose that I put over the cold air vent so it blows the A/C into the tent in summer.

• Some charging options for those digital reading devices.

• A simple system for playing some white noise, rain sounds, coffee shop noise, comiccon convention floor sounds, whatever ambiance you find relaxing.

• Pillows that let you sit up instead of laying down.

Overall, though, the message here is that spending $1,000 dollars isn’t going to transform your reading habits. If you think you’d read more if the conditions were perfect, just forget about it. Conditions will never be perfect for reading so long as there are jobs and biological functions and dentist appointments and this one huge asshole who rides a dirtbike up and down the street most days for like a half hour, ignoring both the intended use of the bike (it’s half the name!) and the fact that he’s annoying every other living being in the area.

And on some level, I applaud this. I mean, for you, this is probably a new experience.

Because of the unfortunate circumstances of your birth (and, no, I’m not referring to your parents’ loveless marriage) you can only imagine what it was like back in the day, when you’d have a Discman, a Walkman, or maybe a Minidisc Player if you were an incredibly lucky ducky, and you left the house with ONE album.

It’s a different musical experience. I’m not here to say it’s better or worse, but before we opened Pandora’s App, we had an incredibly deep experience with a much, much smaller number of albums.

I’m not here today to scold anyone for listening to playlists or a wide variety of music or for destroying the monoculture that gave us so much and asked so very much of us. No, I wanted to take some time today to preach the gospel of the dumb MP3 player, but also to maybe talk about why I don’t think the iPod, or some of the other common suggestions for non-connected music players, are the right choice.

How am I qualified to talk about this?

Qualification One: I’m a Both

I’m of the rare generation that I think of as the Both Generation.

We grew up both in an analog time AND in a time when everything was digital.

We did school pre-internet, AND we did school post-internet.

We taught our parents how to use technology, and now we’re teaching younger generations how to use it.

I’m of the only generation that really and truly has lived a significant portion of life both ways, pre and post internet. Which means I can tell you what was good about the pre days and what is good about the post days.

Qualification Two: I still use a dumb MP3 Player

No bluetooth, no wireless, just some buttons and a headphone jack. I still use this almost daily, and I prefer it in most cases with the exception of audiobooks, which I can no longer easily download since Overdrive Media Console was decommissioned in 2023 (even then, I prefer listening to audiobooks on my lil guy, it’s just not technologically reasonable to do without breaking several laws or maybe user agreements that I would not admit to breaking in a substack newsletter because that would be real dumb).

I’m living what is essentially the iPod life.

What I Like About Dumb Players

I like the return to owning media for real, which has been eroded for a couple decades now. Barring massive EMP deployment, I’ll have access to the same music today that I did yesterday. Meanwhile, over at Spotify, I might build a playlist and then find that a song is just gone.

And I do like listening to albums all the way through. This is how I use Spotify most of the time when I listen to music. I find it to be a more reliable way to find new songs I like than surrendering to the algorithm, which REALLY thinks I want to listen to “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Warlord, which I DO, but maybe it’d be nice to hear something else during “Random shuffle.”

The thing I cherish most about dumb players, though, is that they aren’t my phone. Meaning that I don’t need to take my phone with me to go for a walk or a jog or whatever.

You’re all great, readers, but OTHER people who don’t subscribe to this, they bother me with texts and emails and phone calls, and I don’t want to be in constant, slo-mo communication with everyone I know at all times. I’m happy to text and talk with people, just not when I’m in the middle of something else.

And I damn sure don’t want to be out for a jog and get a fuckin’ phone call asking me if I want to lower a mortgage rate ON A MORTGAGE I DON’T HAVE. I mean, come on, assholes, I’m a millennial, what are the odds I have a house?

It’s like this: Going for a walk or a jog, or maybe doing a hands-on hobby sort of thing while listening to music or a podcast or an audiobook, it’s relaxation for me, and that relaxation isn’t as consistent and constant if I have a phone in my hand.

A dumb player does solve a problem for me: I’m a scroller. I will scroll through countless options, thinking maybe something better is just on the horizon. With a dumb player, I commit to something before I leave the house, and that usually ends up working great for me.

I also do think it’s insane to go on a run with an $800 dollar piece of electronics. We’ll revisit the price deal here shortly.

Last, listening to music on a dumb, cheap player that MAY Have a broken clip that I replaced by supergluing a pen cap to the back of it, the device fades into the background. It’s not about using a device, it’s about listening to the music.

What I Don’t Like So Much About Dumb Players

You DO have to manage them, meaning you have to plug them into a computer every so often to update what’s on there.

This can be a bit annoying when it comes to things like podcasts, needing to download each episode and put it on there, then making sure to delete the old episodes every so often because otherwise you’ll have a whole mess of files that you don’t understand because for whatever reason, every podcast episode I download appears with the filename “1.”

Audiobooks are pretty challenging as well these days. There are a few places where you can still buy MP3 audiobooks, and I’m sure that if you’re willing to sail the seven seas online, you can find them in that form, but that’s a topic for another day, my frustration that has me eyeing up a pirate ship, not because I particularly want to steal content, but because it’s become quite difficult to pay for an audiobook and get a goddamn downloadable file.

Probably the biggest drawback, if you’re not going to have access to a computer for a period, like if you take a trip or something, you have to load everything up beforehand and hope to not run out of stuff to listen to.

Where I Think Some People Go Wrong By Getting a Classic Ipod

Is the iPod a fun device? Absolutely. But…

The prices for these things are outrageous.

There are like a million $20-$40 dollar MP3 players online that you can slap a 250 gb micro sd card into, and that should probably do you just fine for, like, forever.

You can even get small micro sd cards and use them like cassettes. You can load up one with metal, one with podcasts, and you can swap them in and out like it’s nothing.

If you do an iPod, you’ll probably need to flash it with software like Rockbox, and there’s a good chance it’ll need a new battery, and you’ll have to get cables that can carry data/charge the goddamn things.

You COULD buy a refurbished one, but that’s going to run you something like $250 bucks.

You’re not really buying an escape into music with an iPod, you’re buying a new hobby, a different device to fiddle with.

The Other One I’ve Seen Floating Around

I think this one has been making the rounds because it’s cute. Sort of the same reason this newsletter got popular: My cuteness. Everyone keeps telling me that I’ll eventually need to rely on something other than my looks, and to that I say, “When, fuckers? So far, so good!”

I think it’s…fine. I mean, it’s got bluetooth, which is nice, but I think its price and its form are really more about cuteness than they are function. I will say that the best feature of this thing is probably that it does mimic some of that brain chemical shit that you get from picking up your phone, so if you’re someone who is kinda hooked on your phone, there might be something in this device for you, this might be an easier switch than something without a colorful, fun form factor.

And that’s the big thing to ask yourself before you get an iPod or one of these cassette-looking guys: Do I want to listen to music a different way, or do I want a cute, fun gizmo?

Maybe you’re a gadget person, and maybe tinkering with an old iPod is fun for you. Maybe flashing Rockbox onto one is a task that you’d like to tackle, in which case, I say go for it, have fun!

But if your goal is to listen to more music, or to listen to music in a different way, I suggest any of the many, cheapy MP3 players you can buy online.

This lil’ guy is $18.99

It gives you 20 hours of battery life, compared to the Snowsky’s 15 (because you’re using power to light up that screen all the time). You can just drop MP3s right onto a micro SD card, cram it in, and you’re done.

It easily fits into a pocket, even lady pockets, one of the bigger scams perpetuated on the human race.

My Advice To You:

Buy a cheap lil guy first, spend a small sum, and see if you like it. You might want to upgrade to the Snowsky or the iPod later, but try something lowkey first and see if you don’t mind hooking your MP3 player up to your computer every so often, see if you can remember to charge it.

See if it fits your lifestyle. If you’re an audiobook or podcast junkie, it might be trickier. If you LOVE listening to new songs you’ve never heard before, surrendering yourself to the algorithm, then you might not like it so much. Perhaps you’ll come to miss the dulcet tones of Warlord.

Whatever the case, though, my recommendation remains the same. If you want to get into retro handheld gaming, get a fairly inexpensive one you can manage before you go hard. If you want to get into listening to music on CDs, maybe get a fairly inexpensive CD player and see how much you use it. If you want to learn to play piano, there’s no reason to start by buying a $1,000 dollar fuckin’ piano. If you want to read more, the first step is never to buy 25 brand new books.

Start small. If you like something, you can always expand up. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a lot more wasted money, money that could’ve been used to buy drive-thru coffee or avocado toast or whatever it is old people are saying we waste money on these days.

Okay, that last one was me. You caught me. Sorry, okay, I just can’t seem to keep the details straight. Which level are we on, what kind of loot is happening? These are details that flit out of my mind.

If you’re like an elite runner with an aim for a big goal, by all means, wear a device, figure out your heart rates zones, see if you can’t run a Boston qualifying time, all that good shit.

But when you’re on week 2 of your “fitness journey,” or if you don’t know what I mean by “a Boston qualifying time,” it’s probably a bit early to worry about these things.

Plus, if you’re turning to Reddit to make you an elite athlete, you’re playing a silly game. NEWSLETTERS, that’s where the real, quality info lives.

If you’re like most people, and if you’re exercising to maybe just feel a little better and not die, but you’re not jonesing to win any races anytime soon so you can rub it in your high school track coach’s face, provided he’s still alive and accepts your strange invitation to reserved seating at a local 5K’s finish line—if you’re a normal person, you probably don’t need to worry about lactic acid or macros, and I might even suggest that you might be robbing yourself of a little of the joy of exercise, or, okay, realistically, the not unpleasant parts, when you codify and track every little thing in an attempt to make sure you squeeze every ounce of fitness out of every run.

Optimization can be good, but sometimes that shit, that maximum output with minimum input shit, sometimes that takes some of the fun out of an activity.

Like reading.

The CULTure of Optimization

Look, I know our lives are not infinite, we won’t get to read ALL the books. Hell, we won’t even get to read all the Eraserhead Press books.

I can see why a lot of people use optimization to try and keep their lives on track. Sleeping an optimal number of hours per night is, well, optimal. Hmm, it’s not great to use a word to define itself, so let’s say that sleeping an optimal numbers per night is fuckin’ rad. If you don’t understand this point of view, you must be under 40, and I welcome the youth to enjoy this newsletter. Thanks for coming by! No cap(?)

I made fun of all the amateur runners earlier in this very newsletter [see paragraph 1, True Believers!] but to some extent, I get it. For a lot of people, exercise is unpleasant, and I can see why you might want to optimize it in order to spend as little time on it as possible, or maybe to make it seem like less of a slog, or, I don’t know, just suck less. It’s why I make a bunch of healthy stuff into a smoothie: I can quickly chug it down and get the benefits while minimizing the time disgusting, healthy foods lay on my tongue.

Sleep, exercise, diet, phone charging, all good things to optimize.

But when it comes to leisure, hobbies, enjoyment-type stuff, I’m not so sure if optimization is where it’s at.

Is Minimal Input Part of the Goal?

There’s this one episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete where little Pete meets Inspector 34, the person who put the little “Inspected by” tag in all of little Pete’s stuff.

Before we go any further, Yes, I had a special affection for this show because both characters shared my name, and No, we will not be making any “Little Pete” jokes here.

The plot centers around Inspector 34 being perfect and little Pete emulating him, trying to do everything perfectly. 34 is such a perfectionist that he even eats barbecue chicken in a tidy way, cleaning the bones completely and stacking them in a little log cabin formation:

To spoil a decades-old Nickelodeon program, Little Pete comes to realize that eating barbecue chicken this way isn’t perfection because a backyard barbecue is kind of meant to be messy, not a tidy, fastidious affair. You’re doing it wrong when you do it neat. Or, the perfect way to do it is more than a little sloppy.

God, I never get to use the word “fastidious.” I type all these in pajama pants. Those sorts of words, they’re just a color I never paint with.

Point being, the “perfect” way of doing something may be different depending on the thing you’re doing.

If you’re a reader, and if reading is a hobby…is optimization, finding the perfect reading list, reading exactly the “right” things, is that a good way to go?

To be pessimistic about it, aren’t we all reading because we’re eventually going to die, and then our bodies will be charred to ash, and eventually the entire planet and all of existence will be erased, but that’s not happening today, so we have some time to kill?

I mean, isn’t every hobby, kind of by definition, a way to spend time?

And if so, why is minimizing the time spent on it a goal?

To put it more romantically, isn’t it kind of fun to browse a used bookstore? Isn’t it a fun notion to consider just popping into the library, grabbing something off the new shelf that looks interesting and taking it for a spin?

What do you want to get out of reading, and is it an efficient, tidy process, or is it more like a casual backyard barbecue?

Readsearching

Our desire to avoid a mediocre reading experience can wind up with a lot of us reading ABOUT books a lot more than we’re reading books.

And this over researching, this READserching, makes it feel like you’re doing something when you’re scrolling booktok, like you’re engaging in your reading hobby, but…you’re not.

Just consider, in an average day, do you spend more time researching books to potentially read, or do you spend more time actually reading?

Reading a So-So Book is Okay

We eat 6 out of 10 meals, we watch 6 out of 10 movies. I would say most days Monday through midday Friday are pretty mediocre, followed by Sundays which can range from mediocre to godawful, depending on how much of the day I can spend not realizing it’s Sunday.

We do not need to fear a mediocre book. It’s fine. It probably won’t be the last book you ever read. I mean, it could be, Death comes for us all, and rarely does he come when we’re like, “Oh, good timing!” But unless you’re living that Bucket List lifestyle, really embracing life in a way that makes for heartwarming movies and would be SUPER annoying if your boss or your friend was living like that (“No, for the last time, I do not want to go skydiving with you this weekend, any weekend in the future, and I’m very happy having never skydived or skydove or whatever.”), maybe don’t worry so much about picking just the right thing each and every time.

Reading a So-So Book Might Be a Good Sign

If you’re not hitting a so-so book now and again, you’re probably going to get pretty bored with your reading life before long because, well, you’re probably reading a lot of the same authors or types of books or following reading advice very closely, maybe too closely.

A so-so book doesn’t mean you failed, it doesn’t mean you are stupid and didn’t pay attention to what everyone was saying. It just means you took a shot on something that didn’t totally pan out. That’s okay. Maybe even good.

There Are Benefits to Reading So-So Books

I like to squeeze in a book now and then that I think is terrible.

As a writer, it helps to read a terrible book, especially if it was put out by a major publisher, because you can be like, “Wait, this counts? This is the bar?”

I mean, it’s also maddening because you then have to question if your work is much, much worse than you think, but I digress.

I find that bad books usually have something about them that’s interesting. Something that maybe sticks with me or something I think about every so often. Because sometimes a bad book is an ambitious failure. Sometimes it’s a sprawling something that doesn’t quite stick the landing, but you do have a fondness for the path you took to get through it.

This might sound weird, but I think a so-so book can help you appreciate the really great books just a bit more.

Let’s Take It Back to Running

I’m a runner, and not every run is a good one.

Sometimes I just feel like shit. Slow as hell. Maybe I slept like shit, maybe it’s been a long week, maybe I can’t keep tabs on Princess Donut and Carl’s adventures, even though it’s only book 2.

Something you learn early on in running is that they aren’t all great. Some outings that are just so-so.

But they serve their purpose. They get you to the next one.

And my big secret for you is that even if you spend a lot of time optimizing, you’ll still have absolute shit runs now and then.

For me, when I don’t monitor and examine things too much, it makes it a lot easier to have a lousy run and move on.

Yeah, if you have 3 weeks of lousy runs, by all means, look into it. But having one slower run on a Saturday doesn’t, to me, warrant a complete inventory of my eating, sleeping, and my audiobook choices.

Yeah, if you read a few shitty books in a row, maybe reexamine how you’re picking.

But if you like reading, if reading is the thing…don’t worry about it. There’s plenty of good shit waiting for you.

This might sound like an insane thing to make a video about, but trust me, if you like playing old games that can be had for cheap or free, depending on your personal morality, there’s A LOT to pick from. Especially if you get into the world of Super Mario hacks like yours truly. Do I want to have my ideas about what games are melted down by the likes of B3313, or would I prefer the pure dumb joy of Slideverse, a game where all of Mario 64 is made into a giant slide?

Towards the end of the video, TechDweeb, the video’s creator, gave some excellent advice, but it may rub some people the wrong way in that it goes against picking something based on genre, and instead suggests “vibe-based choices.”

Which got me thinking, maybe we’re not doing subjects and genres quite right these days. Maybe libraries need a little more vibe cataloging.

The Weakness of Genres

Genres are liars. They box games into categories that don’t tell you much about the game itself. Vibes are honest. That’s where you’ll get the kinds of games that fit the mood you want. So don’t search for “platformers” or “role-playing games.” Search for the emotions you want to feel. Search for “exciting” or “cozy” or “weird” or “melancholy.” You might go from Animal Crossing to some random, obscure fishing game that feels the same emotionally, even if it plays totally different.

And, wow, this is some excellent library advice coming from a non-librarian.

It’s true, I definitely agree that with today’s searching power at your fingertips on the world wide internet web, you have a lot of options that go WAY beyond selecting from a list of “Mysteries” and hoping that the Stephanie Plum novel you enjoyed appearing on the same list as Stephen Graham Jones’ All The Beautiful Sinners works out for you.

They’re both mysteries, right?

And on the other side, we miss out on solid recommendations when we stick too firmly to genre. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit are often read and enjoyed by pretty similar audiences. They are NOT in the same genre, and while one is a space-faring dark comedy about how our existence is pointless, the other is a fantasy story about the littlest guy making all the difference.

But I think they have similar vibes. They’re both lighthearted. They both have some level of danger. They have a larger cast of interesting characters.

And they seem to please the same nerds.

The Even Weaker Weakness of Categories

When I looked up Fight Club in my library’s catalog, I got these genres:

Psychological; Sociological; Dystopia; Cinematization; Fiction

I mean, these kind of stink because A) they’re incredibly broad, one could probably say that ALL human-created writing (“flesh writing” as I like to call it now) is psychological, and B) these are not terms many people use when describing books they like. What even in the fuck is “Cinematization?”

And I’m sure I don’t have to belabor “Fiction” as a genre. My library’s catalog suggested, on the same page as Fight Club, that if we’re in the mood for fiction, we might try Pet Shop Racers:

Narwhal and Jelly meets The Mouse and the Motorcycle in this action-packed, hilarious graphic novel series starter perfect for early and reluctant readers ages 5-9. Can Ham the hamster and Shelby the ferret become the greatest racecar drivers-and the greatest friends-of all time? Ham and Shelby meet in the pet shop and become fast friends. But who is the fastest? Who will become the greatest racer in the world? Only one can be the best. So as they race again and again, with better and better cars, Ham is determined to cross the finish line first every time. But when disaster strikes, Ham will have to learn that some things-like friendship-are even more important than winning.

I don’t know what the cure for reluctant readers might be, but I don’t think, at age 5, it’s Fight Club.

But possibly even worse than the genres were the categories, because they trick us into thinking we’re on the right track:

Secret societies; Anarchism; Violence; Alienation; Millenarianism; Fighting

“Secret societies” gives me a bunch of Fern Michaels books, The Da Vinci Code, and of the 50 books that click brings up, maybe one, a Gillian Michaels, that I would consider suggesting to a reader who enjoyed Fight Club.

“Anarchism” gives me like 4 books, one of them a Noam Chomsky.

I…I just don’t see us doing readers big favors by saying, “You liked Fight Club? You may also enjoy 50 Politics Classics: “What if you didn't have to read the 50 most important books on Politics to know the most important ideas? This is the thinking person's guide to the big political texts from across the centuries!”

I read something a bit back about the real problem of doctors suggesting treatments that may not cause harm, but aren’t well-proven to provide good results. The issue is that while the patient is trying this lousy treatment, they’re delaying doing something that is actually good, that might actually work.

I kind of see these categories the same way: They send readers off on a path that isn’t going to help them out. Because it’s not the fighting that draws people to Fight Club. That kind of misses the book’s appeal.

Why I Think We’ve Used These Options Up to Now

Weak as they may have been, they were the best thing going for a long time.

I mean, it wouldn’t be reasonable to vibe catalog back in the day. It’s so subjective, it’d be hard to know whether I was doing the right thing when I put Joke Farming by Elliott Kalan next to Football by Chuck Klosterman.

But today, you can kind of figure out that people who liked Book X also tend to enjoy Book Y, even if the connection between the two isn’t super obvious.

And I think there’s another element to this as well. I think the librarian used to play a bigger part in book recommendations.

Librarians, in my experience, used to know their building’s collections a little better, before so many libraries started floating their collections and made it very difficult to get to know what you had.

When you were applying for a librarian job, I think it used to be more relevant if you were able to fill a book recommendations hole in the staff. When I was in the branch, we could all recommend a little of everything, but we had a bigtime expert in romance, a huge reader of thrillers and popular fiction, and a giant fucking nerdly nerd who could talk comics all day.

That was me, guys. At one time, in one specific situation, having read too many comics was a JOB SKILL.

I’m not sure that’s emphasized or required as much anymore. I don’t know that libraries prioritize this sort of thing, and I’m not even saying that they’d be wrong to have it on the back burner because it IS something you can look up online.

But it’s something I think has changed.

I think the catalog was subtly seen as a supplement to the librarian’s knowledge, not the other way around.

Lastly, we didn’t have the data we have today, which consists of millions and millions of readers buying, rating, and reviewing books online.

This is a positive potential application of big data for once. Being able to look up people who would list Fight Club in their top 5 books, then seeing what else was in those folks’ top 5, then being able to do that millions of times does give you some pretty solid next books to try.

We forget that this sort of thing would have been very unrealistic 20 or so years ago.

What Can You Do to Vibe Recommend?

1. Help readers understand what it is they liked about a specific book. When they say it was “well-written,” ask what that means to them.

2. Ask readers how they felt when they were reading the book. Not what the book was putting out, but the emotions or feelings they were having, as readers. Did they like that they were learning something? That it was fast-paced? That they were reading a fast-paced book where they were ALSO learning something, which seems impossible but my inbox is open?

3. Consider, when starting or revising something like a book recommendation service, whether you can use something other than genre to ask readers about their preferences. “Cozy” is a great one that gets underused or is seldom used on its own, outside of “cozy mystery.” “Creepy” is another one that gets swallowed up by the too-large genre of horror.

4. I like triangulating. I look up 3 books a person has really enjoyed, then I see if there are any readalikes in common. If 2 out of 3 books a person enjoyed brings up As She Stabbed Me Gently In The Face by Carlton Mellick III, your reader has bizarre taste, but it’s a pretty good sign they’ll enjoy a CMIII title.

Today’s big question isn’t about urine (god I hope not), though. Instead, it’s about the youths:

Is Gen Z bad with technology?

Rumblings

I first started hearing that the kidz aren’t alright with tech from a few people in libraries and academia. Nothing major, just stuff like college freshmen might not know how to download and install a program on a laptop. Or maybe they don’t know how to navigate an online module for a class or something. Just little stuff like that.

And then I started to hear it more, and I wondered whether it was true like the fact that you can own one of my excellent books for the low price of $5 dollars, or whether it was just something that people were saying, like that rumor going around about how I’ll never become a rich, famous author and instead will toil in obscurity until I’m dead, which will bring an end to the toil part and deepen the obscurity part.

I found a few different sources of info about this, and I would sum up the currently-circulating ideas like this:

The kids today know how to use smartphones, they can easily navigate highly-intuitive apps and software, but they can be pretty clueless when it comes to doing things that, to them, aren’t natural or simple, i.e., most things that you have to do for work.

The kids born into the era when the iPad is a parent’s best defense against a toddler’s midflight meltdown are genuinely VERY good with the sorts of technology that they encounter and use. Which is most often entertainment-based.

And that might be why we’re seeing this new divide.

Why My Generation is Different

I don’t think it’s that my generation is all that different (well, other than being objectively correct about music and styles of jeans), but it’s fair to say that when I was a kid, technology wasn’t so easy to use.

In order to do something like play a video game, we had to learn how to run programs in MS DOS. You had to install software. You had to learn SOME computer basics to do anything fun with a computer.

Or, if you had a Nintendo and then got a Super Nintendo, you might’ve needed to learn how to switch between the two, which required changing a minimum of 4 cables and probably also finding the VCR remote.

I wired up a stereo with separate components for tapes, radio, and CD, and with wired speakers when I was probably 12 years old. This isn’t a boast, I wasn’t special, many other kids did this as well. It’s what you had to do in order to have games and music, to watch movies, all that shit.

My generation was raised with technology, but technology that didn’t always work all that great out of the box.

My generation learned how to use computers that weren’t very user-friendly, and that were not designed to run games and to fuck around with, but instead were designed to do office work. Which meant there was some finagling involved.

Am I So Out of Touch?

Here’s a chunk from an article on The Verge:

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It’s been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.

That’s approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It’s the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.

And just a bit more about information sorting, broken up here to, I don’t know, make it seem like I’m still participating in this newsletter:

More broadly, directory structure connotes physical placement — the idea that a file stored on a computer is located somewhere on that computer, in a specific and discrete location. That’s a concept that’s always felt obvious to Garland but seems completely alien to her students. “I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” Garland says. “They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.”

That tracks with how Joshua Drossman, a senior at Princeton, has understood computer systems for as long as he can remember. “The most intuitive thing would be the laundry basket where you have everything kind of together, and you’re just kind of pulling out what you need at any given time,” he says, attempting to describe his mental model.

As an operations research and financial engineering major, Drossman knows how to program — he’s been trained to navigate directories and folders throughout his undergraduate years, and he understands their importance in his field. But it’s still not entirely natural, and he sometimes slips. About halfway through a recent nine-month research project, he’d built up so many files that he gave up on keeping them all structured. “I try to be organized, but there’s a certain point where there are so many files that it kind of just became a hot mess,” Drossman says. Many of his items ended up in one massive folder.

Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, has seen similar behavior from his students and can’t quite wrap his head around it. “Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,” he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously. “I’m kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files.”

Ah, and we’ve arrived at something important, finally, after all this time. YEARS of this newsletter, and maybe we’ve uncovered something!

Is the problem that kids don’t know how to use computers, or is the problem that we of slightly older generations have just accepted the shittiness of some of our technology without necessarily making it better and more usable?

Do we NEED folders? Do we NEED to pre-sort files now that file searching, you know, works?

Is Gen Z bad with tech, or are they bad with using tech the way WE do?

Maybe Gen Z Isn’t Bad With Tech, Maybe Gen X Tech Sucks (a little)

A lot of what I see is when it comes to Gen Z’s shortcomings is about file structures and hierarchies and software like Microsoft Office, and these are NOT intuitive pieces of software.

Most apps are designed to be intuitive. Because they want you participating right away, and a big selling point of an app meant to accomplish something is that it is easy to use without much fuss. How popular would TikTok be if there was ANY level of learning curve? No way, they want you to sign up and get to tikkin toks immediately.

Outside the world of work, people really can be choosy about which software they use, and they don’t have to settle for MS Word’s stupid bullshit that makes embedding images something that can only be done right by computer hackers.

But at work, you’re stuck with what you’re stuck with. If you work with Adobe Suite, which runs a lot better on Macs, but your IT department flatout refuses to buy a single Mac, you have to learn how to make do.

On one hand, I get the workplace side of this. I mean, it would be difficult to make a software like Adobe Premiere super intuitive while also maintaining a high ceiling on it. People who use it need to be able to do pretty technical shit, and the more complex something gets, the more difficult it is to make that easy for first-time, inexperienced users.

On the other hand, I do think software like MS Office could be a lot easier to use for 90% of what people are doing. It really shouldn’t be that hard to tab and indent something with tabbing and indenting EVERYTHING. Or, you know what makes me fucking nuts in Word? When you write a date, like July 15th, and Word makes that “th” into superscript, and if you backspace right up against it, it’ll just let you write the entirety of the next lines in superscript. That’s an auto-formatting thing that has been wrong for decades now, c’mon, bros.

Genx/Millennial users have just accepted little bullshit like this because, from our perspective, things are MUCH easier to use than they were before.

And, I think we accept it because for us, computers really have been primarily about work or work-related things, typing and so on, boring stuff we produce and that most of you freeloaders just peruse cost-free because you’re termites and don’t care that I just got a medical bill that’d give you a shock of white hair, like Rogue from the X-Men, or Reed Richards from The Fantastic Four (although I think Reed is more in the business of “wisdom-won gray temples, less a shock of white hair from whatever the hell did that to Rogue).

I guess it makes me a little sad. Because…I don’t know, it makes me feel a little like our work applications are shitty. Or, maybe not shitty, but could they be better, more intuitive? Probably. Have companies like Microsoft gotten a little lazy because, hey, what are you going to do, migrate to Linux or some shit?

It’s also maybe a sad signifier of moving from the fun of youth to the drudgery of work. Being born in the digital generation means you get a glimpse of the world with tech, how fun that can be. And then you snap back to reality when you get a job and just want to freeze the top goddamn row on a spreadsheet and don’t feel like it should involve as many clicks as it does.

Troubleshooting

My generation was taught a lot about computers, whether it was on the job or in school or because we really wanted to play that free copy of Chex Quest that we bought Chex cereal to get.

Parents, I hate to break it to you, but Chex Quest is Doom without blood. And also slightly less demonic. Slightly.

And I think we’ve failed Gen Z a little bit because we assumed they would know how to do everything computers, but a lot of this shit isn’t very intuitive, and they aren’t just going to pick it up.

What can libraries do?

I guess my ideal solution is a hybrid approach.

Yes, we need to teach younger generations how things like files work, that they are stored in a location, or accessed from a location.

Yes, we need to teach younger generations some basic troubleshooting. When something doesn’t work immediately, there are definitely some steps to take.

I think the big thing for the library is to speak to younger generations and say, “Hey, no shaming here, how are you supposed to know this stuff if you’ve never been taught? Come into the library for help, no problem, we’ll get you going, and trust me, your questions will not be the stupidest questions we’ve heard today.”

As weird as it might sound, it’s probably time to stop advertising computer classes to seniors and to start considering how we reach the youths with a lot of that same information.

And at the same time, we should be listening to and understanding where their pain points arise, because that might help all of us build better software, and by better, I mean more intuitive, easier to pick up for someone who’s never touched a word processor before. Because some of this shit is ludicrous, there’s just no valid excuse for it.

And if all else fails, we go to Doom Wads. The answer is to teach kids about the greatness of Doom MODs. Because if you can get GZDoom running on your PC and playing Ghostbusters Doom, you’ll be completely prepared to abandon the fun of blasting the crap out of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and begin the drudgery of work!

It looked something like this:

By the by, if you’re seeing an evil picture of Sonic the Hedgehog in the mirror, it means you’ve been cursed by this chain (news)letter, and you have 24 hours to play a Sonic game. Otherwise, you’ll…I don’t know, not experience the joy of a Sonic game in the next 24 hours, a dire fate indeed.

I tried the double wave, and soap shot out into my hand. So, it works, the weird-ass system works, and the sign helped me get the job done.

What irritates me about this, though, is that a sign that says something like, “Wave your hand twice under soap dispenser” is a SIGN of bad engineering. It’s a bad product. Not because waving twice is a hardship, but because it’s not intuitive, hence the sign.

I bring this up because libraries are often FILLED with hastily-made paper signs designed to accomplish things that, sometimes, are outside the scope of a humble paper sign.

Why Don’t People Read Signs? They’re In a Library For Chrissakes!

Well, let’s look at the front doors of this particular library.

I count 9.5 different pieces of signage on these two doors:

1. Left-hand door sign

2. Sign with blue border

3. Sign behind Patmos Library text

4. Patmos Library Text

5. Library hours (currently covered by another sign)

6. Closure sign

7. Which door to use sign (which includes the library name/logo, I guess in case some bandit was placing fake out signs discouraging people from using certain doors)

8. Some kind of logo with a blue book on the far right side

9. No Smoking sign

And sign 9.5 is a little piece of tape, horizontal, on the left-hand door, just to the left of the door handle. I don’t KNOW that this is tape holding up a sign, but based on the experience of looking at these doors, seems likely.

That’s a lotta signage. Out of 9.5 signs, how many would you expect someone to read, reasonably?

And, to read the signs on the doors, you basically have to stand in front of the doors, and if you chose to read all of what looks to be a pretty text-heavy sign on the lefthand door, you’d be standing in front of what is the only working door, forcing you to be rude in order to read the signs.

I think people mostly don’t read signs because A) There are a lot of them, and B) They are often placed in spots that aren’t the best.

How about we begin with Point A and talk about some sign types we probably don’t need.

Let’s Start With Some Easy Ones

What does “Needed” mean, exactly? Maybe I need to feel like I have some control. Maybe I need to feel them tax dollars at work. Maybe I need to push the button because it allows me to open the door without using my hands in cold and flu season. Maybe I’ve got an armful of books, which makes the button helpful. Maybe I’m 5 years old, and what I “need” is indistinguishable from what I think would be fun to do.

More to the point, though: Do people read these signs, and if they do, do they follow the directions?

To be fair to the staff wherever this is, I’m guessing this library is in a cold climate, the service desk is close to the entrance, and the automatic door opens ALL THE WAY, and then it stays open for a bit, and all the cardigans in the world can’t save you from the chill.

And, yes, I can sympathize, there’s something about the shape and size of these buttons that prompts people to really punch ‘em, like they’re on a gameshow or something, and that’s annoying, not to mention not great for the health of the gizmo. Maybe it’s because they’re metal. I think, “I can’t hurt metal,” as I wind up a haymaker.

But, friends, library chums, I think you just kind of have to live with this kind of thing.

Annoying, rage-inducing, grating on your last nerve’s last nerve? Of course. But I just don’t know that putting up a sign is making the difference.

I see these from time to time in libraries.

I do think it’s reasonable to designate certain parts of the library as areas where phones should be silenced. If we lived in a civilization, we’d kind of all understand that silenced should be the default for phones, but we live in a chaotic realm where people see no issue with putting a phone on speaker and having a full-on conversation in the grocery store.

But, again, I don’t think it’s super effective to tell people not to use their phones while they’re with you at the desk.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree, it’s rude AF to be on the phone or texting or crushing candy or crazying birds or whatever while you’re interacting with someone at the desk.

But…I think this is a situation where most people doing it KNOW they’re being rude assholes.

It’s a way of asking people to see your humanity, but you’re doing that…via a sign.

Good Uses of Signs

Super Simple Stuff: I think they can be helpful in situations where you get questions a lot and it would save the user a good deal of time if they’re willing to read a sign. BRIEF directions, like if you have a drop that media items shouldn’t go in, it’s not totally unreasonable to put a sign on it.

Step-By-Steps: I think a very brief set of directions for doing something like printing documents is reasonable to have a sign for. Lots of your users will be willing to read the sign to accomplish the task, and those who don’t want to can ask. I think situations where a sign might save someone significant time gives patrons options.

Bad Uses of Signs

Attempting to Moderate Behavior And Expecting The Sign To Be Enough: Look, a sign that says “Service Animals Only” isn’t going to stop some dipshit from bringing in their definitely-not-a-service-animal who will probably be very obviously not a service animal. Don’t expect a sign to pull that kind of weight.

“My supervisor says signs are not for patrons to learn the rules, they’re for pointing to after patrons break the rules.” I’m…not a big fan of this. I mean, I get it, and at the same time, I don’t love the idea that a sign saying a behavior is forbidden should be taken as more concrete and more legitimate than a human being who works at the library telling you something is forbidden. I think human being overrules sign, and someone telling a patron that there’s a problem doesn’t need to be backed up by signage. In fact, sometimes I think this is worse, it embarrasses the patron. And for the most part, I think the sorts of behaviors we’re talking about, like “No running in the library,” are things that people know they shouldn’t be doing. And in almost all other cases, there isn’t a specific sign to point to. I couldn’t point to a sign that said, “No drinking multiple 40s of King Cobra and spilling most of one on the floor when you knocked it over, probably because it was your third or fourth and that’s sort of what happens and a good argument that it’s okay to START with a 40, but then you should move onto either smaller bottles so that when you spill, it’s not so bad, or just switch to a hard liquor bottle with a screw-on cap.”

Why Library Workers Like Signs

Sometimes I suspect library folks love their signs because the kind of person who works in a library tends to be the kind of person who pays attention to signs and attempts to follow the rules. I am. I’ve been embarrassed many a time at a thrift store I hit up now and then because they have a really bizarre lineup system, and it confounds me. The line is supposed to start quite far from the register, but then they’ve set some browsing impulse items in the no-man’s-land between the line and the register, and sometimes people will browse those things while they wait, exiting the line, but also, they were prompted to do so by the item placement, and—look, I spend far too much time thinking about the right way to interact with this line, okay?

I think library workers are the types of people who tend to read signs, either because being that sort of person makes you a good candidate for library work, or because they’ve worked in a library and have felt the frustration of people not reading signs.

The Step Process

I want to encourage you to step down the number of signs you’ve got, and here’s where I’d go with it:

1. Make a list of ALL the signs you’ve got in the building so you can get an idea of how heavily-signed your library is.

2. Remove Totally Unnecessary Signs: Some states require you to have No Smoking signs on your doors, even though most states with smoking bans passed them 15-20 years ago, but that’s not the case everywhere. Look at signs like that, see what you can get rid of. Wifi stickers are another good one. I think most people are aware that libraries have Wifi in 2026. If it’s a new thing for your library, congratulations, and maybe the sticker can stay, but if you’ve offered patron wifi for a decade or more, it’s probably time for that to come down.

3. Look at what's fixable. Is there a “Use Other Door” sign that could be removed if the door were fixed? Is there a way to change how your book drop works so that DVDs can go in it as well? Take your list of signs and consider how you might address the issues if a sign was not an option. Sometimes, it’ll be too expensive or too difficult to manage. Other times, though, you might find that, I don’t know, buildup from cleaning supplies affects the sensors on an automatic soap dispenser, or there may be a way to adjust the sensitivity of the unit. Think of signs as Band-Aids, and maybe it’s good to take a look underneath and get at the root cause of the issue.

4. Make your remaining signs more permanent and official. Lots of us have 3D printers that, let’s be real, aren’t doing loads of library work. Whip up some 3D signage on those bad boys! Make signs that look official, like they weren’t an afterthought. I do think it can help, it makes it certain that someone, somewhere, put some effort into something. It’s the new era of the handmade sign, and maybe a sign with multiple layers and dimensions carries your message a little further than something handwritten.

Man of Contradictions

I know that the sign I started with is also a sign type I contradicted myself on just a few lines later. Because it IS easier to read a sign than it is to leave the bathroom with hands saturated in pee, walk to the desk, and ask someone working there how to make the goddamn soap work because I’m UNCLEAN. SO UNCLEAN.

And I see another side of it, too, that library users might not want to be like, “Hey bro, I just blasted a deuce in there, and I NEED some soap because cleanup on aisle 2 was a complete blowout situation.” Or, you know, however someone might express that situation.

I know a lot of libraries are doing their best with what they’ve got, and when they have budget that can either buy a copy of The Correspondent or to see if they can fix their automatic soap dispensers, that’s not a choice to be taken lightly.

I think what I really want to encourage everyone to do is to just consider alternatives, consider solutions that aren’t about a sign. Signs are the first tools many of us reach for, and when you’ve got a printerful of paper waiting to have all-caps red letters typed on it, every problem looks like one that can be solved with a sign.

I want to encourage you, whenever you reach for a sign, to consider alternatives. Maybe you put the sign up as a stopgap, that’s okay, but make sure that’s not the end of it.

And maybe…maybe the next revolution in signs is about making fun of ourselves and our love of signs. Just a little bit.

In my travels surfing the net, as the kids sa(id)y, I came across an interesting question.

Well, maybe “interesting” is saying too much. I came across A question that’s useful if you write a weekly newsletter about libraries and so on:

Help to archive my 4K+ books after 10 years of procrastination

Hi everyone, happy to be here for my first post and I hope I am not going off topic. My apologies to Mods if I am and feel free to delete this if inappropriate.

TL;DR: I am looking for archival advice but for my personal library, I am no librarian or archivist.

So: I’m reaching out because I’ve finally decided to get serious about my 4K+ book collection. Right now, they’re spread across two houses and, frankly, I’ve lost track of what I actually own.

I’m looking for any rookie advice you might want to spare to avoid me starting with a flawed system.

Any apps or tools you would recommend size-wise (also considering an average 150-200 books increase YoY?)

What’s the best way to categorize so things actually stay findable?

Are there any “traps” I should look out for when dealing with a collection of this size?

Thanks in advance if you will take the time to answer.

Ah, I see. You want to use my hard-earned knowledge, FOR FREE, to enrich your personal life!?

I oughta give you a piece of my…wait, I’m getting a text here. Turns out that giving away knowledge and so on for free is exactly what librarians do. No WONDER we’re so rich! In friends!

Start With Why

As Simon Sinek says, Start With Why.

I’m not a Simon Sinek fan, by the way, mostly because some people I worked with were MEGA fans, and those folks aren’t ones whose word I take too seriously.

But that won’t stop me from linking you to his book. Or, possibly, putting up a picture of his book that links to a much better book. You’re welcome.

In this case, though, Simon gives good advice. And it’s in the title, so you don’t even have to open the book! Jesus Christ, this job is depressing sometimes. People don’t even want to use books to the extent of reading THREE WORDS on the cover!

It’s important, before you begin cataloging your home library, to determine why you’re doing it. Because this is likely the major difference between a home library and a public library.

Why Libraries Catalog Stuff

Like you, question-asker, libraries catalog partially to know what’s out there on the shelves. As a collection grows in size, it’s impossible to know, right? Imagine a collection 20 times the size of yours, managed across multiple locations! Imagine it. Do it now, I demand it.

Unlike you, however, a big part of why libraries catalog is inventory control. Presumably, you’re not operating a lending library, so it’s not important to know, say, whether a book is in someone else’s hands and how long that’s been the case. You will probably be very aware of something that gets water damaged because you dropped it in the bath tub. Not while taking a bath, you just like to read while you stand over the bath tub for the thrills.

All this means you don’t need a full-on catalog that I’m sure some would recommend.

Also unlike you, libraries have a need to catalog materials in a way that makes sense to everyone. Otherwise, we’d spend all day just showing people where stuff was, retrieving stuff from the shelves, all that noise, when instead, by cataloging, we can include location information, and people can fend for themselves if they choose.

It’s also a matter of efficiency for libraries. If it takes us hours to locate an item, well, we’d waste a lot of time wandering the stacks. Which kind of seems to be how libraries work in fiction.

How Your Needs Are Different

Question-asker, it seems you want to catalog your library because you’ve lost track of what you have. Which is fair, with 4,000 books on the shelves, it’d be easy to forget whether you have a copy of The Martian Chronicles or not, and especially whether the copy you came across at the thrift store might be one you prefer to the one you’ve already got. I mean, you’ve got 4,000 books on your shelves, I’m guessing you’re not above swapping out for a nicer copy of something should the opportunity arise.

You probably aren’t lending, and if you are, it’s probably a very small number of items for non-specific lengths of time, and always to people you know personally, so you don’t need an automated system that does things like setting due dates, sending reminders, and so on. If you do feel like you need those things, get better friends.

Your library isn’t going to be browsed by anyone but you, or it won’t be browsed without your guidance, so you don’t necessarily need a super specific organization scheme that’s logical for anyone but you.

I Say, Start With Simplicity

Take that, Sinek! You’re not the only one who can tell people a thing to start with!

The simplest version of a catalog you can make is probably a spreadsheet, and what I like about starting with a spreadsheet is that it’s got a low barrier for entry, but it’s very flexible and you can do a lot with it later.

My advice, though, is to start simple.

I’d make a spreadsheet with two columns: ISBN and Location.

For the ISBNs, see if you can get your hands on a simple, handheld barcode scanner, and you can scan in all of your books in no time.

A scanned list of ISBNs is probably the most flexible way to start the project, and you can import a list of ISBNs into almost any sort of software you want, even stuff like Goodreads or Storygraph, making it very easy to do the work first, fiddle with software later.

You might be thinking, “But, Pete, I don’t want a spreadsheet of just numbers!” and I get that. But I’m telling you, get those ISBNs in there, and then you can add details later, from the comfort of your desk, without needing to drive to another location and physically handle all them books.

The other major advantage of a spreadsheet versus some other options is that it’s free.

Whenever people get started with a hobby, it seems like they want to spend, and I think the less you can spend at the outset, the more you can gain some experience with things before investing, the better. Because, hey, you’ll know whether you like it or not before you pony up, “pony up” being the term for buying a pony because you saw War Horse and thought, Yeah, I could do al kinds of stuff if I had a pony!

Column 2: Location

As for the location column on your spreadsheet, I’d do it like this: Give your various bookshelves names. They can be 1-X if you’re boring, or you could give them actual names, like Fuckface McShit, Assface Liferuiner, and so on if you nasty.

For each book, you can then know which bookshelf it’s on, which is good enough for a home library.

I don’t mean to disparage home libraries or say they’re unimportant, but…I kinda think if you’re a 4,000-title person, you don’t mind browsing the shelves a bit. You can spend 2 minutes looking through a single bookshelf to find something, eh?

You said your collection is currently very spread out, over 2 locations even, and so this would narrow things down a huge amount, and it’d probably provide you what you need.

Workflow

1. Pick a bookshelf, unload it, bring the books over to your scanner, scan in the barcodes, and once you’ve finished that shelf, reload it.

2. Fill in the location column for all the books you just scanned all at once.

3. Move on to the next bookshelf.

A quick note here, make sure you’ve got enough space to keep all the books you’re working on stacked so that you don’t have random-ass piles all over the place.

Also, do your best to set aside enough time to finish a shelf, or at least to come to a good stopping point, which I’d suggest marking using some kind of physical marker, like a piece of cardboard you can slide in between the last book you scanned and the first one you need to start with next time.

Why I Wouldn’t Rearrange Your Home Library By Subject, Dewey, or What Have You

This is a HUGE pain in the ass, and for most home libraries, it’s not necessary.

You might want to cluster some of your books together, you might want to kind of generally put all your comedy books in the same area, your Swartzwelders, your Strands, your Derks. Maybe you’ve got space on the very lowest shelf for your Derks?

If you have multi-volume comics, you’ll probably want those together.

But you really don’t need ALL of your fantasy paperbacks to be on the same shelf, ordered by author last name.

That kind of shit makes sense if you’ve got a smaller library, but 4,000 books spread out over two locations, you’re going to spend the rest of your life carting shit back and forth, and it’ll never be quite right, and, let’s be real for a second, if you haven’t READ those 4,000 books, you probably need to spend a little less time sorting, a little more time reading.

Some Organization Schemes I Like

I do like to keep a small set of books from my home library in a location that I see often. These are the books that I’m kind of thinking I’d like to get to next. I don’t HAVE to, but it’s nice, when you finish something, to reduce the lag time between putting something down and picking up something new.

I like putting things together that, for me, just make sense together. Maybe because I read them at a certain time in my life, maybe they just have similar vibes.

Whatever you might come up with, I encourage you to run with it in your home library. Because I kinda think that’s one way home libraries are better than public libraries: It’s a reflection of you. You make the choices.

And if you can make the choices, you might as well make something unique and interesting.

You’re listening to KOSA, music that’s close-uh to your heart.

That’s much better spoken than written. Marginally better.

KOSA is designed to keep kids safe on the internet. Who could complain about that?

Who? Who writing this newsletter could complain about that?

How Today’s Movement Came About

Let’s go back to 1998. We’d just forbidden human cloning because we’re stupid, and also because we were distracted by a President getting oral sex and cattle barons suing Oprah Winfrey for saying she was scared off of eating beef by mad cow disease. Turns out all the belt buckles in the world couldn’t convince a court to rule that Oprah can’t say she’s afraid of mad cow.

In 1998 we also got the Children’s Online Privacy Act, which forbade internet-based companies from collecting data on anyone under 13 without verifiable parental consent.

This is important for a couple reasons:

1. Lawmakers have known since 1998, WAY before the rest of us, what these fuckers were up to in terms of collecting your info.

2. This is why most social media companies emerged with a “No users under 13” setup. It’s easier to just forbid users under 13 completely rather than set up this verification system and open yourself up to legal action.

Cut to 2022, and KOSA is introduced in the senate.

In 2026, KOSA was incorporated into some other shit to make the KIDS act (you did it, you did an acronym!), an act designed to protect kids from bad shit on social media.

And here we are.

What’s The Problem?

Something that it seems Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that social media is not good for kids and young teens. Which is probably accurate inasmuch as social media isn’t particularly “good for” anyone.

Maybe it’s more correct to say that something Republican and Democrat lawmakers can agree on is that it’s political suicide to say anything against an act like this because the obvious barb coming your way is, “I see. So you think porn is fine for kids.”

As usual, there is a correctly-identified problem here, and we agree on that, and where we find disagreement is in the solution.

The KIDS act is looking to make age restriction on social media more functional, less of a “I am saying I’m over 13 when I click this box” kind of thing, all in service of keeping young people away from “harmful” material online.

Which comes with two problems:

1. ) We don’t all agree on what adult material is, and

2. ) The method by which social media would be age-restricted would potentially affect internet access completely.

Let’s focus on B first. A smarter man would’ve reversed those so we address them and list them in the same order. Ah, if only there was some sort of “Go Back Spaces” key on this keyboard…

Silly Lawmakers

The problem with ager verification on social media is that you can’t really verify someone’s age without verifying their identity. At least, that’s the claim. The game Leisure Suit Larry begins with the player answering a series of questions like, “‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ was recorded by…?” or “Captain Kangaroo's sidekick was…?” Because, at that time, you’d only know that kind of shit if you were old, and THAT didn’t compromise your identity, but I digress.

To bar anyone under 13 from using platforms, social media outlets will have to identify people, most likely through a government-issued ID, a credit card, or some other personal data that would solidify a connection between you and your identity.

Not great, not an ideal solution, but not to worry, Mark Zuckerberg has an even worse idea.

Zuckerberg, while getting railed about Instagram, proposed that smartphones and computers should do verification at the user level, meaning that your phone would verify your identity rather than each individual app doing it.

Here’s the problem with that brainstorm:

Zuckerberg is not proposing that Instagram verify the ages of Instagram users. He is proposing that Apple and Google verify the identity of every smartphone user, for every app, at the OS level. Once that infrastructure exists, it does not stay limited to social media. It applies to every app on the phone. Every website accessed through that phone’s browser. Every communication sent through any app on the device.

This is more than age verification. It is a national digital ID layer baked into the two operating systems that run the overwhelming majority of the world’s smartphones.

So, we’ve gone from limiting social media use to those over 13 to de-anonymizing all of the internet for all people.

Lovely. Grand. Necessary. Perfect.

One Man’s Trash Is Another Woman’s Information About Abortion

What sorts of things wouldn’t be viewable by young people?

Well, abortion info probably doesn’t make the cut.

KOSA’s co-sponsor, Marsha Blackburn, thinks that CRT in any form doesn’t belong in the classroom in addition to being anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, and against the Affordable Care Act.

There’s even be speculation that any controversial topic, like climate change, would not be something kids could explore online.

And the people who would decide what information is and isn’t permissible would be Attorneys General, so information available online would be decided by highly politicized people.

Maybe today it’s about scrubbing the internet of information about gender-affirming care, tomorrow it’s about removing any information about firearms.

Why Would Anyone Want That?

I’m suspicious that this isn’t actually about kids, which it rarely is, even though we all pretend things are about the kids.

A few years back, the Biden administration…waitaminute, the BIDEN administration!?

[checks notes, makes sure this isn’t just blaming Joey for something that Trump 100% did and likes to blame Biden for]

During a 2024 “Creator Economy Conference” for influencers (barf noise), there was a panel that included senior Biden advisor Neera Tanden, whose remarks were recorded by journalist Taylor Lorenz:

Now, when Lorenz reported on this, Neera Tanden claimed she’d never been in attendance, so maybe there’s some attempt to back out of this one?

But it sure seems like she was there and said these things.

Like, REALLY seems she was there, and it really seems like she was advocating for some pretty heavy internet censorship.

And, SURPRISE, things aren’t awesome on the other side, either.

One of Trump’s big things was about platforms not being censored, or being asked to censor as the case seems to be, any information, ideas, or asinine opinions based on almost no information whatsoever.

But this didn’t seem to be the case after the death of Charlie Kirk:

Last week, Pentagon officials promised to “address” federal employees who mock or celebrate Kirk’s death. And the State Department said it would revoke visas over social posts that “celebrate” Kirk’s death.

On Monday, Sept. 15, Vice President JD Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast and encouraged listeners to call the employers of anyone “celebrating Charlie’s murder.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday said people who post “hate speech” should be “shut down” and suggested that the Trump administration would pursue people who engage in hate speech…

“Democrat critics are lying about the Administration’s actions — this effort will target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to CBS News.

Asked about Bondi’s remarks, President Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Tuesday: “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly; it’s hate.”

It seems, to me, that this might be less about protecting kids, more about shaping the internet to be a tool of whichever government is in charge at the moment.

Why Would Social Media Companies Want This?

Because this gives social media companies a shitload of access to your data. Forget what they already know about you, what they discern based on your internet use, now they would be able to easily connect all of your activity to your actual identity. “Hey, your credit went up two points today, maybe treat yourself to a new iPhone…”

It’s a complete theft of your privacy, possibly levied when you attempt to access the internet.

It’s Still Free Speech for the Rich and Powerful

When you cut off USAID and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands within a year, you can still post a meme of you happily carrying a casket with your former bros. Because…who is going to stop you?

And that’s what I NEED you all to understand: when they talk about curtailing speech, they’re talking about curtailing YOUR speech. Because you might have a hard time getting your next gig if you make something like this, but they won’t.

Why Does The Internet Have to Be Kid-Friendly?

Guys, this is very simple, there are two ways to make the world safe for kids.

Option 1: No content that’s not kid-friendly can exist, be broadcast, be hosted, etc.

Option 2: Parents need to restrict what their kids see and do.

Option 1 is obviously very stupid. It would render loads of important information and ideas undiscussable, it would decimate lots of good medical information, and when it came time to learn something, ANYTHING about topics like sex, even in the reproductive sense, that’d be out of the question.

Option 2 is clearly the right choice here.

Now, parents should be given some resources. Apps that restrict websites and other apps, sure, great idea. Smartphones that are controlled by parents so that their kids can’t be texting at 2 AM, that makes a fuckton of sense. I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to specific phones that come with parental controls or even highly restricted app stores and capabilities. Because that’s a choice parents can make for their own families.

And this shit already exists! You can put an iPhone on a family group setup, meaning that from your phone, you can restrict things like hours, downloads, password changes, and you can age-restrict content.

It already exist, it’s just not legally mandated. And that’s how it should be because, parents, this is on you. You have to make use of available options.

You, as parents, gotta do it.

I get it, you’re busy, and kids want to be on the internet. Some of your kid’s friends have shitty parents who let them do whatever online all the time.

However, THIS IS BEING A PARENT. THIS IS PART OF IT.

It’s the same thing as you deciding whether or not to have a locked liquor cabinet, whether or not to leave your kids at home when you run errands, and which sorts of books your kids check out from the library.

If I have to parent your kids in the form of changing my internet use, we are co-parenting, which is the thing you all purport to hate so much.

I mean, if I have to turn over my data to keep your kids safe, then shouldn’t your kids be shoveling my goddamn driveway? Sending me a father’s day card?

The Bible will be censored. All religions will have items redacted. History will not be accurately reflected. Can we talk about The Holocaust? Because I’m not sure that’s an appropriate topic for really young kids, not because it’s unimportant, but because I don’t really think super young kids can understand that kind of thing, what it means and why it’s important to talk about.

If you really want a law to take effect and do your job for you, here you go: Kids under 13 can’t access the internet, period. Providing them internet access is akin to giving your kids booze. It’s just not done.

Like, seriously, that’s what we’re talking about here. A useless internet that all ages can access, or a useful internet that’s age-restricted.

A Last Wrinkle

I understand these laws and regulations are an attempt to protect kids, and like a lot of things that might have good intentions, they have consequences that are…pretty big.

But I think there’s one other thing we need to consider: Is social media really okay for adults?

I mean, we’ve obviously concluded that social media ain’t good for the kids, which I think is a very fair conclusion, and I’m just not sure why we think adults aren’t affected by it.

I do think it’s time we started viewing social media as the tobacco of the 2020s, the alcohol, the gambling. It’s something that gives us short-term pleasure, and not without a cost.

Perhaps you haven’t because you don’t read THE NEW YORK TIMES, you swine(!), and now you’re weeping onto the electronics you use to read this newsletter, ruining them comprehensively, because I just broke the news that the mass market paperback is DEAD!

What Do We Mean By Mass Market Paperback?

Basically, mass market paperbacks (MMPBs) are about 4.5”x7.5”, their pages are glued, and the paper used inside likes to yellow very quickly, especially if you’re one of those fucking weirdos who’s all about the Sun and just want its poisonous rays penetrating your home all year long, even in winter when we’re supposed to get a break from Apollo’s Curse.

They’re usually a little fatter, usually the print is a little smaller, and usually they’re on the cheap side.

Fat, smaller than expected, cheap-looking…huh, all writing really IS autobiography.

Humble Origins

The story goes, some dude in the 30s was at a train station and was NOT pleased with the reading options he found, and he was like, “You know what would be fuckin’ tight? If I could get quality literature in a format that’s small enough to fit in a pocket and cheaper than a pack of cigarettes.”

That’s probably not EXACTLY what he said, although it’s theoretically possible he did. People used “tight” that way in the 1930s, right?

And, because this was long ago enough that you just had to have an idea for a different size of a thing that already existed in order to get rich, the MMPB was born, a book small and cheap enough that you COULD carry it in a pocket, and you COULD buy one instead of a pack of cigarettes. Or, more likely, you’d buy one in addition to a pack of cigarettes. People back in the day liked reading, but they loved smoking.

Portability

Let’s talk a little bit about NYT’s main culprit behind the death of MMPB’s, the eBook, and let’s examine first the issue of portability.

In some ways, the portability issue has been solved by eBooks and smartphones, although I’d argue not very well.

Yes, a smartphone or an eReader are more portable than a fat stack of books, or an entire library, like this German guy built and stocked in his house and that has become kind of the only place I ever want to be.

You know what makes this perfect? Look at that chair. Ratty as hell. Because the chair DOESN’T matter.

I’d argue that my Kindle is not more portable than a single MMPB, though.

For one thing, it probably weighs about the same amount. For two things, it requires power.

For a third, and this kind of moves us into the affordability part, I sometimes don’t want to take my Kindle out of the house because it costs like $100 bucks! I mean, if I lose or damage a MMPB, eh, no biggie, unless it’s my prized Howard The Duck novelization.

I kind of think one of the big lies of eBooks and eReaders is portability. Because while it can make your personal library more portable, it doesn’t necessarily make the book you’re reading right now more portable.

Cheapness

In the 1930s, the MMPB was cheaper than a pack of cigarettes.

Now, we all know cigarettes are EXPENSIVE AS FUCK these days, which I’m fine with. I mean, whatever, if it was something I liked, I’d probably hate it, but it’s not, so I just can’t be fucked to care. Hypocritical? Yes.

Hey, we’re all hypocritical about something here and there, I guess mine will just have to be surrounding the fact that smoking is really, really not great for you.

In Colorado, a pack of cigarettes gets about as cheap as $7 bucks a pack. Which is A LOT more expensive than the 13 cents you’d pay in 1935.

And in 1935, you’d probably pay about 4 cents for a mass market paperback.

Today, I can pick up a MMPB from Target for $7.50.

5,285% increase in cigarette price, 18,650% MMPB price increase.

Which is a bit of a disingenuous way to express the difference, but the point is that MMPBs went from being cheaper than a pack of cigarettes to being more expensive than a pack of cigarettes, and the price of cigarettes has got to be one of the bigger increases since the 30s.

By the way, the same book on the Kindle store is $8.99, so even more expensive than the paper volume.

Which, I have two gripes about this.

One, it makes no goddamn sense. How can a digital file cost me more, all-in, shipping included, than a paper book? That’s asinine. Who is getting this money?

Two, more importantly, you have to take the cost of the eReader you use and divide it among the books you actually read on it.

So, if you bought a Kindle for $200, and if you’ve read 20 books on it, each of those books technically cost you an additional $10 dollars. If Skeleton Crew was your 20th choice, an excellent selection, sir, it kinda, sorta cost you $18.99.

AND, you don’t own it. Not really. By Amazon’s terms, you lease eBooks, and they can be pulled off your device at any time.

What you pay for is reduced, and what you pay for it has increased.

Where I’m Forced, FORCED to Quibble With Publishers

When NYT reported on the death of MMPBs, publishers cited that producing them is only 30 cents cheaper than producing other formats, and those other format can retail for an additional $6 bucks. So, there’s a margin to overcome here.

But I don’t think it’s that simple.

According to Mary Gillgannon over at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, it wasn’t the cheapness of production that made MMPBs work, it was the volume of copies. You could sell fewer copies of a book printed in the MMPB format, 17,000, and break even, whereas you might have to sell a much larger number of copies in a more prestige format.

What THAT meant is that you could publish more books, greater variety, and because you weren’t counting on these MMPBs to do insane numbers, you could make a tidy little profit publishing a large number of books with small audiences, making the literary landscape more diverse, to use a word that has come to mean a bunch of things that I don’t think it means.

What THAAAAAT (probably) means is that publishers seem to be going the same direction as movie studios: Instead of putting out smaller movies with lower budgets, they’re banking on big, big books with big budgets to make all their money.

Now, this might be a business practice that makes the world of books seem boring, even more boring-er than it is (I mean, c’mon, it’s BOOKS), but it might be necessary for survival.

I think in the past, publishers could take more chances on books not just because of the MMPB, but because there was a much smaller sea of content in which these books would be lost. You could have a non-famous, non-recognized author, but if you got those paperbacks into a couple grocery stores and a few airports, you could make the money back.

But now, I do think consumers are less willing to take a chance on buying a book by a complete unknown, simply because there are SO MANY options out there, and rolling the dice that way just isn’t practical for most people.

Enter the eBook

I do think the eBook has played a role in the murder of the MMPB (that’s right, I’ve upgraded this to a murder now).

In one way, it’s not necessarily bad. Readers of genre fiction like Romance, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy especially have found eBooks to be, generally, a plus. These are readers who plow through a fuckton of books, and frankly it’s just kind of a hassle to deal with that much dried pulp all the time. If you’re adding 100+ titles to your “Read” shelf every year, you have to either get a carpentry apprenticeship and learn how to build some serious shelves, or you have to offload a lotta books.

It can also be nice to read those sorts of things a little more anonymously. No shade coming from me, but we all know there are situations in which you might want to read a book, and you might not be thrilled about the judgments thrown your way based on the cover.

But there’s a weird, unspoken thing about MMPB’s and eBooks, and I guess I’ll speak it because, fuck it, what do I have to lose?

Let me put it like this, and remember, I’m a self-pub author, so I am not just here to trash my fellow hacks:

I think eBook self-pub has filled in a lot of the space of the MMPB, but not the good MMPBs, the bad ones. The super pulp, the stuff that is pretty niche and, often, pretty bad.

We have more to read, sure, but what we have a lot more of is garbage with just a very, very small number of really good books we wouldn’t have otherwise.

So maybe, in that way, the eBook has replaced the MMPB in that it’s become the garbage pile for books that never really needed to be in print.

I TOLD you this was going to be harsh. Hell, I said it, and even I feel a little offended.

However, I think this isn’t just about self-pub eBooks being garbage, I think the type of book that would normally be published in mass market paperbacks has changed.

Dungeon Crawler Carl. If this book was published in 1985, it’d FOR SURE be in mass market paperback.

Why isn’t The Midnight Library in mmpb? Big literary hits used to be really common in MMPB. You can’t walk through a thrift store without being buried in a pile of copies of Lonesome Dove.

Both Dungeon Crawler Carl and The Midnight Library are on Amazon’s bestseller list among many, many older sci-fi/fantasy books that have absolutely been in MMPB, like Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Hyperion, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (whose mmpb cover might be my favorite).

So why aren’t these books coming out in MMPB anymore?

I think this change is good in one way: genre fiction is no longer seen as unworthy of respect. A book can be sci-fi and still end up published in hardcover or trade paperback.

But I think that has less to do with someone catching feelings for sci-fi or romance or whatnot and more to do with publishers seeing that there’s money to be made here. Penguin can make more by putting Carl into prestige hardcovers than they can by moving a large number of MMPB units.

What We Lose

My biggest fear is that we’re about to lose the idea, the sort of back-of-mind thinking that says a book should be cheaper than a pack of cigarettes. They should be cheaper than a movie theater ticket.

I see this happening already on the ground at the thrift store. Generally, DVDs are 99-cents to $1.99. Books are usually around $2.99.

If you’d told me, in the late 90s, that DVDs would be cheaper than paperback novels, I’d have thought you were crazy, and I wouldn’t have invested in Google like you told me to because I’d have to assume you were not a time traveler, but rather a lunatic who’d escaped from some kind of care facility and decided to make it your mission to confuse people about the future.

And this might sound a little consumerist of me, but I think there’s something nice in someone being able to build a library on the cheap, especially a young nerd who doesn’t care so much about prestige formats and painted edges, someone who just wants to put together a collection of the stories they love.

The death of the MMPB is a blow to the idea of a book being a go-to way to entertain yourself when you’re not at home. Which we don’t need to get into, I’ve played the old man yelling at that particular cloud many a time by now. Let’s just leave it at the fact that your stupid-ass friends are no Philip K. Dicks, and reading their texts is just not going to give you the same thrills that a baffling novel about a spray that keeps things from rotting. Sort of.

You probably won’t be seeing books in places like grocery stores much longer, something that was made possible by the mass market paperback’s affordability and small demands of shelf space.

Books are on the road to becoming something like vinyl records, and not in a good way.

They become an antiquated object, something that is only beloved by doddering grandpas in their cardigans, puttering around the house. They become something that you only really engage with when you sit down and read, an activity most people don’t make much time for.

They become a hipster affectation, an intentional choice to read in a more inconvenient way instead of being a useful way to access stories.

Books, without the mass market paperback, become less a part of our lives.

In Idaho, a mom, who was briefly a substitute teacher, started a Moms for Liberty chapter and subsequently tried to ban 95 books all at once.

Brave freedom fighter or cowardly slap back at a school that fired her?

Wait, what?

Yeah, what?

So here’s the full(er) story.

Cierra Clarke, previously a stay-at-home mom, was substituting in her child’s class, the HEIGHT of horrible embarrassment for a grade-schooler.

Cierra claims that she noticed, by substituting, that her son’s class seemed to be behind in their learning.

Now, Cierra, this might be a good time for me to inform you that when you’re the sub, things usually aren’t quite the same. Kids, some kids, anyway, know that subs are not their “real” teachers and therefore do not wield the same educational status as a full-time teacher. They…might not always act exactly as they do with their full-time teacher.

Anyway, because Cierra thought the class was behind, she decided to Google the regular classroom teacher, as one does, I guess in hopes of finding that the teacher is posting things on social media about how he’s running a diabolical scheme to dumb down the youth of Idaho through B- teaching.

Cierra found some videos that were objectionable in her opinion.

Now, I’ve seen some of these, and…eh?

We’re talking about a video where the fella suggestively eats a sausage, that kind of thing, stuff that’s not exactly an A+ comedy-wise (I mean, comparing a sausage to a dick is the easiest leap imaginable, at least go banana and then compare peeling it to a bris), but it was all within Meta’s guidelines, which aren’t exactly free-wheelin’ when it comes to sexy time.

I mean, okay, on one hand, yes, I wouldn’t want children in a classroom setting seeing a video of someone looking at a sweet potato and comparing its veiny-ness to a dick.

But on the other hand, the hand that’s living in our reality, that’s not what was happening.

This seems to be a teacher with a private life in which he engages with crude humor, scatological humor, toilet humor, crapping in the hand and throwing it at the keyboard, which, you know, is like 5% of the internet. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but considering that every business, including Cullman Liquidation, has multiple online listings, 5% is significant.

By the way, in case you’re curious what buying a mobile home from Cullman Liquidation has to do with Cullman’s owner being hit in the face 5 times with a crescent wrench, they’ve conveniently made a commercial to answer just that question.

From here, things get a tad murky.

Cierra sent an “anonymous” complaint about the teacher and seems to have been upset that the school didn’t immediately fire the teacher based on an anonymous complaint about Meta-safe comedy sketches.

THEN, it seems, one way or another, Cierra’s identity was discovered or revealed, not sure, and after a meeting with the school’s admin, she was fired as a sub, and after an argument that was more or less heated, depending who you ask, Cierra was trespassed from school grounds and cannot return for a year.

The Creation of a New MFL Chapter

Up to now, I’m not all that invested in this story.

I mean, okay, I DO think teachers should have First Amendment rights and should be able to kinda do what they want, within the law, outside of the classroom, outside of their time on the clock, outside of representing the workplace.

The ironically named Idaho Freedom Foundation had this to say:

What teachers do in their private lives matters because they are entrusted with our most precious responsibility: children. Educators are not merely employees; they are authority figures, role models, and daily influences on young, developing minds. When a teacher’s publicly available behavior includes explicit sexual content, simulated sexual acts, or the glorification of violence, it raises concerns about judgment, boundaries, and fitness for the classroom.

And I couldn’t disagree more.

Educators ARE employees. If you want to pay them to be moral role models 24/7, you’re going to have to up the salaries significantly.

But here’s where it gets interesting for me.

Cierra, after being trespassed:

So that’s just kind of what inspired me to open up a chapter of Moms for Liberty here. Because if they’re going to do this to someone like me — someone that they loved and adored and begged me to go back to school to get my degree so I could have a classroom next year — then what are they doing to parents and families that they don’t have a good relationship with?

What’s baffling is that it seems Cierra wasn’t even aware of Moms for Liberty or what they do until after she was fired.

I didn’t even know what Moms for Liberty was.

Before we move on, Moms For Liberty should not be allowed to call their groups “chapters.” That sort of bookish language flies in the face of everything they stand for.

I’m A Bit Suspicious

Yeah, I said it. And I’m about to say it again!

I’m a bit suspicious about the chain of events here and the ways books and, geez, can’t believe I’m about to say this, Moms for Liberty are being used.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Cierra’s substitute teaching position does not seem to require any special qualifications whatsoever (as quoted above, Cierra said people at the school “begged” her to get her degree so she could have her own classroom). Now, I’m not necessarily here to judge the credentials or criteria, but merely to say that I find the claim that Cierra was able to accurately determine that her son’s kindergarten class was behind, after a day of substitute teaching, to be highly unlikely.

What standards would she be using? What basis is there for this claim? If Cierra is not herself educated in childhood development, is it just vibes?

Next, if her son’s class was behind, why would Googling the teacher be a productive thing to do? If your concern had to do with your child’s class being behind, it seems to me that this would be something to express directly to the school’s administrators.

Look, instead of beating around here, I’ll just say what I think: I’m pretty sure Cierra knew, based on some of the things that her son told her, possibly based on the actions of the teacher in interactions she’d had with him, that the teacher was LGBTQIA+ friendly. And I think she didn’t care for that. And therefore, she tried to get him fired.

And when THAT didn’t work, and when it turned on her (rightfully), she opened a chapter—no, wait, let’s call it a pit—she opened a pit of Moms for Liberty, without even really knowing that MFL’s primary action is book banning.

My suspicion here is that Cierra doesn’t give a shit about “liberty” or whatever, my suspicion is that she was finding another way she thought might be effective in slapping back at the school she felt had wronged her.

Then things get REALLY suspicious…

The Book Challenges:

Cierra put in challenges on 95 books in the school’s library.

The challenges are copied and pasted directly from booklooks.org, which is the Moms for Liberty Playbook. And when I say copied, it looks to be an attached screenshot or PDF straight from the website, not a copy/paste job. C’mon, at least do everyone the courtesy of removing the goddamn logos from the document.

What’s kind of funny is that, in an interview with Cierra, we first get this:

Clarke said she began her book challenge process by looking at lists of books that are most often banned in schools and then looked at what is available in Twin Falls school libraries.

“Sure enough we have a lot of books in these libraries that are, you know, pretty graphic in nature,” Clarke said. “Pretty sexualized.”

But then, a bit later:

In each of the book challenges she submitted, Clarke stated that she has examined the entire resource.

…Clarke, 34, told EdNews that she is an avid book fan and has been reading her whole life.

“I couldn’t tell you exactly when I’ve read each one of these titles, but I’ve read them within my lifetime,” Clarke said.

EdNews asked Clarke why she didn’t challenge any of these books before she was fired.

“I didn’t know about them,” Clarke said. “I had no idea. I didn’t even know what Moms for Liberty was.”

So…which one is it? Have you been reading this books, concerns mounting, or did you take an MFL list and compare it to the school’s library?

The Part of Cierra’s Story I Believe Least

I do not believe that she’s read all of these titles. At some point.

Even at a pretty brisk adult reading pace, let’s say a book every two weeks, this’d be about 4 years of reading. 4 years! Of JUST reading objectionable books. And not a peep about them until you’d, what, finished them all?

I do not believe that she read 15 volumes of Assassination Classroom.

I do not believe she read all 5 books in the Court of Thorns and Roses series.

And let’s be a little accusatory now, as EdNews was above: If you really thought these books were a menace to your child, wouldn’t you put in the challenge as soon as you’d finished it? Why wait and put them in together, wouldn’t you just do them as you go?

And why copy the MFL playbook in your book challenges? If you’ve read them, you can come up with your own points on them, which are certainly going to be a lot more convincing.

Where All This Goes

I’m gonna call this one like I see it:

Some lady wasn’t a fan of her son’s teacher’s personal life, she was aggressive enough about it that she was trespassed from the school, then she looked for a way to slap back at the school, and the easiest path she found was through book bans.

What’s hard about this is that, on one hand, I think it’s important for libraries to take book challenges seriously, to address the people bringing them forth, and to examine the materials.

On the OTHER hand…sometimes, and I hesitate to say this, but sometimes I feel like we’re being foolish in taking ALL book challenges seriously.

These 95 book challenges are clearly disingenuous. It’s fairly obvious that this book ban isn’t about books, it’s about an individual taking out their anger on a school district.

And in those book challenges, she’s just fucking lying. She just is. She did NOT read all these books. You know it, and I know it.

I’m tired of having to always be on this side, of always having to take people like this at their word. I think it’s one thing to listen to people, but I think it’s another to, as the school has done, painstakingly examine 95 books based on, well, lies and a thirst for revenge.

A Modest Proposal for Book Bans

I think it’d be fair to ask people attempting to ban a book to take a 5 question quiz on it.

And, yes, practically, this is unrealistic, and I think it’d ultimately be a bad thing, but I would just really, really enjoy seeing the results, especially in this case.

If the book banner gets a C or better, hey, the challenge process moves forward.

D or lower, ut oh, they need to go back to the start and maybe bone up a little.

You could make these quizzes very simple. For example, I saw that the book Ready Player One is on the list, so you could ask whether the book takes place in the past, present, or future.

You could make it a little more challenging, and, honestly, better. If you asked banners to identify three main themes of a book, I think that’d be incredibly fair and a reasonable show of whether or not they’d read and understood the material. I read Ready Player One like 15 years ago, but I could still give you a quick themes rundown: Nostalgia, Corporate Greed, Economic Disparity.

Okay, yes, giving quizzes to book banners is not going to work. And it’s a terrible idea because it pits the library against the community, and that’s never good.

And, as I’m fond of saying, sometimes book banners are right. The committee reviewing Cierra’s 95 requests did end up removing 2 books from the library and saying that a third could only be checked out by high schoolers, middle schoolers having access to it with parent permission.

Maybe I just wish libraries could be a little, a teensy tad, more honest in situations like this. Maybe I just wish libraries could say, “Look, we get it, you’re mad at the school, but banning these books doesn’t really solve your problem.”

Maybe I wish we could say, “Listen, we recognize Moms for Liberty documentation, so you’ve gotta give us something YOU made, not something generated for you online.”

Maybe I just wish people would stop abusing the library because they’re pissed off about something totally unrelated.

It IS a book that I adore, and before I give you some advice and tell you to read it, I have to make with a warning.

There’s a cuteness to this book, a lot of layout and other things that, I know, can be kind of repellent.

It feels, I don’t know, overdone, overconsidered, like when you go into a coffee shop and they measure the water temperature, everything happens on digital scales, and the only thing more curated than the beans is the mustaches of the baristas.

It feels a little like hipster bullshit in book form.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but I feel like I have to give you a warning about its format and my particular relationship with books like this.

I took a look in the mirror, which is Goodreads in this case, partially because I think you can learn a lot from what someone chooses to read, partially because the amount of acne on Goodreads is very low—I looked in the acne-free Goodreads mirror, and when it comes to books with unusual layouts and graphical gimmicks, I like them.

This might be my own fault.

You know how sometimes it seems like movie critics are really into a movie, then you see it, and it’s not your thing, but there’s something unique about it?

Sometimes, in those cases, I suspect that the reason critics like it so much is because they’ve seen so many fuckin’ movies that just having something a little new and novel is nice, refreshing.

And, when you see a lot of movies, you have more patience for and interest in something that kind of messes around with what movies are, what they can be, and how they function. Movies that sort of comment on movies seem to be a lot more interesting to these folks.

There’s a very good chance that I’ve read too many books, and this is why I like House of Leaves. And The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, all books with really unusual ways of being books.

All that said, I think House of Leaves is genuinely a very good book that’s worth reading, and if you’re just not sure because it looks long and confusing and maybe like a bunch of over-barista-ed bullshit, read on.

The Very Basics

I don’t want to tell you a ton about the book, but I’ll tell you enough so that you can maybe build some interest in it.

Basically, it’s a haunted house story. But not a traditional one where there’s a ghost, and you probably need to put its bones to rest, and then it’ll stop attacking people and stuff.

Man, ghosts are really petty about what happens with their bones.

Instead, House of Leaves is about a family that moves into a house, and impossible things start happening, like a door appearing in a hallway one day, or the inside dimensions of the house being larger than the outside dimensions of the house.

The formatting comes in because the story is being told in layers: You have the family living in the house and documenting what’s going on with cameras, then you have someone named Zampanò who is putting together all these paper records, then you have Johnny Truant, who is trying to complete and compile all the stuff Zampanò collected and seems to be losing it a little in the process.

It’s a book about an unfinished book about a documentary film about a house. Of leaves.

I know, that sounds a little confusing, but remember, all of these layers are about the same thing: The house.

So, imagine it kind of like a movie where we have the perspectives of three different characters explaining the same event. Even though it’s confusing to chart it out or think about it, narratively, it’s pretty smooth and workable for readers.

Why I Think It’s Worth Reading

We’ve all read or watched something like this, something where there’s a big gimmick, and maybe the gimmick is the star of the show.

I think House of Leaves is an interesting, worthwhile read beyond its gimmick. Or before you layer in the gimmick.

I found it really creepy, eerie. The story itself, I mean, without the formatting.

I think the gimmick is well-used because it enhances the story. Mark Z. Danielewski didn’t confuse the gimmick for the story, didn’t come up with a gimmick and then forget to attach a good story to it.

Reading Tip 1: Learning to Read Again

Whenever you see a page from House of Leaves online, it’s one like this:

But don’t panic.

While this looks confusing and annoying to read, by the time you get to this, you’ve learned a little bit about how the book works and how to manage these sorts of layouts.

The first 10 pages look like this:

Then, a little later, you’ll get something like this:

Something where the shape is odd, but it’s still a pretty standard left to right, top to bottom kind of thing.

You’ll get things like this:

Which, again, is top to bottom, left to right, although you have to rotate the book to read the second page.

What I’m getting at is, don’t be put off by the super wild pages. By the time you get there, you’ll be ready for them, and, honestly, they comprise less of the book than you’d think if you did a quick image search.

Because, of course, if you want to write about House of Leaves online and get attention, you need to show me the weird. But I wouldn’t say the bulk of House of Leaves is a test of a reader’s ability to figure out how the fuck you’re supposed to tackle this thing.

Reading Tip 2: The Wave

When I saw Neil Breen’s Twisted Pair with Poonmaster Flex, I turned to her a couple times with questions.

“Wait, is he an alien? A clone?”

“Wait, is this supposed to be a restaurant, this patio on a community college campus?”

And at some point, she said, “Don’t worry about it. You can’t puzzle this out, you just have to sort of let it happen to you. Like being on shrooms”

And she was 100% right, despite never having taking shrooms in her life.

You can’t, like, OWN a Neil Breen film. If you try and squeeze it too tightly and wring meaning out of it, you’ll find everything just slips through your fingers and falls into the toilet because you left the goddamn lid open again while you stood there, brushing your teeth, watching a Neil Breen film 5 minutes at a time because you’re that specific type of maniac.

House of Leaves is a little like that, I think. Instead of trying to solve the puzzle, and instead of trying to discern the hidden meaning of every little thing, I think you’ve got to sort of let the whole book happen, let it wash over you, and kind of let the details be.

Don’t keep a notebook, don’t decode stuff, just get what you can from it by reading and keep moving forward.

I think there’s a place for more active reading, and I think that place comes around after you’ve read House of Leaves, love it, and decide you want to devote a lot of time to it. But on your first readthrough, I’d suggest you skim the surface and avoid taking any deep dives.

Maybe this is a good way to say it: It’s a book that doesn’t benefit from looking stuff up online. If you’re tempted, just put the phone down and keep reading. Either your question will be answered, or you’ll find it’s not super relevant. Everything you need is contained in the book.

Like the house described in the book, House of Leaves has lots of detours, little nooks, crannies, even, and if you examine every single one, I think it’ll end up being like walking through a haunted house with a flashlight, a tape measure, a notebook, and a desire to understand how every single little thing operates. You’ll understand technical details, sure, but in doing so, I think you kill the magic.

Reading Tip 3: Timeframe

I’ve read lots of accounts from readers who say it took them years, multiple years, to read House of Leaves.

As a librarian, let me give you a tip: If a book takes you years to read, you probably aren’t enjoying it all that much.

House of Leaves is a thiccboy, it’s a little intimidating, but there are many sections that don’t take very long to read at all, parts where there are very few words per page.

I’m not here to shit on slow readers, but I do want to say that you shouldn’t consider House of Leaves a multi-year commitment. Both because it doesn’t need to be and because I think your reading experience will be better if it’s more condensed than that.

Ideally, I think starting and finishing this within a month is good, and the shorter, the better.

Commit to picking it up every day for a month. Even if you only get in two pages per day, do that. Try and condense it down. I think the inescapability, the trapped feeling of the house in the book is really a lot more powerful without breaks or jumps over to other books.

And don’t worry if it feels like slow going. If you’re looking for books to fill a quota, House of Leaves isn’t the best choice. But if you’re looking for an interesting read, even if it takes a bit longer, you’ll be glad you picked it up.

Reading Tip 4: All the words?

Some people aren’t going to like this, but you don’t need to read every single word in House of Leaves. I’m not 100% sure that you’re intended to. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s not the idea.

I saw author Mark Z. Danielewski give a talk when his book Only Revolutions came out, a book that’s also pretty wildly formatted and probably even more challenging to read than House of Leaves in that it’s very non-linear, there’s really no way to go from the first page to the last with this one, you have to kind of do different readthroughs.

Someone at the reading asked how to read the book, or maybe something more like, “What’s the best way to read it? Which parts should I read first?”

And Danielewski said something like, I think about reading it like hiking a mountain. Everyone starts at the same place, and you can always see the top, but different people will take different routes to get there.

I think what Danielewski was saying is that when you read one of his books, you make some choices, and those choices will make your experience slightly different from someone else’s, or even might make the experience different from one you’d have if you read the book a second time.

And when you make choices, inevitably, you’ll miss out on one thing or another. That’s kind of what making choices is about: picking something at the expense of something else.

So here’s the tip: If you’re looking at some of the more complex pages in House of Leaves, and if you’re feeling like you’re not getting anything out of the words in the little square boxes, skip ‘em. I’m serious.

Consider them mood lighting. You know they’re there, they kind of create a vibe, but you don’t have to examine them too hard to get the gist.

Why I Think House of Leaves is Popular Again

House of Leaves is a book that kind of makes people rethink what books can do, how they can function, and at the same time, weirdly, it reinforces a return to physical books and reading.

You CAN listen to an audiobook presentation of it, but it’s not really the same thing.

I don’t think there’s an officially-sanctioned ebook version of it, and even if there was, it’d be a maddening, awful experience.

And there’s no movie version. There was, at one time, a TV series in the works, and you can buy the scripts on Mark Z. Danielewski’s website. But it sounds like it was a little bit of a takeoff on House of Leaves as opposed to a straight-up adaptation.

So I think one factor in the book’s popularity is that it’s something people can talk about, write about, and create content around because it’s not the easiest thing to access and understand. It’s very easy to see the newest Star Wars and make a reaction video, it’s a little more difficult to read House of Leaves and do the same thing.

House of Leaves is good fodder for content because it’s something that a lot of people will look at and say, “Yeah, fuck that,” but they might consider watching a YouTube explainer on it just to kind of understand what it is.

And I don’t hate on that. I do the same thing sometimes with video games. There are plenty of games out there that, because of their gameplay, I don’t think are for me, but that have stories or gameplay mechanics that I’m interested in. I think it’s fine to pass on playing a video game and to instead watch a video explainer, and it’s hard for me to say that about video games and to not feel the same way about books.

There’s also the ergodic thing.

Don’t get uptight about the word, it’s not a big deal, nobody’s going to bring it up unless you hang out with English nerds. Maybe you’ll be at a brewery and they’ll have an IPA called Ergodic IPA, and based on what you’re about to learn, I’d avoid that particular beverage.

Ergodic literature is the term used for books that require a “non-trivial” effort to complete. In other words, they require a reader make decisions or maybe solve puzzles in order to finish.

Think of Choose Your Own Adventure books. You can’t really just read one from start to finish. I mean, you CAN, and you’ll find out just how few good endings there are, but it’s not really experiencing the book.

Early text-based adventures, like Colossal Cave Adventure, can also be considered ergodic, depending on the balance between gameplay and narrative and your personal feelings on that kind of shit.

And I think House of Leaves, as a key piece of ergodic lit, is having a moment because I think there are people out there who want to be captivated, who really want to pay attention to ONE thing for a while.

I mean, just consider how rarely we spend even 15 minutes a day just doing ONE thing with nothing else competing for attention.

House of Leaves is kind of a permission slip you can give to yourself to turn off your phone, to not check your email, to devote your lunchbreak to ONE thing. You can’t really get through it without making a real effort. And while the effort at the time of its publication in the 90s was about turning the book and choosing which parts to read in what order, I think the effort in 2026 is about putting away everything else and focusing on this one thing. In that way, it’s bridged generations.

I’m going to old man yelling at clouds for a moment and say that I wonder if, for younger people, who seem really interested in House of Leaves right now, this may be one of their only experiences reading a book and doing nothing else at the same time, simply because it’s a book that requires that kind of attention.

The kids might be having a reading experience that’s much, much closer to the kinds of reading experiences us old-timers used to have pretty frequently.

I hope that’s the case, and I hope that readers who dive into House of Leaves figure out that, hey, there’s really something special about spending time with a book and nothing else.

How’s THAT for human writing? An AI can’t tell you how agonizing a thrombosed hemorrhoid is, and an AI can’t make you SUPER uncomfortable because you thought you were reading a library-related newsletter, and instead you’re hearing about a human man’s butthole.

This is why I’m never worried about my writing being replaced by an AI: When there’s no one interested in what you do, no one will ever ask an AI to do it.

Anyway, some AI enters our lives without our choosing. We can’t stop AI from popping up in our Google results, from lurking unhelpfully in the upper right corner of Outlook, and we can’t stop people from doing, well, this:

which I have to assume was generated by a Red Lobster CEO in the hopes that Shrimp Fest would resurrect their seemingly dead franchise.

That said, there are times we can avoid using AI, and in fact there are some times when we definitely should avoid it.

For example:

Let’s Start With the Clear Problem

George Clooney is not the best Batman.

If you like a campy Batman, Adam West is clearly the Battusi-dancing king.

If you like a light-heartedness, Michael Keaton is the guy.

And here’s where I really bring Grok down: If you like suave and charismatic, you’re talking about the best BRUCE WAYNE, not the best Batman.

Clooney has himself said that Batman & Robin was terrible and that he was terrible in it.

Grok, a little tip from a nerd who’s got decades of experience fighting and writing about this stuff: If you want to do a hot take on this one, go Affleck. That’s the correct argument, given the options above, which exclude Adam West, Kevin Conroy, and Diedrich Bader.

But, what the fuck am I doing here, arguing with Grok?

What Grok Believes

Grok doesn’t “believe” anything, but it has been programmed in some ways that’d make it likely that it would go for a hot take on Batmen as opposed to a most accurate or reasonable one. For example, in using Twitter posts to train itself:

The idea seems to be that X’s real-time, crowd-sourced nature offers a direct pulse on what people believe, unmediated by editorial gatekeepers. However, this overlooks X’s own biases — its algorithm often boosts engagement over accuracy, and its user base isn’t a representative sample of reality. Misinformation, as noted in a 2023 MIT study, spreads faster on X than accurate information, especially when tied to polarizing figures or causes.

I think what Grok has done here with Clooneygate is to give the hottest take, or to basically try and write its own thinkpiece, not because it actually thinks George Clooney is the best Batman, but because saying so will garner the most attention on Twitter, thereby making it the “best” opinion.

Because, see, “best” is really defined by the goal.

There was a period of time, thanks to social media algorithms feeding outrage, when the best asset for a writer online was being willing to generate terrible takes and then stand behind them.

For example, the Rolling Stone list of the 200 Best Singers of All Time. Because it’s Rolling Stone, of course Bob Dylan is on it, which is fine, but the real problem is that he’s NUMBER 15!? I think even Dylan fans would argue that while Bobby D. is a great songwriter and compelling performer, he’s not in the top 15 all-time best singers. I mean Dio is 65! The fuck? Celine Dion doesn’t even make the list, which, even as a non-fan, is nuts.

If you went to a karaoke bar, and if you heard two people singing Journey’s “Separate Ways/Worlds Apart,” and if one sang it like Bob Dylan and the other sang it like Celine Dion, no contest.

But this is what you do if you’re Rolling Stone. You put out a list of the 200 greatest singers because you have a goal that’s separate from correctly, as objectively as possible, identifying 200 of the greatest singers ever to sing “Rainbow in the Dark.”

Your goal is to make a list that royally pisses people off, they argue with it, and that involves reposting and commenting and…fuck, putting it in their newsletters. Damn it.

It’s possible Bob Dylan made the list because his voice is unique, it’s iconic, and it’s also possible that he made the list because Rolling Stone fucking loves the guy and can’t see past that, AND it’s very possible he made the list, and was listed so high, because Rolling Stone knew people would be incensed.

A list of 200, with some controversial picks thrown in and some slam dunks tossed aside, THAT’S how you get clicks.

I think Grok “knew” that Clooney was the most controversial, therefore most click-generating, pick, therefore the “correct” pick as its Tweet-informed goal in situations like this might be to create engagement.

What’s Genuinely Scary About This

If a human were to write an article claiming Clooney was the best Batman, that human would have to start out by establishing some bona fides. They’d have to show some knowledge of Batman history, or maybe they’d need to show that they know a lot about how movies work, or, hell, maybe they’d need to give us a backstory of seeing Batman & Robin at age 7, how it was their first Batman movie and they fucking wore the tape out watching it over and over.

They’d have to give us something so that we believe that their opinion isn’t just hot take bullshit.

AI, on the other hand, is viewed as an accurate source of information. That is AI’s cred, that is why someone would ask AI a question like this: They see it as unbiased, factual, objective, and incapable of lying, and therefore it’ll give us the rightest answer.

While I think what Grok is doing here is making a headline, the larger impact may end up being that we turn to AI in subjective matters because we see its answers as the closest thing to the miraculous act of turning subjective water into objective wine.

In other words, you wouldn’t have to ask people if your haircut looked good, you could just ask Grok.

And even if every one of your friends, and probably even you, knew that your haircut was shit, you could choose to cling to Grok telling you, “Looks great.” Because while everyone else is telling you that your hair looks dumb, Grok represents hard data, hard science, and therefore is more reliable.

I mean, as the synthesized opinions of billions of people, maybe it’s right? There’s an argument to be made that in matters of opinions, the MOST opinions matter than the most correct opinions, but I think we all learned from the Boaty McBoatface saga how that isn’t always the brightest scheme.

This is what people talk about when they talk about bias in tech. It’s REALLY hard to see sometimes, and when people try and create examples like, “AI won’t tell you 1+1 is 3, ever,” what they’re missing is that it totally would if it was programmed to do so, if its goal was not to give you the correct answer, or even a mass consensus sort of answer, but instead to provide the answer that would most likely generate the most chatter online.

I think the frightening, dystopic possible future presented here by the film Batman & Robin, as if it hasn’t already had a bad enough legacy, is a future where we trust AI in matters of taste more than we trust ourselves. A future where we think there is such a thing as objectively good or bad when it comes to taste.

What Should Be in the Realm of Humans

We talk a good bit about which tasks should stay in human hands and which shouldn’t, and I might summarize it as “Creatives who know how to do creative things think those things should stay in human hands, and we mostly ignore them because we think we’re creatives, too, even if we haven’t picked up a goddamn paintbrush in our entire lives.”

I now have a more expansive, and I think more useful, definition of the line between what AI and humans should do.

I think AI should not be used for anything that can definitively be called highly subjective.

Art is subjective, writing novels is subjective. And who the best Batman is, that’s DEFINITELY subjective.

Arguing about who is the best Batman is a HUMAN endeavor. It’s something we benefit from, a social activity. It’s not a chore, it’s not filling in a spreadsheet, it’s not coding a boring ecommerce website. It’s a discussion to be had, and the only real value in it is listening to and considering the opinion of others.

But more of a problem, bringing AI into those subjective things not only cuts humans out of the conversation, it is a surrender to our robot overlords, an endorsement that everything they say and do is right, even when it’s not.

Tech bros, my dudes, will you make a goddamn robot that can tape and paint a wall in my house instead of making another robo artist who paints pictures of flowers?

The article went on to make a lot of great points about the promises and shortcomings of self-checkout in the world of retail.

Mostly, I think we were promised that when we went to the grocery store and had just a few items to tackle, we’d never wait in line again!

And boy is that not true!

Let’s talk a bit about self-checkout and whether the dream is dead or alive in libraries.

“Self-Checkout Hasn’t Reduced or Removed Lines”: Why Self-Checkout Works in Libraries

Alright, The Atlantic, you’re probably right. This is true for retail, probably not true in libraries, though.

Library self-checkout processes are pretty simple, they rarely have to accommodate vastly different items, items that you have to be 21+ to take out, and shit like, I don’t know, bundles of firewood, which sit outside the store, the ultimate proof that honest people will be honest. Oh, okay, so I can just pick up an acorn, plant it, and make a tree, but if that tree is in a different place in its life cycle, and is dried and chopped up, then it’s theft?!

Most libraries also use RFID self-checkouts, not barcode-based systems or systems that force you to put in a code, like you do for produce at the grocery store. That means it’s incredibly simple: You set items on a tabletop, and the self-checkout machine scans them. Every item checks out exactly the same way.

This isn’t practical for grocery stores. I’m guessing RFID tags have gotten a good deal cheaper, but back in my day, they were about 50 cents apiece. Nobody wants 50 cents added to each item they buy. Well, let’s be realistic, 75 cents added to each item they buy. C’mon, we all know how this works: The cost goes up 50 cents, so the PRICE goes up 75.

Another reason library self-checkouts work a little better is that most libraries typically had one or two people at the circulation desk, so it’s pretty easy to double capacity with 2 self-checkouts, whereas a grocery store might struggle to put in as many self-checkouts as human checkers.

Maybe the bigger point, I don’t think we were really talking about taking massive lines and reducing them to none lines in libraries. Because waiting behind 15 people was never the issue. The issue is waiting behind one person who has a more complicated need.

I think the library’s goal has always been to give those folks who have very simple transactions a way to get their shit done quickly and easily, allowing staff to spend more time and energy on those things that aren’t so simple. I mean, if you think it sucks to wait behind someone with paper coupons at the store, try waiting behind someone who has never touched a computer getting set up with an email address at the library.

I know, this sounds like propaganda for self-checkout companies, 3M or whatever, but I genuinely think that in the case of libraries, they are, on balance, increasing the library’s capacity and shortening the wait times for people with simple transactions.

Subtle Benefit

There are certain items that you’d rather just not take up to someone working a register, if at all possible.

Fuck, this is the first image in this newsletter, so it’ll probably be the banner image as well. Way to keep it under the radar, Pete!

And there are library equivalents, too.

Not things you SHOULD be ashamed of, just things that, perhaps, you don’t want to discuss with a stranger, or, even worse, the person working the circ desk, who you see quite regularly.

It’s nice to have the option to access some materials without anyone else seeing.

Why Self-Checkout Doesn’t Work in Retail

Because it’s not about the customer, it’s not about making things more efficient for the shopper, it’s about profit.

It’s no secret that a big part of the push for self-checkouts was to allow companies to employ fewer people. I mean, a machine is much, much cheaper than a person, just in terms of wages, benefits, and so on. We all learned this from the legend of John Henry, except for those of us who learned about it from the Drive-By Truckers song about the legend of John Henry, which is an efficient yet emotional way to hear the tale.

In the distant past, a Wal-Mart had to do some math: How long will people wait in a checkout line before it repels them from the store? What’s the maximum wait people will accept before they reconsider their retail outlets? And, along with that, what’s the minimum number of checkout people we can have so that we don’t have a bunch of them standing around, doing nothing.

Now, Wal-Mart’s self-checkout math is really just about “How much can we get away with before customers turn on us?”

And I do see the library playing a different game.

Because most libraries haven’t eliminated or even reduced customer service and circulation desks, they’ve just operated them in parallel with self-checkouts.

And libraries are fortunate in that we don’t have to make a profit, so instead of thinking about how to shave off a couple dollars, we can focus entirely on how to get the best user experience for the budget we have available. And I do think that comes from a combination of self-checkout and circulation desk staff.

How Libraries Have Done Self-Checkout Badly

There are some practices that libraries have engaged in around self-checkouts that I don’t love.

When my library system first put them in, when someone came up to the desk, staff was supposed to walk them to the self-checkout and basically do the self-checkout for them unless they straight-up refused, which usually came in the form of a person telling you how they like human contact, but saying it in a weird, aggressive way that made you think…

Forcing staff to do this is silly. It juices the self-checkout numbers, but I’m not sure how useful that is. Even if you, a library admin, want to see those numbers go up, you’re just setting yourself up for a huge drop within a year or so, once everyone is familiar with the machines and those that approach the desk do so with full knowledge of the self-check option.

And I think it sets up staff to have bad interactions. It kind of sends users the subtle message that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, that they probably WOULD use the self-checkout if they weren’t so dunderheaded and confused as to how exactly it works.

From the user side: Yeah, if I wanted to self-checkout, I would. I chose not to. Respect my choice! My body (of literature), my choice!

Maybe it made more sense 20 years ago, a time when self-checkout wasn’t quite as popular as it is now. But I kind of can’t imagine that you’ll find someone today who is self-checkout-curious and just hasn’t had anyone take the time to show them how it works.

Why It’s Bigger Than A Checkout

I don’t always love when people have this overly-optimistic, utopian vision of libraries. But self-checkouts are a pretty good way to kind of show people the difference between technology’s application in a for-profit business and technology playing a role in a more humane, human-centric situation.

Kroger uses dynamic pricing to change the prices on items at a moment’s notice, or possibly even to change the price for online shoppers so that you and I might not pay the same price for an identical item (they claim they are not doing this currently. “Currently” is a really important word here). That’s using tech to extract money from you.

The library can use a dynamic cataloging system to see where specific items are more requested and more in-used, and it can help a library shift items where they’re needed in addition to helping librarians make better purchases in the future. That’s using tech to improve service.

Self-checkout, the technology itself, is not good or bad, which is the case with most, maybe all, technologies. But its application can really set a different tone depending on its purpose.

In retail, self-checkout only serves to please shareholders. That’s it. Period. So unless you’re one of those shareholders, it pleases them by making your day a little worse.

In libraries, self-checkout does improve the experience of most users.

I invite all to consider, maybe technology isn’t good or bad, maybe it’s neutral, and the way we apply it, the goals we try to achieve with it, are the real problem in a lot of cases.

If you’re not aware, I think the major issue most people have with Goodreads is its sale to Amazon, and I get that, but those aren’t my primary gripes with the service. Because my gripes could fairly be called “petty” in almost all cases, and the sale of a fun website to a megacorp, while not rad, can’t really be categorized as “petty.” So let’s focus on the pettiness for a moment. That’s right, let the Andy Rooney flow through you.

Sure, Goodreads is slow AF. It loads about as fast as MY PERSONAL WEBSITE, which is pretty pathetic considering Goodreads is owned by Amazon and my personal website is owned by a global conglomerate that shall not be named but that needs a sort of web-based front for secret, encoded information.

I’m not really supposed to divulge that my site, which appears to just be some writings and podcastings from a goddamn lunatic, actually serves a deeper purpose, but, what the hell, it’s not like anyone’s headed there anyway. I don’t even think the promise of deep state sort of secrets can convince someone to visit my site these days.

Probably my top Goodreads annoyance comes up when you search for a title, then bring up a list, and you have to wait a good 5-count before clicking. Because there is ALWAYS a banner ad incoming, and when it comes in, it pushes everything else way down the page, which often results in me clicking on something I didn’t want to click on AT ALL.

fig. 1: Mouse cursor stationary over book title, 390px from address bar.

figure 2: Mouse cursor stationary over book banner ad that has pushed the page down, cursor still 390px from address bar.

I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think Sophie Hannah sucks or something, I really don’t have an opinion, I’m sure that No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done is a fine book that may come with a slight twinge of title-based regret that, to me, is very recognizable as someone who wrote a book titled The Heist-est Heist Ever Heisted: A Heist Story of a Heist: Special Editor’s Edition.

I’m not 100% certain whether this banner delay is accidental, just another slow, shitty part of a slow, shitty website, or if it’s more diabolical.

See, sometimes, when you pay for an ad to run, you pay by the click, and if you wanted to really churn through a lot of paid ads pretty quickly, a good way to do it would be to make sure a lot of dumbasses like me were constantly clicking banner ads accidentally.

Ah, but the problems of Goodreads have hit a new level, a new cup size, if you will.

Enter: The Boob Ladies.

Before We Get Too Far:

I kind of can’t believe I’m about to knock on knockers and complain that busty women are sending me messages online. But it’s 2026, lots of weird shit is happening, so buckle up.

Well, before I complain about something in a way that my pre-teen self would slap me for, I want to make it clear that these boob ladies are not book lovers who just happen to have jugs so bodacious that I am able to use terms like “jugs so bodacious,” which is something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Probably ever. Partially because I’ve never been in a teen boner comedy type of movie where busty ladies…I don’t know, ski? There seemed to be a lot of those based in ski settings, even though ski settings do not seem super conducive to showing a lot of skin.

In Connie’s case, I can be pretty sure she’s not interested in books because she messaged me a question with the subject line “What are your favorite books?” and the body of the text reads, “Hello, how are you?”

Now, any user of Goodreads would know that it’s quite easy to look at my profile and see what my favorite books are by, for example, looking at my shelf labeled “Read” and then sorting it by star rating.

Or, if that’s too much to ask, there’s literally a shelf titled “Favorites.” That might be a decent place to start this inquiry.

The whole point of making a shelf of something like Favorites, Connie, is so that you don’t have to explain, individually to each person, which books are your favorite.

Perhaps the generously-boob-ed among us are used to not looking at stuff like that. Perhaps they are used to asking questions and being greeted with a generosity of spirit and time that us mere mortals are not typically treated to.

I actually prefer this friend request to Connie’s DM:

This is just someone sending me a friend request, and their profile is clearly 100% about funneling me towards pornographics.

Hey, let’s be real, I don’t particularly mind being funneled towards pornographics so long as I am aware that I’m going that direction. Don’t make me tell you about books, Connie, just so you can ignore that and send me to your OF.

Why Boob Ladies Are a Problem

I have NOTHING against busty ladies making a living by being, well, busty ladies. And I’m not particularly bothered by their presence on Goodreads, even though they do not want to be involved in books and reading.

Part of this is because I’ve long used Goodreads reviews as a personal blog, often just discussing whatever the fuck I feel like discussing, especially if I didn’t particularly care for a book and didn’t know what to say about it. So when it comes to declaring the “correct” use of a Goodreads profile, I can’t be said to have much of a leg to stand on as I’m objectively using it wrong.

That said, however, my nonsense is not proactive. I never messaged people to tell them I had a new review posted or whatever. If they wanted to see my nonsense, they could. If they didn’t, I’m extremely skippable.

The problem with boob ladies isn’t really the ladies, nor their boobs, it’s about what they signal. A deluge of boob ladies are basically the horsewomen of any platform’s apocalypse unless that platform was originally designed for use by boob ladies.

When the messages and friend requests on Goodreads start rolling in from boob ladies more often than they do from all other groups combined, things have gone awry. The platform is attracting more and more fake users, more people piggybacking on Goodreads to sell their own wares (boobs) than people using it to talk about books.

And boob ladies are more obvious on Goodreads than a lot of other platforms because GR is a platform that has a specific purpose. Sure, a purpose I deviate from constantly, but it’s a little like a LinkedIn, or something where a gateway to adult content is a little more obvious. It’s EASY to end up on an Instagram profile for a moment before realizing you’re looking at a boob lady. But on Goodreads? Not so much.

The Invasion of Boob Ladies may show us that Goodreads is on its way out.

The Past

Something like 5 years ago, I wrote a column about the history of Goodreads and where it was at the time. I’ll give you the beats:

2006: Goodreads is founded by a guy and his wife. The guy used to work the technical side of dating apps, and he thought that if everyone could easily put their bookshelves online, it’d make finding new books a lot easier and more fun. How pure!

2011: Somewhere around here is when Goodreads really hit its stride. It had a good following, and it had a recommendation engine that was probably better than Amazon’s. Why? Because instead of basing its recommendations on your purchases, it based them on your ratings. This is also in the midst of the smartphone boom and all of the small, independent sites for things like book reviews moving over to social media.

2012: Goodreads stops using Amazon’s data and switches to using data from book distributor Ingram. Why? Because Amazon’s API restrictions sucked.

2013: Amazon buys Goodreads for $150 million dollars. The founders are fairly defensive about this, and, like, they don’t need to be. Am I bummed out about this? Sure. Would I turn down $150 million dollars to run over a puppy? …Yes, I’d like to think so. BUT, $150 million is enough that if you offered it to me in exchange for running over a puppy, I would consider it enough money that the proposition wasn’t totally unreasonable.

And…that’s pretty much it. The history of Goodreads kind of falls away there as Goodreads enters its current, zombie existence.

What!? ZOMBIES!? WHERE!?

What I mean by “zombie existence” is that Goodreads still exists, it still works, but it’s sort of like there are no lights on upstairs. Like, if you went to Goodreads HQ, you’d find yourself knocking on the door of a shack in the New Mexico desert that just has one Compaq Presario running the whole deal, and seated in front of it would be a weird Hills Have Eyes mutant who knows how to code and has been peeing into Mountain Dew bottles for several months.

I’m sure SOMEONE is doing stuff, but Goodreads is not really moving ahead, you know? It’s not improving or really changing in any way.

And this happens all the time.

Sometimes it’s called a “killer acquisition,” a situation in which a smaller company is bought out by a larger company in order to, basically, kill that small company’s product before it can become a big competitor.

This is like Twitter acquiring Periscope. Or Microsoft acquiring Hotmail.

Other times, it’s what’s called a “zombie acquisition,” a situation in which a company acquires another company but allows it to sort of keep existing, albeit in a hollowed-out way that ensures it will NEVER create competition against the large company’s main product line. Like a zombie, it’s never going to get better, no matter how handsome people seem to find Norman Reedus.

Why Would Amazon Do This?

I mean, it’s not like $150 million is a shitload for Amazon, but still, there have to be reasons, right? Goodreads wasn’t a distributor, they weren’t taking a bite out of that industry whatsoever, so it’s not likely Amazon saw Goodreads as a competitor in the book sales space, per se.

Some, the more conspiratorial-minded, say that Goodreads was doing A TON of affiliate link business. Erm, affiliate link business is where you link to a book, and if someone clicks the link and buys that book, you, as the link provider, get a small amount of money from that sale. And the conspiracy theorists say Goodreads was doing SO MUCH affiliate business that it was cheaper for Amazon to buy Goodreads for $150 million than it was to keep shelling out those affiliate bucks.

I don’t know that I totally buy that theory, though. Affiliate links for books are, like, 5% of the sale price. That’s probably in the neighborhood of $1.25 per book, meaning Goodreads would have to sell 120,000,000 books to get to that $150,000,000 dollar mark. Goodreads boasts about 150,000,000 members, and I can’t imagine a remotely high percentage are buying using affiliate links. I don’t know, seems like a push to me.

PLUS, sure, maybe there’s that 5% cut to pay out, but as long as Amazon is getting MORE than 5% of the initial sale, they’re still coming out ahead every time an affiliate link is used, so even if Goodreads was doing shitloads of affiliate link sales, it would still be to Amazon’s benefit overall to allow them to continue doing so. It’s basically marketing they only have to pay for when someone actually makes a purchase. Marketing you only pay for when it’s successful. That’s a good deal.

Another theory goes that Amazon wanted to use Goodreads as a big funnel that works as a discovery tool for books and then, once readers discover those books, they’re pushed straight to Amazon. Which makes sense EXCEPT that Goodreads STILL, today, links to Barnes and Noble and Kobo among others. Is it possible Amazon is getting affiliate fees from Barnes and Noble? Is Amazon running Goodreads, which pushes people to Barnes and Noble, which then has to kick money back to Goodreads, which ultimately ends up with Amazon?

Would I, by using a Kobo and shopping for books on their store, STILL be putting money in Amazon’s pocket whenever I clicked a Goodreads link?

I mean, it’s not UNpossible, and it seems pretty goddamn diabolical, which makes it seem more realistic.

Still ANOTHER theory is that it’s all about user data, baby. By acquiring Goodreads, boy did Amazon acquire a shitload of user data. Habits, tracked manually by users, were now available for Amazon to crunch and spit out as money somehow. That’s my understanding of how big data works, and I put this nearer the top of my Most Likely list, just because I think we’ve seen over the last few years that data is a lot more valuable than just about everything else.

Maybe, though, the reason behind Goodread’s zombie status is less important than the fact of it. Maybe it doesn’t really matter WHY it’s happening (hear that, Simon Sinek? YOU start with why, you fraud!"). Maybe all that matters is that it IS happening, and here I am, stuck throwing good book reviews after bad. Well, additional bad book reviews after the bad ones I’ve already written.

What Can Libraries Learn From Boob Ladies?

I can’t really imagine that this Goodreads pipeline is working too well for the boob ladies. I mean, I AM an information professional, so I suppose it’s possible my ability to seek out adult content is greater than the ability of some, but is it difficult to find this stuff online?

No, it’s not.

But there are a couple things we can learn from their entreboobneurship.

Has anyone understood better than the adult industry the need for simple cataloging, recommendation engines, and low barrier to entry?

Can anyone name me a better example than the adult industry when it comes to categorizing and shifting categories and labels very quickly as the culture shifts?

Truly, we libraries could learn something from the industry. Not about sex moves or whatever, but about how even a mountain of data can be managed if you’re nimble and paying attention to what the people want.