Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.

Weird market!

PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.

If you can't sue over anything then you can be prevented from suing over anything.

" Even if I didn't like Google's set of cloud customers I could still work on Google Maps with a clear conscience."

Only if you're so dumb as to think those divisions don't both wind up on the same balance sheet and padding the same pockets.

"Simping for Hamas is absolutely a crystal clear example of employees... of human beings in general... who "did the wrong thing."

Yes, netanyahu, who told us that he was deliberately funding Hamas back in 2017 for the purpose of developing support for violently conquering Palestine, certainly did the wrong thing. So why are we funding genocide? He's an American citizen!

"who the fuck is the UN to tell ANY sovereign power what to do, much less occupy any country?"

Good point. They should not have founded the nation of Israel in the partition of Palestine in the first place.

But now that they have, there is a moral obligation to address the problem of Israel perpetrating a holocaust against Palestine.

You are happy with a status quo which involves the torture and murder of Muslims, so you don't want anything done. Just admit that so we can move on without you.

Check out the Four Horsemen series by Chris Kennedy (and friends).

https://chriskennedypublishing.com/the-four-horsemen/

Dump a bunch of Asimov, Star Wars, Gundam, Heinlein, and a dose of Bladerunner, add a cup of political theory, put in a bowl and stir...

It's the only scifi universe I've read from in years.

I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works.

Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.

Regarding the OP topic, a lot of the published hardcopy books of the types mentioned are published for the explicit purpose of a PR or political campaign. Stuff like the Obama or Hillary Clinton books which are pushed massively and funded by third parties - the fact that they're books and people (supposedly) buy them is secondary, they're being paid for by other interests. They're basically a long form version of those "get published in our magazine about who's who/the top 50 in the x industry, for a low, low price of...." magazines you'll sometimes see, still.

Trump wants to keep armed the .00001% of nutjobs who own firearms and who are willing to be violent and use them to attempt to overthrow the government to keep Trump in power (You DID see the Capital riots, I assume? It was kinda covered in the news).

Yep, I saw them.

I saw a protest that got out of hand with a some of the people being violent.

That that were violent, should be charged, but I do have a problem with those that merely went inside (especially those that video shows the cops LET in and welcomed in)...at worst they should have only gotten misdemeanor trespassing.

But back to your quote...are you seriously calling the riot an "armed insurrection"? If so, that was the WORST armed insurrection I have ever seen...especially given the number of guns we have in the hands of the people in this country.

And as for Trump...did you miss the parts of his speech telling folks to to peacefully protest?

No, maybe not...the mainstream news seems to conveniently leave that part out.

The only person shot there that day was a protesting lady by a Capitol guard....

I don't hold any delusions that Trump is much more than a narcissist....but, even so, I remember my life while he was president just before covid happened. Inflation was down, prices were reasonable, unemployment was down, and we weren't embroiled with wars all over the f'ing world.

He might not be the best person in the world, but things were running pretty well in spite of him you might say.

And given what we've seen with Biden...well, I'd vote for a small soap dish over that shell of a man....and even more scary for me, a vote for Biden is more than likely a vote for President Kamala, and that cackling bitch scares the fuck out of my more than any of them running.

Her in charge? Kiss the world goodbye....although the state of the union word salads would be amusing.

The ghost writers have gone along with it and I think really shot themselves in the foot.

We are still getting new Tom Clancy novels. Sure you can look below the line any see who actually wrote it but that isn't the big bold letters on the cover. This is true for a lot of the popular "air port series", I guess Lee Child is actually still writing his own books.

How are new authors supposed to make a name for themselves when marketing all goes to guys already in the ground. The authors actually writing those books have more or less allowed themselves to be comoditized and just wait for the LLMs to come for them...

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

It's not that things aren't selling, it's that the stuff they like to push doesn't sell. Tradpub was always hit heavy, with the hits generally not being what the pickers thought was 'good literature'. Combine this with 90+% of their highly advertised biographies being either in kind political donations or personal favorite celebs of the higher ups in the publishing companies and it's no wonder that sales are so lopsided.

I was offered a job for pretty much a fortune in a country whose politics I disagree with and I declined. I'm sure someone else will get this job and consider me a moron for rejecting what's easy money.

Err...just out of curiosity, what country was this....and are they still taking resumes??

For how much again??

;)

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

All it would take is the U.N. declaring all of Israel to be a demilitarized zone, ordering the Israeli government and Hamas to both disarm, shooting anyone who refuses to comply, and then keeping those million or so troops in that region to help rebuild, slowly drawing down the number of troops over... say 200 years, so that by the time they are gone, no one alive still remembers the horrors of this day.

Look, while I admire your passion for what's happening over there, and your love for peace, your statement REALLY troubles me.

I mean, who the fuck is the UN to tell ANY sovereign power what to do, much less occupy any country?

I mean, the UN is a place for the world to talk, but they simply have no power nor jurisdiction to go into a country and force anyone to do shit....

I mean, let's move it to another country for an example....the UN has no power nor would they have any to come into the US with an armed force and demand us to do anything. I dont care what happens, they are not the world police and have no hold over any sovereign country.

The UN has no power nor authority to declare anything.

I'm curious where you got this idea that they did....?

And wow..that part where you have the UN "shooting anyone who refuses to comply"....

Seriously???

I have not bought or have been given a book in the last 15-20 years I enjoyed.

It doesn't matter to most people out there, sadly...

The two latest generations can't fucking read anyway...

And they didn't come upon this out of the blue...their parents apparently weren't all that literate and didn't teach their children to sit still, obey and have an attention span longer than a gnat.