> If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life.

I think increasingly this describes how things work in the US, if we broaden our definition of "corruption" a bit to include things like corporations stealing your data, charging hidden fees, etc.

I'd add tipping system for various services, but specially restaurants etc in definition of corruption too. Here blame pass around between employees, owners, restaurant associations, govt officials making/ passing laws etc. But end result is customer keep paying extra charges or being labeled as worst customers.

I love how media is in this game , printing endless articles how customers are really supposed to pay tips because poor server. And even when customers are revolting against tipping culture it is going from 25% to 22% as a way of speaking truth to power.

> I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want.

There is some truth in this, but to me it's similar to saying that a drug dealer gives their customers exactly what they want. People "want" those things because Google and its ilk have conditioned them to want those things.

On the one hand, a search engine is not heroin... It's a pretty broken analogy.

On the other hand, we could probably convince Cory Doctorow to write a piece about how fentanyl is really about the enshitification of opiates.

It boggles me that anyone is able to get used to phone screens as a serious device for consumption of just about anything, let alone creation (e.g., typing).

consumption is easy. I read alot of Webcomics and well they are literally made for the Phone. Mangas are usualy also fine. Watching Videos also.

The Creation point I completely concur, I hate typing on my phone.

I sometimes edit photos I took right on the iPhone while on the bus or in a coffee shop and one time I edited a gaming clip through iMovie on the same iPhone. It feels good to use that processing power for something that isn't mobile gaming or reading reddit.

for typing I use the swiping keyboard if I am typing in a language it supports, but I concur it sucks using the mobile keyboard in either horizontal or vertical orientations.

I am not a big fan of reading manga on the phone on the other hand, I much prefer doing it on the tablet. Although I used to read webtoons a lot back when I was still on iPhone 7, which feels tiny in 2026, but felt gigantic back then.

Fairly enough I do have a natural advantage for reading small stuff on my phone. I just put my glasses up on my forehead and have the advantage of my diopters working like a zoom lense.

Curious if you have a sense of how long this has been going on. My perception is that various sorts of rudeness and inconsiderateness have been on the rise for a while, but really jumped post-COVID.

Some of it is minor but just suggests to me that many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them. Just today I was walking down the street and a woman was stopped, in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at her phone. She was in front of a shop door but not right in front of it, so she was half-blocking both people passing on the sidewalk and people trying to get into the store. I see this kind of thing so often now, in store aisles, on sidewalks, etc., and a part of me wants to go up to these people and inform them that there are other people around them and that if they want to take a moment to look at their phone they should step to the side.

Definitely post-COVID. I remember going to see bands in between or just after lockdowns ended, and even the bands were taken aback by the change in audience behaviour, commenting on it. Lots of self-entitled behaviour, talking and even yelling out during quiet moments, people walking up to the stage during a seated Nick Cave concert demanding to hand him stuff or shake his hand - I remember him saying "wow, you guys really forgot how to behave over the last couple of years". Now it just seems to be normalised that crowd behaviour is worse, more self-entitled. I'm not sure what's driving it - whether people who previously weren't going to gigs decided, during lockdown, that they wanted to go out and do stuff more, but just had never learned the etiquette, and/or social media making the experience about the individual rather than the performance.

Another problem that could be largely solved by shattering Amazon into itty bitty pieces.

At this point the US government is a national security threat (to itself).

This is not specific to publishing. The diagram tells the story: it's consolidation. Consolidation is bad. Giant companies are bad. In publishing as in other domains.

Correct. That's why even though the specific complaint from the article no longer applies, and small-volume books are easier than ever to publish, things are still shit, only in different ways. Consolidation in a market is just about the worst way to run anything; all the worst elements of a government agency and a profit-seeking business with none of the moderating factors of democracy or competition.

Bookstores themselves are a good example. Borders and Barnes & Noble put all the local bookstores out of business. Then Amazon put them out of business. Now most towns don't have a bookstore at all.

This is a good example of something that sounds true but is actually not. Private equity put Borders out of business (famously). Barnes & Noble is now private but by all reports (still) doing fine. There are more independent bookstores today (in more towns) than ever before.

Sounds true because (at least in some cases) it is. All the books I've bought in the past 20 years have been online, mostly from Amazon. When I was a kid my town had at least six bookstores that I can remember. Barnes and Noble and Borders came and they were fantastic but caused all the locals to close up within a decade. Then Borders closed and a few years later Barnes and Noble was gone. I go there today and there aren't any bookstores. Nobody thinks a bookstore in a small town is a viable business in the Amazon era, so none have been opened.

Big cities I'm sure still have some, they have enough population to support them even if most people don't patronize them.

I'm always surprised when I see B&N stores.

I see a fair number of them, scattered around, not even in ultra-populated areas, but the last 3 or 4 times I've stopped in to try and buy things for e.g. holiday gifts, they've had none of the things I was looking for in stock, and they always seem empty.

Some of the ones in the Bay Area were quietly acquired by Barnes & Noble in the last 12 months.

I hope that's not a national trend, but I suspect it is.

On top of that, Barnes & Noble is closing their larger locations, and replacing them with tiny ones that simply aren't compelling if you're looking for something specific.

people give books away here in California with "tiny house" library stands. In a major college town, previously full of specialty and trade bookstores, now very empty.

It's a community called "Little Free Library" or imitators. they're all over my nighboorhood. https://littlefreelibrary.org/

These are common in Tompkins County New York but I've seen them in Montreal and Philadelphia

Barnes and Noble put local bookstores out of business by doing a better job at being a bookstore.

Yes, as Walmart put local retailers out of business by doing a better job of being a department store.

I'm curious how much this is the cause or effect, though?

The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.

It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.

There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.

And, with publishers, you can get both monopoly _and_ monopsony problems. The latter is, I believe, one reason the attempt to consolidate from Big Five to Big Four failed -- I'm forgetting which two publishers were trying to merge, but angry authors talking about having difficulty selling books, and reduced pay for them, was a key argument.

CBS/Viacom was trying to unload Simon & Schuster. PenguinRandomHouse wanted to buy, but it ended up selling to a private equity company. A rare instance where that was actually the better option.

It's almost like competition is critical for a healthy marketplace! (Seriously, I _don't_ understand why this is such a hard concept for a lot of people to understand...)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair

I'm willing to believe this but the explanation given in the article doesn't make sense to me:

> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.

What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.

Yes, but you can't replicate a bottle of unscented shampoo ad-infinitum for basically zero additional cost. With books, print-on-demand and digital particularly, you can. Then it all becomes a huge one-off cost with a huge profit potential.

Amen to that. Larger companies should face more requirements than small ones. And if they can't meet them, great! That just means they can't be large. Companies should be smaller on average than they currently are.

There is nothing that large companies want more than a straightforward, procedural list of requirements on how to comply with copyright law.

(ok maybe there are several thousand things, but you get what I mean)

> I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life.

Agreed. I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI hit at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by. The lack of a "classic" mode in Win10 was one thing that motivated me to switch fully to Linux. To make the switch, I spent a good amount of time trawling the themes to find one that mimicks the look of Win95/95/2000. (The one I use is a KDE theme called "Reactionary".)

I think it is both nostalgic and pragmatic. I don't have to second guess what's the point of a widget, or even whether there is a widget. In default MacOS setting, the scrollbar is invisible, which literally spent me many minutes in some cases to even find that I could actually scroll down to find more options. That was completely crazy!

> I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI hit at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by.

I know some of my preferences for UIs are informed by what I first really learned how to use. But I also have preferences that are informed by decades of heavy computer use.

I despise UI widgets that just look like the window background with no borders or shadows. I can't stand massive amounts of useless white space. UI widgets don't require oxygen to survive so they don't need to fucking "breath" that much. I also despise mystery meat UIs that change their arrangement because I clicked one button more often than another.

Everything that increases my cognitive load and doesn't allow me to build up muscle memory in a UI is supremely frustrating. I might like the "look" of Mac System 7, it was a great intersection of functional and whimsical in my opinion. The consistent behaviors and learnable interface go beyond subjective visual appeal however.

Another thing is that part of my liking for the UI of that time is connected with the fact that it was consistent across all apps. Like you could set the font and color for a menu bar and every app would have that. This era of web apps drives me nuts because now it's switched to "this app should look the same for all viewers", when I want it to be "all apps should look the same when I use them".

The lack of consistency in web apps and Electron apps is infuriating. The inconsistency increases my cognitive load switching apps. Then you've got in-browser web apps aliasing system keyboard shortcuts.

Modern software feels so primitive in terms of UI compared to software from twenty and thirty years ago.

My recollection is discussing banned books from the perspective of "people have done and still do this elsewhere in the US, but we don't do it here".