Back to Blog
The invisible man penguin5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Amazon, which owns Kindle, has recently announced it will cease to offer its customers newspaper and magazine subscriptions - heedless of the devastation this will cause for independent periodicals. They are also owned by shameless monopolists. Technologies are all ephemeral, but whilst the book has been the primary vehicle for the transmission of knowledge for millennia, its electronic offspring are lucky to last a decade or two. Are books as physical objects already obsolescent? Few young people can give them house room. Nobody has to own books any more in order to read them. In the course of my lifetime, the private library has gone from being a necessity for any thinking person to becoming at best a luxury, at worst a burden. Mar cus, a gentle giant and evidently a well-read one, could not have been more courteous. ![]() “I was sad to part with mine, but now I have a much larger library on my Kindle - and it takes up no space at all. “What a great collection of books you have !” he said. It was the house-sitter who, as he marvelled at the book-lined walls of our sitting room, made me doubt my sanity. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |