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Comment by goblin89 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more.

At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.

I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.

As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.

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> At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.

You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.

My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.

I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.

Your grandparents’ house must be huge. We never had a room just for books, not me, not my parents, not their parents. A family of 4 in 2 bedrooms, one living room. Shelves are not expensive and you’d be surprised, they can fit quite a lot of books. Over time some books were lent or given to libraries, others added.

Not huge, they just had a full-ass house custom built from scratch at my age.

I'm still trying to get my first proper apartment instead of renting =) And know I make more in a year than both of them combined in 2-3 years.

I know someone who owns some land to build a house. I envy that person, who is definitely in a more secure position than myself.

When I was a kid we lived in a small apartment. We still managed to have room for books though. A single bookshelf or two takes up only about 10 square feet of floor space.

I've become an avid reader of web novels when I found out about them as a teenager sometime before 2010. Idk, for me it completely removed the urge to get physical books. I've got a Kindle too at some point, but I felt the form factor was terrible for reading fiction. There is a reason why newspapers always put their publications into columns, because it makes for an extremely fast reading experience - which is great for fiction.

Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.

IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.

I never got into reading web-native writing, though sometimes I wish I did. I also don’t piecemeal publishing, even though I know many classics were published that way initially. On the contrary, I like to read for as long as I want, finishing a book is always frustrating.

Agreed, LLMs are an issue and will probably reduce the amount of written content published in the open (or at all).

Going to the library means you pick what you want to read from a much wider variety of available books, not just the ones the adults in your life deemed worthy of purchase.

I would almost certainly be on a diet of some attractive but unchallenging fast food like teenage detective novels if I had that choice as a kid. Would my life actually have turned out better if I didn’t read the likes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Garcia Marquez back then? Perhaps, but at the time I was enthralled and didn’t mind being able to choose among the books adults in my life had around (likely knowing I would end up reading some of them).

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