I keep following Vox Day because he’s my only window into the SF/F world. There was a time I enjoyed reading… not so much anymore and VD is the only guy able/willing to clue me in on the depths of the publishing world’s depravity.
Barnes & Noble has entered its predictable death throes.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/02/barnes-noble-beginning-of-end.html
The news comes as no surprise but B&N is the only chain bookstore left in California since Borders died in 2011. Soon, there will be no physical bookstores remaining except used bookstores that sell the equivalent of free Project Gutenberg. End of an era, indeed.
I speculate, what would have happened if B&N has morality-policed the publishing companies? If they’d refused to sell any books containing necrophilia or anti-Christianity? Perhaps they’d have gone out of business… but they went out of business anyway because people don’t want to buy those books. They could have refused to kick the can down the road and solicited higher-quality product from lesser publishers. What they actually did can only be described as appeasement.
Cooperating with evil is like paying Danegeld: a temporary play for enough time to eject from a problem that is not going to leave just because you feed it. Save yourself if you have no power but push back if you do. If your suppliers demand you sell shit to dupes then tell them to go to Hell. If you don’t… then the consequences will not pass you by.
Sic Semper Converged.
Meanwhile, Amazon is winning the biggest-box Big Box retailer award. But I’m having the same trouble with Amazon that I did in the brick-and-mortars: “Will this book that costs $$$ offend my conscience to the point where I refuse to even finish reading it? Does this new author belong in a mental hospital?”
Many of the books I’ve purchased from Castalia House don’t hit my fancy but they’re SAFE for me to purchase. I’m not going to end up reading about a villain getting an erection the size of a fire extinguisher from drinking the blood of an obnoxious evangelical Christian. I’m not going to read about a Mary Sue supersoldier who plots the overthrow of his government because fifteen years ago, he was conscripted away from the girl he had such a strong teenage crush on that he actually said hello. I’m not going to read about suits of powered armor whose recharging plugs are located in the crotch. I’m not going to read about how the U.S. Constitution is saved by a flaming homosexual. (That offering was from Sarah Hoyt.)
Burn in Hell, Barnes & Noble. You brought this upon yourself. You offered me filth in so many endless varieties that my only winning move was not to buy… that my love for reading fiction withered away.