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Originally Posted by Namekuseijin
the worst part of modern times is that some guy may just send you a link of his bookshelf in goodreads as proof that he reads a lot, but it may just be as fake as his public profile. He may also download tons of books via torrent to impress you the next time you peek at his e-reader.
at least the old days you knew the guy at least spent a few bucks to have those shelves filled...
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Signalling has always been a part of human interaction (albeit great facilitated by the Internet in some cases, as you've shown). George Orwell pointed out in his essay "Bookshop Memories":
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In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical' English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, 'Oh, but that's old!' and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand.
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