Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I think some of you kids are missing the point.  MMPBs were cheap and portable. Indeed, the first line of MMPBs produced in the US were called Pocket Books. If you were a person who wouldn't leave the house without something to read, they were life-changing. Their defects resulted from their virtues.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't read one now. But they were great. They made it possible to own a bunch of books and always to have something to read. Why disparage them? And they could still serve that exact purpose, too. As well as being lendable and giftable. |
Absolutely this. My first classics as a kid were "two for $1" MMPBs from Wal-Mart of all places. I read my first Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jane Austens that way. I grew up an hour away from a decent library (my parochial school banned books like they were hard drugs), and i didn't see the inside of a bookstore until I was 17. But I had 200+ MMPBs by the time I left home for college.
Ebooks, even with the benefit of thousands of PD books, are just not as accessible in the same way. My parents would throw fifty cents at a book far faster than any tech (though cell phones didn't have color screens until I was in law school).