Quote:
Originally Posted by astrangerhere
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).
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I have fond memories of picking up paperbacks from a small convenience store, mostly star trek.
On the other hand my catholic high school had a small but very, very eclectic collection of books; both Dante and Dune for example. The most surprising find in my *catholic* high school library was
Bear by Marian Engel.
It was with a collection of Can Lit, mass market books in boring, boring covers suitable for the dreary, dreary lives, (complete with depictions of bad sex) encased in many of the books. However while
Bear starts with the protag living a dreary, dreary life, it doesn't stay there
It was the sort of experience where I later needed to verify it was an actual book not some sort of warped dream/nightmare.
From what my teen says, most of their class mates in this low income area have cheap phones which would allow for reading on them. I doubt most bother.