Three shelves of Bibles. Three shelves of the exact same book with different color packaging.
Two shelves of Science books, and nearly half of them are Complete Idiot’s Guides to whatever science they’re about.
One shelf for all of Astronomy and Physics.
Not quite one shelf of Philosophy.
And what about Darwin’s Origin of Species? Out of stock.
If you don’t understand the problem with this, then you are the problem.
This.
Best way to help change this is to buy more science-oriented literature, that will encourage more publishers to print books in those fields and help prompt bookstores to give them more space on the shelves.
Encourage scientific literacy!
To Whom It May Concern, please file this response under “The Problem Isn’t what you think it is”
First, please reference that all these shelves combined only take up a smaller fraction of the store than the kids section. Not to mention all the “Adult” fictions, or Science Fiction. There are more works fantasizing about having sex with aliens around distant stars than books on those stars.
Second, Origin of Species - out of copyright. Anything you would buy would probably have been originally typeset around… 1915s? Perhaps with a more modern forward. There’s no money in it.
Third, Interestingly, the Bible has exactly the same issue, with one caveat - out of copyright, but also the original wasn’t in English. Even original English translations, Most notably the King James Version authorized 1611, with their “archaic*” language, are out of copyright. Yet people buy Bibles, and Publishers create new translations of the Bible, which they can have a copyright of. Add to that targeted variations - plainly visible in your photo… That’s competition. That’s American publishing competing for American Dollars.
Fourth, it would have been great to see how much shelf space the combination of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism - but those probably aren’t the religions your regular readers are rebelling against, are they?**
(Wig, getting to a specific response)
In my last visit to the local Barnes and Nobel location, which is obviously not the one featured above, there were similar ratios of shelf space to those given. There were also similar counts of unique titles; a much better comparison of what is being published versus what is being bought.
Bookstores are businesses. Publishing is business. I agree, a higher level of Scientific Literacy would be great. However, if it comes to where money should go, I’m not entirely sure upping publisher’s profits would be the best direction to push.
~
* Archaic, yet were one of the stabilizing forces in the English Language for hundreds of years.
** Please note the different definitions of “rebelling” and “reacting”. I hope I have chosen the appropriate word.
(via wigmund)
sqbr:
A series of fractals, shifting and coalescing from a line to a fern-like shape to a Sierpinski triangle to fuzzy polyehedra and back again.
If you’ve heard of fractals before, you’ve probably seen Sierpinski triangles and fractals that look like ferns or leaves. This animation shows how these two pictures and various other fractals are linked. The pictures are generated using Iterated Function Systems, which take a starting point then repeatedly either rotate it about a point, or move it closer to another point. By changing the angle of the rotation, you get all these different pictures. In general this method can get you all kinds of cool fractals. [more] [code]
(via sqbr)