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Speaking of that. Just look at this.
these tiny books are very much a decent gift and desirable thing to own, if there's a book that's dear to your heart, maybe a bible or some kinda religious scripture or otherwise something you always wanna keep on hand in your pocket and maybe pop open and read a line out of now and then, it's nice to have
Ran into the same issue. I was trying to find the new edition of American Test Kitchen for my mom, but all I could see was Hogwarts or great British bakeoff books. And a shocking amount of air fryer books. I think people must just live on frozen tendies, judging from all of the beginner instapot or whatever books. Don't even get me starting on the gender-afirming manly meat or bourbon or beer books.
Every hobby seems to be plagued with beginner level books and little else. I get that they sell better and when you want to improve your skills you go online, but there’s a lot of bad information and it would be nice to have books that show you better ways to do things. It makes me wonder how many people randomly start new hobbies all the time, for beginner books to sell in huge numbers.
Most of the time when you want a book on a topic, you're not really starting from the very bottom, you have some semblance of what the hobby is about before you get into it, after all, if you're interested enough in, say, computer building, you must have some idea of why you like it before you set foot into it, right? You don't need to be told that the power button turns the computer on. Books like that, almost stupidly beginner friendly, are for hobby tourists, people who literally just jump into a new hobby as soon as it interests them for a day (or the hobby suddenly becomes popular and they want social cred for partaking in it) and immediately jump into buying stuff relating to it before learning up elsewhere so they can validate their interest before it disappears in a week
I'm now old & crotchety enough that if anyone; family, friend, coworker; gave me a ""gift"" saying it was from any of these chinesium dropshipping sites, or that information somehow otherwise came to my attention, I would refuse to take it. I don't care if I'm called Grinch or Scrooge or ungrateful, if it's so great lucky you it's all yours. Perhaps I'm just lucky I don't have to engage in middle management mandated secret santa or the like, and I'm sure being a man helps
i don't know how that will save you from shitty Temu gifts, we all get them sometimes
Ain't that the fuckin' truth. It genuinely shocks me how ingrained Temu made itself in like, 2 years. Young and old people talk about it, talk about shopping on it, talk about how they find great deals on it, etc.
People in the age demographic of under 30 are less tech savvy than the previous generations. Gen X to Older Millenials was the sweet spot of general tech literacy when it comes to modern day computering (and a good chunk of them were barely at acceptable anyway). The younger people might give the illusion of understanding, since they can figure out how to click the 2 buttons to connect to bluetooth, but ask them to switch operating systems on their phones and see what happens. When the technology becomes dumb and streamlined, so does literacy.
I more meant getting away with being the grouch that says no thanks to such a thing, as I feel the lady farmers might not be so fortunate
Cookbooks are a dying breed like all picture-less book right now. You know how it's typically insufferable to actually get to the recipe in a webpage? You have to scroll past fifteen giant magazine-style images and five pages about the author's children's first day of kindergarten? Cookbooks are the same way nowadays: every other page is total bullshit that might have some entertainment value/eye appeal, but is basically fluff.
I do a lot of shopping on Aliexpress and it's always "buyer beware". Each "store" has individual ratings from prior customers, and it's a good idea to study those ratings carefully before buying. Some stores will have two types of reviews, wholly positive and wholly negative. This means that the store cuts costs by occasionally mixing counterfeit crap with legit merch, using their good reviews to offset the bad ones. Some stores have absolutely lovely people running them, some are flat out con artists and standover merchants, but most are in between.
There's a trend of a lot of people overspending on chinese ecommerce apps. They see all the cheap items since you're basically paying with less middlemen than amazon or your typical retail, and they end up walking away with a horde of cheap trash they probably spent 10 or 15 or so minutes perusing through and call it a haul. What'll typically end up is a bunch of clone people with cheap and tacky home decor, or they just throw it out quickly once they have their fun with their toys. Have someone I know that works with ewaste and he give me some of the shit they throw out for free and the things they get there from such sources often end up there literally unused or open-box and barely used.
Can't blame ya since I do the same for all of those reasons but I also sometimes import from Taobao (aka the mainland china version of aliexpress) since it has a lot more aliexpress doesn't
It's similar to some cooking websites when you want to find a chili recipe and the post starts with three screens worth of author's (made up) childhood story on how their mother used to make that chili or whatever. I'm sure some idiot from a marketing department concluded that emotion sells better. Some people, me included, want just the goddamn recipe.
You picked the worst example of a bad cookbook. That's The Food Lab by Kenji Alt Lopez which is a beginner tier cookbook by a food scientist that explains concepts, his thinking in why he chose to cook that way, and the scientific reason why the food works. The only real criticism I have is that most of the book of available free online.For example, here is a random picture of someone on r/Cookbooklovers (archive) showing a cookbook, I'm pretty sure from an influencer.
Half of one page is the ingredients, a quarter of one page is the recipe, a quarter of a page is a picture of the ingredients posed next to a serving of the food.... And the entire page opposite is the author's meandering opinions on what is and isn't good in vegetarian chili- and it continues to the next page.
Usually I brave through the page and then turn the skyscraper-tall thing into a post-it sized piece of paper or two. When I started with cooking I vented to mom about so much useless shit taking up a space in these and later got some old no-nonsense cookbooks as a gift from her. Also got more use out of a post-ww2 pamphlet from the early communist era that was given out for free in every grocery store than someone's dumbass diary with some recipes that masquerades as a modern cookbook.
