7
Shadows
Decluttering is a gateway drug to minimalism. Kyle Chayka wrote a critique of both trends in his book, The Longing for Less: What’s Missing From Minimalism. Having enjoyed that book, I requested my academic library acquire his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. While I waited, I found his 2020 LitHub essay where he writes about finding a vintage book in Donald Judd’s personal library.
That book was Jun’ichirĹŤ Tanizaki’s In Praise Of Shadows (1933), which compares Eastern and Western approaches to the use of light and shadow in architecture. My library’s copy of the 72-page translated work was checked out and overdue. New print copies were $9 on Amazon. Meanwhile, PDF copies displayed at the top of Google search results. I debated the ethics of reading the PDF copy. The author was not alive, but the translators were. Had I borrowed the book like I intended, nobody alive or dead would receive royalties.
So I started to read the PDF, but less than twenty pages in, I remembered how much I hated reading long PDFs on a computer. I went back to the book’s Amazon product page, switched formats from paperback to ebook and discovered I could read this immediately on my Kindle at no added cost. This title was available through Kindle Unlimited, a service I forgot I had subscribed to (more on this later.)
Authors who enroll in Amazon’s program are able to receive royalties (at a rate of around $0.004 to $0.005 per page read) through Kindle Unlimited. Whether the translators for Shadows were eligible for enrollment, I do not know.
