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Digital books wear out faster than physical books

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Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#71

Post by themitigating »

abracadaniel wrote: post #28
falcolas wrote: post #10

This is a really weird article for me. Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside. That's about it. These three technologies are some of the oldest and most robust we have when it comes to digital media at large. Being concerned about reading and displaying HTML pages in a zip file in a decade is absurd. They're both already over 30 years old themselves. DRM, yes. DRM is a complete a…

The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable. An ebook takes a migration plan to remain readable. Yes you can remove DRM, but libraries cannot, they have to keep paying, and they're being sued to prevent them from preserving and migrating their data.

So it's possible to preserve them, it's just difficult. The article should really say "it's easier to maintain written information than digital"

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#72

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #21
falcolas wrote: post #10

This is a really weird article for me. Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside. That's about it. These three technologies are some of the oldest and most robust we have when it comes to digital media at large. Being concerned about reading and displaying HTML pages in a zip file in a decade is absurd. They're both already over 30 years old themselves. DRM, yes. DRM is a complete a…

If you don't copy those files to new media, the piece of hardware itself that they reside on may be unusable. How easily can you read some HTML sitting on a 500 megabyte IDE drive from 1995, versus a book printed in 1995? If you come across such an object, you don't even know what is on it, and whether it is worth it to delve into it.

[deleted]

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#73

Post by serf »

version_five wrote: post #42
falcolas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.

This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine

go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load.

I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme.

Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#74

Post by schiffern »

falcolas wrote: post #64
schiffern wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not. I'm picturing someone in the crowd saying this while the Library of Alexandria burns.

And that's why it's great that the internet exists. A very large number of libraries can burn and no knowledge will be lost. Just copies of that knowledge. Those Alexandrians' should have focused more on their tech game. :)

Alexandria wasn't the only library in its day, obviously.

Sometimes you "only" lose redundancy. But occasionally a lost library (or digital archive) contains unique content, so statistically the survival rate still trends toward zero.

How is knowledge lost? "Slowly at first, then all at once."

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#75

Post by midoridensha »

version_five wrote: post #42
falcolas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.

This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine

You've never seen a paperback made in the 1960s-1990s? The paper is brittle and the pages are literally falling apart. You can't read paper where pieces of it have fallen off and disintegrated.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#76

Post by ncallaway »

falcolas wrote: post #13
armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years , and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk. But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Inte…

Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.

> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years

I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months?

It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#77

Post by Eupraxias »

falcolas wrote: post #13
armchairhacker wrote: post #5

Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years , and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk. But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Inte…

Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.

Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape.

When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#78

Post by jamiek88 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68
falcolas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, yes. Today? No. The internet has, in many ways, supplanted it. And where Libraries are hobbled by following the laws, the internet community has found ways around this particular damage. And that's cool. Now then, should Libraries be getting shafted like this? Fuck no. Can any actions I take - short of running for office and making my way up to the federal government in charge of interstate commerce - e…

> The internet has, in many ways, supplanted it. The internet is big and sprawling. It's easy to prune, by accident or malice. Think of how much of the web goes through Cloudflare! Think of how much we rely on the Internet Archive; if that went down, where would we be? Libraries, on the other hand, are decentralised, redundant, curated, indexed, and maintained against both bitrot and link rot. We could make the inter…

Great point about if the internet archive went down.

Every single one of us on this site unless in poverty should consider donating to the IA.

I’ve just changed my monthly donation from Wikipedia to IA.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#79

Post by sammalloy »

linuxhansl wrote: post #14

Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one. Every hoop is taken to make them like real books whether it makes sense or not, except for the time when you actually want to lend or give them to someone else. Then it gets complicated, depends on the vendor, or is simply impossible. I have no need for that. Imagine 200 years in the future, all license servers are disabled and we cannot read our own…

> Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one.

It seems like less of a scam and more of a technology constrained by publishers and authors. Lots of people borrow digital books from libraries, for example, without ever buying them.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#80

Post by ncallaway »

serf wrote: post #73
version_five wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine

go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load. I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme. Yes, a human could…

> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years

>> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store

Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.

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