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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

#81

Post by midoridensha »

bragr wrote: post #12
Yujf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally buy books that came out recently (but pirate 10+ year old books) and the first thing I do to a new book is crack the DRM so I can just save an EPUB that I can read where I want to read it, when I want to read it.

Authors that published 10+ years ago don't have bills to pay? This is a weird moral distinction to me.

I don't get paychecks from work I did 20 years ago. Why should anyone else?

Moreover, the copyright term used to be 20 years way back in the 1700s-1800s. If 20 years was good enough back then (before overnight international shipping was possible), it's good enough now.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#82

Post by goosedragons »

falcolas wrote: post #45
kazinator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hence my comment about needing a backup strategy. If I go to a library to read a trade paperback from 1995, it's going to have been re-bound. And that's if the paper has survived. Trade-bound paperback books - which are usually price equivalent to ebooks - require intervention to remain usable for more than a few years. As for my own collection, I have no books from 1995 left. They've mostly fallen apart or been repl…

What do you do to your books?? Chew on them while reading?

I've read and bought paperbacks more than 30 years old. Yeah, I imagine a popular book in a library that's constantly checked out wears out faster, but every 27 year old trade you have is ruined? Seriously?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#83

Post by debesyla »

falcolas wrote: post #67
debesyla wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trade-bound paperbacks which tend to fall apart after (sometimes during, grrr) a single read I'm sorry for probabbly a stupid question, but what is "trade-bound paperbacks"? I have tried to google it but I can't figure out which binding method is meant here..? Cheap glued paperback books? Sewn books? Something else? :/

Effectively hot glue bound paperbacks filled with low quality, poorly printed pages. EDIT: I have probably confused Mass Market paperbacks with Trade paperbacks. The former is the main target of my ire, the latter is purportedly of higher quality in general.

Thank you!

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#84

Post by trgn »

sbf501 wrote: post #65

Not if they are stored in the cloud, where the bits are constantly being shuffled around various media. It is never the case that a bit stays on the same sector of the same media indefinitely. A personal library is effed, tho, because some flash fails if the blocks are not cycled. E.g., multi-level cell flash requires at least a refresh, of I think, 36 months (don't quote me)? Basically: the blocks need to be copied…

> Not if they are stored in the cloud

myspace was a cloud and lost all music.

I get your point, but books have proven to stand the test of time. We just don't know yet for digital media. I mean, very concretely, are amazon's ebooks going to be functional 200 years from now?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#85

Post by KptMarchewa »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #43
falcolas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable Not really. The paper's acidic, which means that the paper degrades to the point of not being usable without a huge amount of intervention. I have trade paperbacks which are under 20 years old whose paper are downright brittle. > but libraries canno Which is, I hate to say, irrelevant to the discussion of preserving digital documents. Libraries are getting…

> Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not. Libraries are how humanity at large preserves documents! Sure, I might have a wonderful collection of books on my hard drive, but other than me (and whoever knows about my torrents), nobody's benefiting from that; whereas everyone with a local library knows (at least, in theory) that they can find information there. When I kick the bucket, what happens to my…

Horses were how humanity at large moves from point A to B.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#86

Post by MikePlacid »

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. :)

What will happen to that digital knowledge if there is no electricity in the world for like… twenty years? I am not even thinking about “twenty generations”.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#87

Post by version_five »

ncallaway wrote: post #80
serf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#88

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

When I go to Olin Library at Cornell to get physical books today I find quite a few that are seriously yellowing and I am not talking seriously old but books printed in the 1970s. Paperbacks I have from the 1970s in my farmhouse which is a horrible place to keep books are often still in usable condition but have gotten much worse in the last 20 years.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#89

Post by ncallaway »

midoridensha wrote: post #75
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

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.

Certainly not true of every paperback from then. I wandered downstairs and found several books on my shelves printed in the '70s, '80s, and '90s in totally fine condition. On the oldest books the paper has started to yellow a touch, but are otherwise fine.

But even a book from the 90s is 20-30 years old at this point. I'm not sure if that fits colloquially with a claim that they fall apart in "months to years". I've never had a paperback book I've purchased fall apart within 5 years (hell, I can't think of a time one fell apart within 10 years with the exception of severe water damage).

I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#90

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #78
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Supporting the Internet Archive is very much worth doing – but we also need a parallel effort to archive the Internet Archive. There are other ways for it to go down than just "we ran out of money". (Then again, I don't know that a parallel effort exists; Archive Team were doing one a few years back, but I think that's stopped. So donating to IA is still your best bet, here.)
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