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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

#111

Post by jahewson »

midoridensha wrote: post #47
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…

>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. I thought modern books were made with acid-free paper? I know this is a huge problem for books made in, for instance, the 1970s. Is it only the nicer books that are made with acid-free paper?

My 10 year old paperbacks are turning yellow, so I guess not.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#112

Post by anonporridge »

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.

> The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable.

Physically? Maybe.

But another factor is that human languages will naturally evolve to the point where future generations won't be able to read the words we're writing now without some kind of translation service. Even if it hasn't evolved enough to be classified as an entirely new language, it can change enough to be extremely difficult to decipher. This also requires a migration plan or historians to update the book for the modern language.

If you've ever picked up a very old book, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Even if it's still physically readable, you struggle to make sense of vocabulary and style in popular use at the time of publication.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#114

Post by chaxor »

version_five wrote: post #87
ncallaway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud".

Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#116

Post by midoridensha »

BashiBazouk wrote: post #95
midoridensha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a few sci-fi novels from the 50's that are in fine shape and many more through the 60's to 90's that are even better. Where are these people buying such poor quality paperbacks? The oldest hardback in my library is right around 300 years old and beyond a bit of foxing in quite good condition.

They used much higher-quality paper 300 years ago, so those books don't fall apart. Somewhere in the 20th century they used really crappy acidic paper for the mass-market paperbacks. If you're looking at sci-fi novels in hardcover form, this doesn't describe those; they generally used high-quality paper. I have a bunch of those from the 70s-80s that are fine too. Go look at the crappy romance novels from the 80s, and you'll see a very different story.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#117

Post by QuarterReptile »

sammalloy wrote: post #69
abracadaniel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable. Some can, most can’t. I’ve got a Bantam paperback copy of Moby Dick from 1985. It’s pretty much on its last legs. The pages are disintegrating and turning golden yellow, but the binding is still intact. Not sure if it will last another 63 years or so.

You'll have to treat this as a bread crumb, lacking sources as I do, but I believe that the nadir of printing quality was in the mid 1900s, when rapidly decaying mass paperbacks were on the market. I think that particular strain of bad quality left the market.

OTOH, I have a full set of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that is entirely readable and mostly in good condition, with nothing except gentle handling, regular dusting, and infrequent treatment of the leather binding to prevent red rot (because I don't read them frequently enough to prevent the condition with oil from my skin).

Edit: it wasn't hard to find a page discussing the phenomenon of acidic paperbacks: https://library.uoregon.edu/catdept/presbind/brittle

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#118

Post by falcolas »

troupe wrote: post #102
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> When I kick the bucket, what happens to my hard drive? Well you could write a will saying that you want it to be released to the public and then have someone come along and say, "they didn't really mean it." http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity

The prior version is still available, though? And the caveat "the wishes that Aaron had in 2003 do not necessarily correspond with those that he had in 2013" is a far cry from "they didn't really mean it", especially when the old version is still available (encoded as data on the existing page).

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#119

Post by moralestapia »

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…

I totally get the point of the article, not only in books but in other media as well.

My CD collection is sitting next to me since forever and will continue to be there for the foreseeable future.

Guess what happened to the very carefully curated playlists I had on Grooveshark?

I've also lost dozens of songs from Spotify as they've been removed.

I have a huge list of music videos that I like on YouTube (~900), every month or so I find a few of them gone, I don't even know which ones they are as they only say "deleted video" or whatever.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#120

Post by falcolas »

MikePlacid wrote: post #86
falcolas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

> if there is no electricity in the world

Then humanity will have bigger problems, such as survival. Our world isn't made for survival without electricity.

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