But they can be replicated much easier and much faster
Digital books wear out faster than physical books
141–150 of 453 posts
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#142Many of the books I read as a kid would never have been read if they weren't a physical chunk of dead wood in front of my face, sitting on a book shelf. Now, as a full-ass adult with young kids, I usually buy books from Kindle. It's far more convenient to use the Kindle app on my phone. But there's a voice in the back of my head wondering if I'm doing my kids a disservice. They don't see me holding a big chunk of dea…
Seems like you’re overthinking it to me. If you want your kids to read books, take them the library or a bookstore. They’re bound to find something they like with enough exposure. That’s got to have a bigger impact than whether they see you reading a physical book.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that trade paperbacks really suck. Frequently the bindings crack when you open them for the first time. Mass-market paperbacks are not great but they have some minimum level of quality that is not certain in trade paperbacks.
I believe you have that backwards. Mass-market paperbacks are the bottom of the barrel, trade paperbacks are the better version.
No, I mean what I say. Mass market paperbacks are at a low standard but it is a standard. They are great to put in a backpack because of small size.
A good trade paperback is better than any mass market paperback but trade paperbacks come in various sizes and designs and many of them have serious defects when manufactured.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#144This 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.
An awful lot of print media from the 19th century is gone forever simply because nobody wanted to pay the storage costs.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#145DRM-laden digital books should be seen like the extra cheap paperbacks which fall apart sitting untouched on the shelf after a couple of years. Extremely different than the well-bound books one might think of when handling a 100 year old book. Non-DRM'd ebooks in formats which are open, easily parseable, and that people care to archive should be fine for a long time. Some people here are talking about a decade as if…
Is there a non-DRM format + an e-reader combo that allows for bookmarks, text selection, dictionary search? Ideally I would prefer to keep my Kindle but would really love to buy and own non-DRM books.
Kindle accepts DRM-free epubs (as of fairly recently). I just email epubs to my Kindle and it works fantastically
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your first paragraph had me thinking differently, but the second drifts off.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#147Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you have that backwards. Mass-market paperbacks are the bottom of the barrel, trade paperbacks are the better version.
No, I mean what I say. Mass market paperbacks are at a low standard but it is a standard. They are great to put in a backpack because of small size. A good trade paperback is better than any mass market paperback but trade paperbacks come in various sizes and designs and many of them have serious defects when manufactured.
Ah, I see where the size standardization could be valuable. I was thinking only of quality, and everything I've read (and I don't mean I just went to wikipedia ;-), though they do actually agree) suggested that a trade paperback was closer to a paper bound version of the original hardback, up to and including the size and everything, and built consistently to a higher standard than a mass market version.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your first paragraph had me thinking differently, but the second drifts off.
The second is questioning the validity of current copyright terms. The argument for authors continuing to receive royalty payments many years after publishing something is based on copyright law, however current copyright law is the author's entire life plus 70 years (IIRC), which is ludicrous. Even in the age of sailboats this was considered ridiculously excessive and unnecessary.
So look at the reverse: why is even 20 years necessary? For software, that's ridiculously long. If it weren't for pirates, we wouldn't have a lot of older software (like old DOS games) any more because of these copyright terms.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#150Many of the books I read as a kid would never have been read if they weren't a physical chunk of dead wood in front of my face, sitting on a book shelf. Now, as a full-ass adult with young kids, I usually buy books from Kindle. It's far more convenient to use the Kindle app on my phone. But there's a voice in the back of my head wondering if I'm doing my kids a disservice. They don't see me holding a big chunk of dea…
I only read on my kindle and yet I have a room full of shelves overflowing with physical books. Most of the justification for those books and shelves is so my kids have a place to wander into and browse around if they want something new to read.
Alas, I have yet to get them to show any interest in browsing the shelves. My daughter reads all the time but isn't interested in "old stuff". I'm holding out hope that she'll get to it when she's older. I recently told her that as far as I'm concerned there are no age limits for books and she can read anything she wants, that seems to have made her a little more curious.
It's my quiet little sadness. My love of Tolkien and Holmes and golden age mysteries and sci-fi is all due to the books scattered throughout home. I'd like to share those with her but I know that I can't push it.