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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

#201

Post by vel0city »

theNJR wrote: post #135
fideloper wrote: post #131

Many 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 have this exact worry as a dad of a seven day old. During pregnancy, my wife and I read various new parent books out loud to each other. The plan is to continue that with baby. Maybe she’ll associate the Kindle with reading, but my dad collects books, so I grew up absolutely surrounded by them. If he just had a big kindle library, not sure it would have had an effect

Consider taking your kid to the library often, pretty much as soon as they can walk. The library near us even had a good collection of board books. My kid loves going to the library, playing with some of the toys, looking at the small aquarium, and browsing all the books to pick out the three to take home for the week. He's under 5 and has already checked out about 200 books!

Be sure to pick up at least one for yourself while you're there to set the example during the week!

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#202

Post by Vrondi »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #161
killjoywashere wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The libraries are getting rid of books. Especially bound journals. My alma mater has a fabulous reading room, and just enough shelving still in the building to partition the study cubbies. It's more about aesthetic than knowledge.

University libraries have notoriously poor childrens sections.

Unless you go to a college or university with a strong tradition of teachers' education programs. My alma mater has a terrific "children's literature room" in the library. Heavily used by Education major and Literature majors alike.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#203

Post by KerrickStaley »

A related thing Brewster didn't mention: When libraries "buy" ebooks from publishers, what they're actually buying is a license to lend the ebook a fixed number of times. For example, after a library lends a HarperCollins ebook 26 times, it disappears from the library's virtual shelf until it's purchased again. A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out.

The above is from a fascinating Planet Money podcast on the relationship between ebook publishers and libraries. Transcript at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385. I'd encourage listening to the whole thing.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#204

Post by jayeshhere »

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…

They actually store multiple copies. They even use IPFS to store it over decentralized network. But copyright is the main issue we don't see many services like open library or internet archive. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#205

Post by Vrondi »

willywanker wrote: post #151

The issue here is with DRM and having to move across storage media. I still have ebooks as text files from 20 years ago that I got off the Gutenberg project, and tons of EPUBs which are guaranteed to be readable since they are just zipped up HTML/XHTML files and not proprietary. For that matter I have Pascal code from high school in the early 90s sitting around on floppy drives and then later hard drives.

Yep, the Shakespeare text files I downloaded in the 1990s are still perfectly readable on basically any tech device, and have traveled across floppy discs, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, etc. They've been read on laptops, Palm PDA, PlayStation Portable, Windows Mobile Phone, and Android.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#206

Post by _Algernon_ »

falcolas wrote: post #105
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

> saved files are somehow more reliable I have a whole set of ebooks I picked up at a less than reputable site in '11. They're all in pristine condition, all perfectly readable. I have books on my Kindle that are older than that (though not by a lot). My 5 year old copy of "Edge of Tomorrow" (The LN "All You Need Is Kill" movie tie-in release) is yellowed and the binding is coming loose due to re-reading. The ebook m…

Either that specific edition is of bad quality or you need to learn how to take care of books better.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#207

Post by trgn »

sbf501 wrote: post #194
trgn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Amazon's ebooks or the database that holds them? Two different things. I believe every book amazon has in their database will never be lost, at least until WW3. They won't rot. They won't be eaten by worms. Acidic ink won't deteriorate the cellulose. We won't need to have gigantic buildings to house them all. Meanwhile the world's cloud storage will continue to expand exponentially, and the vast databases of books wi…

> the database that holds them?

But that's completely useless if there's not the software and hardware infrastructure to make the contents of that database readable and searchable. That will be really tough to do.

> and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again.

That doesn't happen automatically. Instead of librarians, it will be sys-admins scp-ing shit all the time. And they will totally accidentally delete entire archives at some point. Or forget, and the actual storage medium will degrade.

> I'm bullish on the cloud, if you didn't notice. :)

hehe :)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#208

Post by _Algernon_ »

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.

Unless the ebook we are comparing to (from the same time period) was a literal .txt file, it is unlikely you will be able to open it on a modern computer without processing/conversion of some kind.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#209

Post by robin_reala »

shakna wrote: post #186
Turing_Machine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either). EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuance…

HTML isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility. The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead. The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead. Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, y…

(hgroup is in the HTML living standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#the-hgr...)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#210

Post by prashantsengar »

nineplay wrote: post #150
fideloper wrote: post #131

Many 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'l…

> 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

Maybe that's the problem. If you tell her that she is not allowed to read books from one part of the shelf, that will make her more curious about them ;)

/j

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