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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

#211

Post by bonoboTP »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #109
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.

I have paperbacks over 100 years old that are still easily readable. It is in the shelf. Before that it was on my grandfathers shelf. The transformation was quite easy. Shelf ot Shelf. Somewhere on an Amazon server I have a couple of thousand Kindle eBooks. How long will Kindle device be around and useable? They may disappear at any moment really. I have also bought book and publications in other formats. PDFs, Word…

You overestimate how much people will care about your bookshelf after you die. Usually most of such book collections like that get sold for cheap or tossed out. Yes, a few interesting ones may be kept. But books are dime a dozen, the point is to read them, not to keep them around indefinitely.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#213

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

They can fall apart but can be re-bound. I have a bunch of such fixed books where I got the cover and the binding replaced.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#215

Post by friend_and_foe »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #206
falcolas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But that's kind of the point of the whole "electronic books last longer" argument. You don't have to worry about either of those things with electronic books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#216

Post by romdev »

I've got mixed feedback on this. I had a house fire a few years back where all my paper literature was soaked, and stayed in water for days to weeks. Books, and especially my comic book collection consisting of Sandman and other very collectible treasures, were transmuted to a soupy, unreadable mess. It was a very emotional time salvaging what little I could of these gifts from friends and family. Interestingly the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies from 1990 and prior were in water tight containers, but I knew from previous attempts to recover data from them that I'd be wasting my time trying to get ancient BBS text files from them. Digital media will expire, but I've got IDE hard drives from 30 years ago that have fared pretty well, and thankfully I had the foresight to duplicate the magnetic media that has a known shelf life to media that might survive a bit longer. And data grows in size and scale, so a 20MB hard drive from the 80s is pretty easy to preserve as long as you're organized, and plan, and don't procrastinate too long. But thinking about it - like life, isn't data meant to expire? Maybe your descendants will appreciate a few pictures of you, and some journal entries or your great novel draft. But I have no interest even in my mom's or Hemingway's kindergarten buddies. And especially if there are published books on a shelf, they're almost always replaceable. Think of who will be cleaning out your house when you die while you curate your data, and try to preserve what's of greatest worth to you and that audience.

And finally, last time I visited my father he showed me a 6" thick bible that had been in the family since the early 1800s, with beautiful fonts, colored illustrations, and the first few blank pages filled with marriage and birth records. There are some books that can't be replaced or duplicated, and should be cherished like a child.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#217

Post by BarbaryCoast »

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…

PDF is also future-proof. At least, it can be. A PDF file is just a collection of pages described in the Postscript language. The page "object" is then compressed and some metadata is built around it to produce the PDF. There are tools which will extract the pages in their (plain text) Postscript form.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#218

Post by StillLrning123 »

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

Most paper contain acid. The acid breaks down the paper. Pages become very fragile after some time(100 to 200 years?). Paperback uses cheap paper that contain acid. Paperback books will not last forever. More expensive acid free paper is often used by artists. Acid free paper is made plant fibers, but often not wood. It could be cotton. This will have a much longer life span. This paper is too expensive for most books

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#219

Post by friend_and_foe »

I don't know about this. There are a lot of considerations and trade offs, and simplifying the difference it too much usually a sign that someone doesn't understand the problem or is biased towards a position and wants you to be also.

Paper books have a fantastic UX. A book comes with all the information you want and also the renderer, and the interface is so intuitive that anyone that has even a vague understanding of what writing is can tell exactly what it is and how it is used, no tutorial necessary.

They're huge though, humongous, and they degrade. What we do with electronic books is re-use the renderer and only store the data separately, and this means that we don't have to instantiate the renderer with every set of data, this saves tremendous amounts of resources and space. Imagine every book you could ever want to read on one piece of paper, that's the limit of where this electronic book thing can go.

But the hardware is not passive, so using it consumes resources, and non passive things tend to degrade faster, and formats degrade (for some reason, I think financial reasons, can we settle on a format already? Let's do epub), storage hardware degrades...

I personally like electronic books. If we can come up with some type of cheap, small, long lasting storage hardware, like microSD cards but much, much longer lasting, settle on a format that can store basically any writing and drawing you could want (gzipped LaTeX and PNG anyone?) and reading devices that consume miniscule amounts of power, have no moving parts, are cheap and render well, I think we have a winning combination.

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