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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

#261

Post by dredmorbius »

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

The problems with paperbacks, and even a fair number of hardcover books, is acidic paper (archival quality is acid-free cotton-rag), and for paperbacks, binding glue, which often fails with time.

If the pages don't literally crumble to dust, they fall from the binding, especially when actually read.

There are some formats which survive better, but many books will in fact deteriorate beyond readability within 50 years or so.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#262

Post by jahnu »

jayeshhere wrote: post #204
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

Is it be possible to "donate" storage to the Internet Archive in the form of being part of it's infrastructure but distributed? Like plug in an off the shelf NAS on my home network which acts as a backup for some part of the archive? Perhaps that is wasteful, but then again also resilient.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#263

Post by dredmorbius »

midoridensha wrote: post #116
BashiBazouk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cheap pulp-based paper was a creation of the 19th century.

The 1898 Report of the Librarian of Congress has an appendix titled "The Durability of Paper" addressing just this concern:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...>

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#264

Post by atoav »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #242

I used to work in a fine & rare book room at a library. The kind of thing behind a lock & key, climate controlled, you need to apply for permission to look at anything and you're monitored while you do it. The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library. Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/…

The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the information. If you find a thumbdrive with the same flyer as a pdf from a hundred years ago it will take a team of experts with specialized (or at this point very old) hardware to figure out the contents.

Video is even worse: a film roll that you can look at with your bare eyes vs some realplayer codec nobody can decode. This is why the library of congress lasers video onto analog film for archival. Reading an analog film is a question of blasting light through the transported film. Reading the equivalent realplayer file involves a little bit more in terms of hardware, OS and software (and this is just one codec I picked randomly).

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#265

Post by [deleted] »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #242

I used to work in a fine & rare book room at a library. The kind of thing behind a lock & key, climate controlled, you need to apply for permission to look at anything and you're monitored while you do it. The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library. Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/…

[deleted]

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#268

Post by FrankyHollywood »

lacker wrote: post #228

Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. This question made me curious, and I took a look. The first Kindle book I ever bought was Shadow of a Dark Queen, by Raymond Feist, in December 2010. It still works just fine. (Now I wish it had been something more intellectual and respectable. But no, the first four Kindle books I got were the four books of the Serpentwar Saga.)

I also thought this is misleading, I can still read the 30 year old txt files I have in backup (copied from old floppy disks).

As long as data is not stored in some obfuscated proprietary format you will get along just fine. Either software is available, or the format is known and you can write a decoder.

What if the format is unknown? Well, try reading old Egyptian, this problem is not new...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#269

Post by sorwin »

krmboya wrote: post #188
sorwin wrote: post #178

Terrible example, digital media can last far longer, under the same circumstances. Have a USB drive Hard Drive, or USB? Plug them in 10 to 15 years later, chances are, they will have far less damage than a book in all those years. It's an unfair comparison.

- Assuming the hardware does not change - Assuming the software does not change - Assuming the usb device is stored securely and lightly used. Bit rot is real

Assuming the book is kept under good conditions, in a humid controller room, with nobody touching it?

Your point is moot. there's a reason we moved to digital media, and why nobody keeps paper copies of everything, aside for last-resort scenarios (which once again includes physical media that nobody ever touches)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#270

Post by sorwin »

obsrvatlarge wrote: post #223
krmboya wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Assuming the hardware does not change - Assuming the software does not change - Assuming the usb device is stored securely and lightly used. Bit rot is real

Need to store virtual machines with both the operating system and the reader/converter software included. There are lots of bits that can rot...

No, you don't lol. You do realize both the algorithm to decompress the media, and the media as well can be stored alongside, right? Including. any instructions to actually use that media.
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