I buy the book on Kindle, then I remove the protection and save it as a PDF. Let's see how long that lasts...
Digital books wear out faster than physical books
331–340 of 453 posts
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#332> Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. No, it worked terribly because they hadn't been stored well and were covered in mold (even the ones from only 70 years ago) or otherwise falling apart. I couldn't search them for specific phrases I remembered my grandfather reading me as a child, and I didn't have the physical space of my own to store them all eith…
You seem to be comparing opposite extremes: physical books stored carelessly (in a well-heated and ventilated house, mold shouldn't be a problem) with digital books stored very carefully (you were careful about DRM-free formats, etc.; and if you have stuff from the 80s, you doubtlessly have made backups and transferred it from device to device several times. I have some digital stuff of mine from the 80s and 90s, but I've also lost a lot, in spite of being conscious of the importance of backups).
On average I think what the post says stands. Assuming some minimal, but not very careful upkeep, physical books easily last for 100 years, digital material for much less.
By the way, an anecdote: some time ago, I found a bookshelf in an old house of a branch of my family, which contained books dating more than 100 years back (some were from the 19th century). The house had been abandoned for many years, so the books had been exposed to the elements. Most of the books were softcover, and they crumbled on touch, some of them almost literally crumbled to dust. But the few hardcover ones endured, with moisture stains on the cover but I still have them and they are perfectly readable.
Before that, I usually preferred to buy softcover books because they are lighter, more comfortable to read, cheaper and take less space. Since that day, if I really like a book (or think I'm going to like it, due to author, etc.) I always try to get it in hardcover.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.
I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is…
Those user hostile features are what drive me to piracy. No way I'll pay money to have the privilege of installing spyware just so I can stream low-quality video to whatever device the provider deems worthy at that particular moment.
I'll just go on 1337x and in 2 minutes I have an high quality mkv that I can play anywhere I want. I'd happily pay 5-10$ a pop for this, and for indie movies I do make the effort of seeing if there's a way of paying to watch it somewhere, even if I just pay and don't watch it there, and watch the pirated rip anyway.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#334The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot l…
Digital data doesn't wear out, but it also doesn't degrade gracefully. Usually if a printed page starts to degrade there is at least the opportunity for someone to notice and take corrective action before the content is lost completely (scanning, processing and re-printing, perhaps). Digital data tends to go from "fine" to "gone" with no middle ground.
Well the thing about digital data is that it's all represented in an uneven compressed way. Take your average piece of paper with text on it, it's essentially a 2D array of white and black dots. Remove half of all black dots and you can still mostly see what the text was.
Same is true with raw digital representations. Take on the other hand a jpeg which is a bunch of coefficients for sine waves, where every tiny change ripples out to ruin the entire thing. Even the basic 3 byte RGB per pixel representation is already compressed with only 8 bits being used to save 256 values. Flip the MSB and your value is already completely screwed.
An equal encoding to real paper would be using 256 bits to represent each colour, summing up the bits to get integer values. That way you can flip 20 bits and you'll still easily tell what the colour was, without any extra processing.
This of course comes at an exponential increase in storage requirements, plus we can be smarter than just using brute force. Taking a compressed representation and then adding on a few layers of error correction would likely be far more reliable while preserving most of the spatial efficiency. Of course then you need the software for unpacking and correcting to survive as well...
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.
I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is…
I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me, the content was streamed to me, the device has no business preventing me from taking a screenshot or recording video. Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally buy books that came out recently (but pirate 10+ year old books) and the first thing I do to a new book is crack the DRM so I can just save an EPUB that I can read where I want to read it, when I want to read it.
Authors that published 10+ years ago don't have bills to pay? This is a weird moral distinction to me.
This is what you say here, but let's see if this accurately reflects your reality.
Do you live in a house? Do the people who built it receive regular payments from you?
They build houses and are paid for their work. If they want to keep being paid, they need to keep building houses.
What about the roads you use, do those who built them continue to be paid for their work decades later?
What is "Weird" about your thinking is that somehow because they wrote a book 10+ years ago you feel they should still be paid for it? If they want to be paid today, they should publish another book.
How come you are OK having people pay for books they wrote 10+ years ago but you dont pay others for work they did decades ago?
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is…
I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me , the content was st…
Just wait till they make impossible to take a photo with your phone of your desktop screen.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#338Click-bait title. It's about devices, not the actual digitized book. I have .pdf files from 90's when I started to learn assembler, they still apply (for basic and medium) today and I can read them just fine on my Foxit reader.
To be fair, there are probably other files from that time which you can't read anymore easily.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an option. Rooting the device voids the warranty. It's not a reasonable thing to ask the average person.
Not having a warranty is, frankly, also a part of it being really your phone. "I want to be allowed to do whatever I want, but if I do something I regret, I get a refund" is not a coherent position to take.
Bullshit, warranties is the way to keep manufacturers honest : if it only has minimum legal manufacturer warranty, you know it's crap.
And it should be illegal to void warranty for rooting.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#340Terrible 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.
If USB sticks are as unreliable as some SD cards, chances are they break after a few years, too.