Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Digital books wear out faster than physical books

blog.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 453 posts

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#341

Post by vertis »

jahnu wrote: post #262
jayeshhere wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they store on IPFS (someone else said they did), then the answer is yes. Grab a subset of the content and mirror it to your device. Keep said device online.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#342

Post by BlueTemplar »

garfieldnate wrote: post #335
adalacelove wrote: post #250

Earlier 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…

"Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot" :

https://web.archive.org/web/20170617174641/https://www.alexr...

And that's why it's important to boycott devices and software that allow DRM : Intel and Ryzen AMD CPUs, Windows 11 (requires a DRM chip), maybe Chrome/ium if it doesn't allow to easily disable DRM support, Steam...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#343

Post by BlueTemplar »

lqet wrote: post #282
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, 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) I very strongly disagree. The amount of technical overhead required to render a simple zipped XML from some storage medium is immense. Even if you store this on tape, you need a tape machine to read the bits. If you manage to pull this off, you won't get anything useful,…

Yeah, I'm a bit worried about UTF-8 : it might be impractical to read with 8-bit only CPUs ?

http://collapseos.org/

At least the ASCII part should still be easily readable ? But not much of a relief for non-latin alphabet languages...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#344

Post by afiori »

leidenfrost wrote: post #320
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it doesn’t void the warranty, it voids SafetyNet, so now Netflix and other apps might refuse to work. And even if it didn’t, it increases the attack surface. Random apps can ask for root, and the average user won’t know what it means. And even if you know the risks, now it’s much more of a hassle keeping your device up-to-date. So yes, rooting is theoretically a solution, but it’s not practical in the least.

And that's the problem with "owning your device entirely". Most people are not capable (or willing) to own their device to its full extent and take responsibility for it.

The options are not limited to "A sanctified centralized authority controls and limits all my devices" and "I need to recompile the kernel by hand".

For most people "owning their devices" means being allowed to meaningfully change OS (or even just modify it) without losing major functionalities.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#345

Post by syliconadder »

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…

Another problem is the ease of reading. When there's a book on my shelf, anyone visiting can take a look and dive into the book. Or my kids could wet their feet in different topics, something which is not possible with digital formats.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#346

Post by afiori »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #339
thaumasiotes wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that (precedent aside) in the US the law clearly says that the manufacturer has to prove that you managed the product under warranty.

That is those "warranty void" stickers are not enforceable (under that specific law) by themselves, they need to argue that the user actually damaged the product.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#347

Post by matwood »

abracadaniel wrote: post #28
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…

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.

It's not really about physical or ebook though. Both require a plan. The physical book requires a shelf and some climate control. The ebook needs to be DRM free and stored on a 'digital shelf'.

In a 100 years if we can't unzip a file and read text files, then we have likely lost many of the physical books also.

Physical books also have a unique issue of storage space and hard to replicate.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#348

Post by HeavyStorm »

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…

Plain text files haven't changed that much in the past few decades. We could (should?) transform at least text into plain files (instead of stupid epub/mobi/etc), and that might conserve them for ages

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#349

Post by HeavyStorm »

adalacelove wrote: post #250
jstummbillig wrote: post #244

Earlier 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…

It is yourphone. As such, it has drm capable hardware, which let's you stream Netflix.

Think of the alternative: you don't have protection. Who would license their media to Netflix?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#350

Post by matwood »

f1refly wrote: post #321
longlivebooks wrote: post #307

What if we had a world where digital books were just .txt files? E-book readers can format the book with any font, margins, or layout they want, but the book itself is just a plain text file. Is such a world possible? I believe that simple text files can bring books to life regardless of the technology used. Even if all e-readers are gone, you can still use Vim or Notepad to read books. Even if the editor went away,…

That's pretty much what epub files are. You can unzip them and then read the html they contain. You can also use something to strip the html tags and only plain text will remain.

Exactly. And some modern books are taking full advantage of that fact and including javascript for interactivity. Though I'm not really a fan of this direction, some of the childrens books I've worked with have been pretty cool.

Also note that while EPUBs are zips, the first few bytes are not compressed. Doesn't matter when unzipping, but if you want to make changes and re-zip you have to account for it.

Post reply on HN