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Digital books wear out faster than physical books

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381–390 of 453 posts

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seei…

What a way to justify a crime. "I don't like how they act, so I don't comply with their rules". You pirate because you have no respect for law, because you are a entitled child or because you don't have enough money. Piracy isn't plain theft, but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners. It's close, isn't it? Would you sneak into a amusement park? Not pay for dinner if you found it not to…

I would just as easily pirate movies as much as I would buy an xbox controller off amazon, replace it with a broken controller, and send it back saying it doesn't work.

These massive companies don't owe you anything. These companies exist purely to extract as much wealth out of you as possible while convincing you that they're the only ones that can provide that service.

It's so convenient that I can pirate videogames, movies, tv shows. These companies want you to keep paying for this mass produced content controlled and influenced by money and what "sells" based on algorithms, social media influence... These companies control and influence you (read: consumers/society) more than we think.

I'd rather see these companies go bankrupt and blown up into a billion different smaller companies than have massive conglomerates control and influence what we see.

If we were to see more originality in the higher-value sections of markets (think indie developers/filmmakers vs companies like EA, TenCent, etc.), then I'd probably pirate less things.

The hyper-optimization of art and culture by these massive companies designed solely to make profit (and the population willing to throw their cash at it for toys, theme park rides, etc.) is morally repugnant to me.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#382

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,…

A few books need images. For instance, to show up some weird figures in mistery books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#383
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but rewriting software in order to access books is a lot of extra work. I just store the VM containing the necessary tools and make sure it still executes in the new HW+os when they are upgraded.

Formats change. Could you use some disk image formats from old Mac emulators made for the Amiga?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#384
post #269

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

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)

Your books will be readable in 20 years. Not so with a USB drive.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#385

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

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…

Bullshit. I can go to a second-hand bookstore in Spain right now and buy tons of volumes from the 70 and 80's.

The math book I'm reading right now it's from the 70's.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android. There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble. I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap. All those digital mediums a…

Have you tried to read a 5 volt smartmedia card recently? I came across a few 2 megabyte 5v cards when going through my Dad's stuff a few years back. I stuck them on EBay because it was better than just throwing them away, and was astonished when they fetched £30 a pop. I can only imagine they're used by some classic synth gear or something like that.

I have not recently but I think the card reader attached to my monitor supports the 5V cards. I don't think I've touched a smartmedia card since 2003.

They were really popular back in the day though. They seemed so futuristic, this ultra thin plastic chip seemingly storing your data on these etched gold patterns. It definitely seemed like something out of science fiction. SD cards are so plain in aesthetic comparison.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#387

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…

Many countries have their own digital archives, generally as part of their government's archives (so not just digital), I have worked on tools for sending data to the Danish Digital archive and was interviewing for a job there one time but I messed up the interview because I'm a dork.

They even have archives of all Danish (.dk) websites to some degree. Though it is not generally accessible like the Internet archive is

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seei…

What a way to justify a crime. "I don't like how they act, so I don't comply with their rules". You pirate because you have no respect for law, because you are a entitled child or because you don't have enough money. Piracy isn't plain theft, but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners. It's close, isn't it? Would you sneak into a amusement park? Not pay for dinner if you found it not to…

The reason you think that it is a crime is that you associate legality with morality. However there are deeply cruel and immoral things occurring entirely within the established "system" (as there have been all throughout human history), so that's a very poor compass indeed.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#389

EPUB, the current standard, is a zip containing UTF-8 HTML files. Zip, UTF-8 and HTML are all ~30 year old standards. They're not going anywhere. It's just that we haven't had the chance to see how long they'll last. As for the processing and reprocessing... We can't really do anything with printed books at scale without lots of manual labor. E-books open up that possibility. That's supposed to be a bad thing? Printe…

I have digital books from 12 years ago on my hard drive (I switched to digital 12 years ago and got rid of all my dead trees about 10 years ago). I don't see any reason why they won't still be available and readable in another 20 years, or 50 for that matter. I used to have about 500 physical books, which took up a dozen or more book boxes and were back-breaking to move (I move a lot - every year on average). Every t…

What ereader do you use that lets you read PDFs and EPUBs (presumably those formats) easily? I've heard Kindles aren't very accepting of that and would love to have a good alternative.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#390

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…

> It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone. Root it.

Not practical if you want to use the phone for payments and identity services because a lot of those will refuse to work on a rooted device.
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