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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

#391

Post by jjice »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #365
DocTomoe wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I worked at a national library during my university years, for some extra cash and free access to the more silent part of the building. State/National libraries in Europe often work on a "required (free) copy" aspect: publishers are required to provide the national library with a free copy of any book they publish. This makes them huge, but it also makes them have all kinds of books of different quality, both con…

I think this context is important, thank you for providing it. If i were to summarize succinctly I would say the lifetime of a book in a library is akin to the lifetime of a car at a rental car company. The natural wear and tear on it is far greater than one that is owned by a single, private owner, and so the expected lifetime becomes much shorter.

Great comparison. Individuals treat their possessions much better than they treat others.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#393

Post by orblivion »

I don't quite get why they have to keep updating formats. Or why there's OCR involved in the first place. Unless they're talking about scanned books specifically.

At any rate, I can't imagine a future where there's a trove of digital works from 100 years ago, but gosh darn it we just don't have the programs to interpret them anymore. No, there's going to be the interest in preserving it and they'll find a way. The cost per work will be minimal; they just have to revive each kind of software once, assuming they preserve the binaries or specs. Or just have one emulator for an old system that runs all of it. Or worst case reverse engineer the formats (again, once per format not per work). Is there a single case of digital material from let's say the 60s that we can't interpret anymore?

However it makes sense to me that DRM and physical upkeep of the drives are real blockers.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#395

Post by JTbane »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #11

Planet Money did an episode on the "e-Book Wars" between libraries and publishers a week ago: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe... I learned a few things about digital library books that made me sad: * Publishers only allow a certain number of "rentals" of digital library books, after which the eBook license expires. * Publishers also put an expiration date on the license, so after maybe tw…

Yep, those are some ridiculous restrictions when the library could (and should) just buy a retail copy and lend it out how they wish.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#396

Post by JTbane »

matwood wrote: post #357
grensley wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The episode is much more fair to the publishers. They specifically call out the Libby app as the turning point. Once it became super accessible for people to get ebooks through libraries, it started really putting the squeeze on publishers and authors. In the episode they talk about how publishers started seeing the curve go parabolic and were basically forced into panic action to stay solvent. The money disappears o…

Agree with what you said. Some other points, it's not all publishers. The big 4/5 are this way, but there are a ton of publishers who license much more liberally to libraries. Some will sell their entire catalog for a fixed yearly subscription w/o waits and some will even sell parts of the catalog perpetually. It's a win-win since publishers get a nice chunk of money and libraries get much better licensing terms. Ano…

>Maybe unpopular opinion, but I think libraries should give up on best sellers or at a minimum embargo them for 12+ months. They'll end up with better terms from the big 4/5, and can be a discovery place for new authors in addition to/rather than Amazon KDP where many end up now.

I'm 100% in agreement of this for ebooks given how disgusting DRM practices are.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#397

Post by ivanhoe »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #317
ketzu wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the point of the original comment that the setup to keep paper safe is also very complex? Another question I wonder about: How hard is noticing the failures?

The cold hard truth here is that curating information is actually a very difficult problem - but paper records will survive longer than digital records if no-one's actively looking after them.

It's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to be actively looked after too. There is a fire protection, regular deratization and disinsection, if roof starts leaking it has to be fixed. If you just leave a book in the middle of a field unprotected it won't last a year. When libraries are left without funds their books get destroyed fairly quickly, I've seen that first hand in my home country.

Digital data requires some maintenance, but with cloud services that's offloaded to service providers. I haven't logged in into Glacier or the related AWS account in years, and yet it still backups my hdd regularly. Now, if a comet strikes the Earth and destroys all the civilization, yes, paper books will be a lot more useful than HDDs or dead cloud servers, but in more realistic scenarios data copies give you more flexibility. Just look at Ukraine, they moved all their official digital archives out of the country at the very beginning of the war. You couldn't ever pull it off with paper archives, it would take months and cost a fortune.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#398

Post by r3trohack3r »

jjice wrote: post #389
marcus_holmes wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use the ReMarkable 2 for reading. It supports PDFs and EPUBs and the experience is pretty great. I can download a PDF to my phone and push it to the tablet via their cloud sync service. From my understanding, under the hood, the EPUB is converted to a PDF before getting displayed.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#399

Post by alexvoda »

Karunamon wrote: post #359
HeavyStorm wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it isn't close. The reason none of those things are comparable is because the service provider has lost something in the transaction in your example. Sneaking into an amusement park is theft of services, not paying for dinner after you consumed it is plain old theft. In both of those cases, the seller's resources were consumed. They have lost resources or effort. With digital items it isn't like that. I can make…

You realize the endgame for the MPAA is for all TVs to have mandatory cameras with face id to identify the people watching and automatically charge each person per view.

There already are unenforced (currently unenforceable) maximums on the number of friends you are allowed to enjoy something together with. Beyond that you would need a broadcast license.

There is no limit for the greed of the copyright cartel.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#400

Post by r3trohack3r »

systemicdanna wrote: post #27
vel0city wrote: post #18

DRM-laden digital books should be seen like the extra cheap paperbacks which fall apart sitting untouched on the shelf after a couple of years. Extremely different than the well-bound books one might think of when handling a 100 year old book. Non-DRM'd ebooks in formats which are open, easily parseable, and that people care to archive should be fine for a long time. Some people here are talking about a decade as if…

Is there a non-DRM format + an e-reader combo that allows for bookmarks, text selection, dictionary search? Ideally I would prefer to keep my Kindle but would really love to buy and own non-DRM books.

I love my ReMarkable. It does everything you listed except dictionary search. It also supports adding blank pages for notes which is super handy.

A dictionary is a feature I'd love to see added.

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