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?
yes, it's hard, but papyrus kept inside a very strong, possibly waterproof, possibly not affected by rust (alluminium, stainless steel etc), metal box will last much longer than hard drives kept inside the same strong metal box.
Digital books wear out faster than physical books
401–410 of 453 posts
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#402Terrible 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.
I have some books on CD-ROM. They have no damage, true...but good luck finding a computer with a CD-ROM drive now.
From a Library of congress study: "The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer."
https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rott...
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#403Earlier 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 isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility. The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead. The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead. Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, y…
Those are all basically cosmetic/layout related, though. The text itself is still perfectly readable.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#404A related thing Brewster didn't mention: When libraries "buy" ebooks from publishers, what they're actually buying is a license to lend the ebook a fixed number of times. For example, after a library lends a HarperCollins ebook 26 times, it disappears from the library's virtual shelf until it's purchased again. A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too wo…
> A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out. Is this the real range? Intuitively, it seems low, but I have no idea. I remember those "Due date" tables in books from my childhood, with what must have been at least a couple of dozen rows...
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon's ebooks or the database that holds them? Two different things. I believe every book amazon has in their database will never be lost, at least until WW3. They won't rot. They won't be eaten by worms. Acidic ink won't deteriorate the cellulose. We won't need to have gigantic buildings to house them all. Meanwhile the world's cloud storage will continue to expand exponentially, and the vast databases of books wi…
> the database that holds them? But that's completely useless if there's not the software and hardware infrastructure to make the contents of that database readable and searchable. That will be really tough to do. > and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again. That doesn't happen automatically. Instead of librarians, it will be sys-admins scp-ing shit all the time. And they will to…
To give you an example, a good friend of mine did her PhD on two 16th century French philosophers' correspondence. It was a very comprehensive analysis of all of their exchanged letters, diaries, and journals. She's in a complete panic about the fact that today, all correspondence is done via email, which is protected with passwords; and once people die their passwords go with them unless they make arrangements. Maybe this is OK with a few big brains that the world knows about, but what about all the quiet geniuses that haven't been discovered? Historians will never have access to these lost works. Of course there are analogies to the analog world, but the point is: digital media is causing a type of dark age right under our noses.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTML isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility. The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead. The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead. Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, y…
None of that is unreadable. You can always download a browser from a few years back and open the page with that. So while there may be some inconvenience with old information, there is no loss of content.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#407Earlier 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.
It doesn't if you're using Magisk - which is the case 99% of the time. Magisk has been updated and passes SafetyNet under Android 12 too - no other means of rooting a modern phone is safe anyway.
It's nice if this is a hobby (and I have rooted my phones in the past), but for the average user (even the average technical user) who just wants to get on with their day without becoming an expert in rooting, it's a complete no-go.
Importantly, it's a very poor substitute for regulations mandating that manufacturers offer us these options without having to go through back doors. I believe that any energy spent on technical workarounds to manufacturer locks is better spent on political activism to enable true device ownership through regulation.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#408Earlier 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.
Check out some talk here, for instance: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=350162
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You might care to temper it with a balance of rigour in verifying your own beliefs and anecdotal experiences, your haste to dismiss that of others, and as in assessing your own methodology and its potential weaknesses.
I could perhaps have been more clear to indicate that use of acidic, pulp-based paper is more common in paperback publications, rather than universal. The point remains that as a cheaper publication mode, that cheaper publication processes and materials are more prevalent. I have encountered issues with pulp-based decay in both paperback and hardcopy books.
I'd linked an 1898 reference to issues with high-pulp, acidic paper degradation in an earlier comment (also submitted as an HN item). It begins:
The Library of Congress is indebted to the American ambassador at Berlin, the Hon Andrew D. White, for the following copy of the regulations adopted by the Prussian Government for the security of the national archives, and teh special danger involved in printing or writing records on paper made of wood pulp.
Wood pulp is extensively used in the manufacture of modern paper.
Paper made from compositions containing wood pulp decays more or less rapidly in proportion to the amount of wood pulp used.
Such paper is unfit for official use where permanency of records is essential or important.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...>
The specific issue is somewhat less the wood pulp than acidic materials used in its preparation and their interaction with the pulp. Wikipedia has a good article on the matter:
Paper degradation is a slow process, but it is significantly accelerated in an acidic environment. In the mid-nineteenth century, the method of paper production became popular, in which resin-alum glue was added to the paper pulp.[3] The aluminum sulphate remaining in the paper form, in reaction with water, acids that catalyze the decomposition of cellulose (acidic hydrolysis). In this process, the cellulose chains are shortened, which reduces the tear resistance of the paper, and at the same time increases the cross-linking of their structure that causes the paper to stiffen and become brittle.[4] Parallel to the degradation under the influence of water, the cellulose chains react with oxygen, in result of oxidation the chains are also shortened.[5] Not only cellulose, but also the lignin contained in the paper is oxidized, which leads to the yellowing of the paper.
... The process of self-degradation of paper causes exceptional difficulties in safeguarding the collections of archives and libraries. For example, an analysis of the book collections of the Jagiellonian Library, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Książnica Cieszyńska, the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Cracow University of Technology proved that as much as 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s (to be precise in 1996 in Poland) have all the features of acidic paper.[7] It turned out that these institutions, established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper>
As to books published in the 1970s and 1980s, I have, or have had, numerous instances of these in my own personal library, purchased new, which are in the process of or have entirely degraded beyond usability, the latter having been discarded.
Those Spanish examples you've encountered might be a useful foil on which to consider a further concept (and common methodological / sampling error): survivorship bias:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias>
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#410Earlier 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…