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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

#421

Post by anthk »

remram wrote: post #372
robinsonb5 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This completely ignores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code Those have been known for a long time and they are used in practice for both transmission and long-term storage. Big storage arrays come with health metrics and auto-rebalancing around broken drives. The idea that digital storage media degrades without "opportunity for someone to notice" is outright false.

Devices themselves can fail too, not just media.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#422

Post by anthk »

Retric wrote: post #93
falcolas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, yes. Today? No. The internet has, in many ways, supplanted it. And where Libraries are hobbled by following the laws, the internet community has found ways around this particular damage. And that's cool. Now then, should Libraries be getting shafted like this? Fuck no. Can any actions I take - short of running for office and making my way up to the federal government in charge of interstate commerce - e…

The internet is insanely prone to losing stuff. What percentage of the first 10,000 YouTube videos from 2005 do you think are still accessible? With copyright and account issues etc issues I would be surprised if it broke 20% and that’s for a website that’s still around. You can find old stuff due to internet archive and that’s about it. Making the internet basically a giant single point of failure in practice.

I remember an old webpage, the Spanish speaking clone for Slashdot, Barrapunto. They turned down the servers because they had no visits compared to Menéame, a Reddit clone for Spaniards.

Now you just have a few pieces at the Wayback Machine and that's it.

Now, tell me the digital wankers how much the digital preservation is compared to the books. Even if they used NNTP, I think not the whole archive would be preserved, just ask Jason Scott.

And I love computers, I use OpenBSD and CWM on a netbook. But current media preservation efforts are ridiculous compared to a simple book from the 70's.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#423

Post by yencabulator »

vertis wrote: post #337
garfieldnate wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like they already made it impossible to make color photocopies of some content? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#424

Post by Siira »

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…

> 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.

This is pure hyperbole. The one and only challenge is rent-seeking. There already are lots of ebooks from decades before in PDF.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#425

Post by zsz »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #17
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…

> 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…

The PDF/A format was developed specifically for long term document archival.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#426

Post by antifa »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #351
f1refly wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Netflix refuses to offer their services on a device that you own, you're always free not to pay netflix and instead take your money and attention elsewhere.

Just remember that that doesn't mean piracy.

If there's no ethical company left to purchase goods from, then there's no ethical issue with piracy.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#427

Post by dublin »

midoridensha wrote: post #75
version_five wrote: post #42

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

You've never seen a paperback made in the 1960s-1990s? The paper is brittle and the pages are literally falling apart. You can't read paper where pieces of it have fallen off and disintegrated.

I've got a dozen or so paperbacks from the 1930s on my shelf that I read from time to time, and hundreds from later decades. Most (> 90%) are only slightly yellowed and stiff. The remaining 10% vary from crispy around the edges to falling apart. Sure, paper eventually degrades, especially cheap non acid free paper, but we know for sure (because they're in libraries and still quite readable) that the content of quality paper books can last for centuries, and probably, with good care, millennia.

Keep in mind that bindings often last a lot less than that: One of the reasons genuinely old leatherbound books have those horizontal ridges on the spines is that they cover the (often also leather) laces used to re-bind the book and hold the pages together. This gave the classic works a certain look that was later replicated by publishers as just decorative ridges on the spine - but the origin of the feature was that those leather ridges were functional (they also acted as wear bumpers, but this was a secondary bonus) and a key part of the rebound book's structure!

I'll add one more big item to the anti-electronic book column: It is simply impossible to build electronics that last for decades with lead-free solder. Leaded PCBs will still eventually have tin whisker problems, but the new "green/RoHS" lead-free PCBs always stop working much sooner than leaded ones. Worse yet, no one cares because obsolescence design cycles are single-digit years now. Prior to lead-free electronic controls, appliances lasted many decades: Almost all of my major appliances are over 30 years old now, and some have never been repaired at all! They're a little less efficient, but much cheaper over the long haul, as I'm not replacing them every few years - that makes them arguably better for the environment, too, as there's no waste filling the dump, either...

Real books last centuries. E-books can't. We're a long way from Andromeda's "flexies"...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#428

Post by dublin »

dredmorbius wrote: post #409
anthk wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I admire your enthusiasm. 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…

No, he's right. Your comment was bullshit. Even really poor quality books will last at least many decades longer than any ebook reader and format. Good books last centuries to millennia. (And the ones with really good content tend to get re-bound, as well, lasting nearly forever...)

No ebooks can last more than a decade or two, and even if the files are perfectly readable, you often need a LOT of supporting hardware and software to use them.

Take even a very simple example like a Kindle in 15-20 years time: The LiPoly battery will fail, it may not be able to phone home to validate your DRM anymore, for many reasons: Amazon my have updated the APIs to a form unusable by your old device, your account may no longer exist, the wireless network standards may no longer be compatible or in use (original Kindles already suffer from this!), the charger may be long-gone (or you can no longer find a type-A USB port to plug the charging cable into), the lead-free solder will have developed tin whiskers and shorted out PCB connections, the grid may have collapsed due to the instability of renewable energy or a Carrington event, and in my experience, the microUSB charging connector on the Kindle itself will most certainly have broken, anyway, as they always do (and I'm NOT hard on my devices...) Exactly NONE of those issues will ever prevent a book from providing you access to the information it had from the day of its printing.

Thanks, I'll take paper. *ALL* digital data/info storage is ephemeral. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.

(And BTW, history shows that the fall of civilizations (and their support structures, of course) does happen with alarming frequency. For the last few thousand years, books( (or close cousins like scrolls, etc.) have proven to be as resistant to that sort of thing as possible.)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#429

Post by crtasm »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #348
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

An epub is a .zip containing HTML, I'm pretty happy with it as a long term format.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#430

Post by dredmorbius »

dublin wrote: post #428
dredmorbius wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your enthusiasm. 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…

No, he's right. Your comment was bullshit. Even really poor quality books will last at least many decades longer than any ebook reader and format. Good books last centuries to millennia. (And the ones with really good content tend to get re-bound, as well, lasting nearly forever...) No ebooks can last more than a decade or two, and even if the files are perfectly readable, you often need a LOT of supporting hardware…

You are refuting an argument I did not in fact make.

Actually, several arguments I didn't make.

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