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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

#431

Post by dublin »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #332
xoa wrote: post #15

> Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. No, it worked terribly because they hadn't been stored well and were covered in mold (even the ones from only 70 years ago) or otherwise falling apart. I couldn't search them for specific phrases I remembered my grandfather reading me as a child, and I didn't have the physical space of my own to store them all eith…

You seem to be comparing opposite extremes: physical books stored carelessly (in a well-heated and ventilated house, mold shouldn't be a problem) with digital books stored very carefully (you were careful about DRM-free formats, etc.; and if you have stuff from the 80s, you doubtlessly have made backups and transferred it from device to device several times. I have some digital stuff of mine from the 80s and 90s, but…

I learned this from a bibliophile minister many years ago: Any book worth reading is worth keeping. Any book worth keeping is worth having in hardback, if at all possible. Buy hardbacks (used if possible) and keep them. Bookcases aren't really that expensive. (Toss the occasional purchases not worth keeping, and don't worry about them.)

Oh, and do whatever it takes to keep mold out of your library. Moldy books that you decide to keep, not replace, belong only in sealed plastic boxes treated with borax, sodium carbonate, and/or chlorine dioxide, and preferably stored outside the house!)

Building a library is like planting trees - you don't do it so much for yourself as you do for those who will come after you. I have a digital library, too, but I don't expect it to be usable at all in a century...

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#432

Post by musicale »

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…

> Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.

This situation sucks. It's as if movie and tv studios (including Netflix, apparently) said "we want you to implement a bunch of intrusive, complicated, wasteful technology that will punish paying users while having little to no effect on pirates" and all the tech companies said "great idea, let's do it!"

I suppose the (self-correcting) endgame is when DRM makes paid media so inconvenient that it drives the masses to piracy.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#433

Post by musicale »

gwbas1c wrote: post #184
matheusmoreira wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? Copyright, of course. The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me.

> The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me. Because it's a library. If you happen to be lucky enough to go there and meet the people running it, it's very clear they are librarians doing what librarians do.

> Because it's a library

Unfortunately digital libraries seem to be stuck with ebooks that often carry greater restrictions than physical books while costing more.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#434

Post by kwhitefoot »

dredmorbius wrote: post #261
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

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…

I have at least a couple of thousand paperbacks that are at least fifty years old. Not one of them is unreadable. A few of the cheaper ones (mostly very cheap US editions) are falling apart but that doesn't have much effect on readability.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#435

Post by account42 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #342
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…

"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...

Boycotton all recent x86 CPUs is probably not reasonable for most people. More actionable is to make sure you control the software (most importantly, the OS) that runs on those CPUs so that their user-hostile features are not used for DRM.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#436

Post by account42 »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #355
andrepd wrote: post #333

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…

> but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners

The legitimate owners of information are all of us. Copyright is a special monopoly only granted to authors only because it was thought to benefit society as a whole.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#437

Post by account42 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #303
layer8 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.

The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG. However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from t…

> However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.

Or DRM. HTML still being used isn't going to help you when its wrapped up in an encrypted blob. We're not there yet (except for video) but you can bet there are plenty of actors who will jump at the chance.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#438

Post by account42 »

Shorel wrote: post #240
layer8 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.

It would be a bit tragic if HTML goes out of use, but JavaScript continues XD

There are already websites that intentionally hide everything until JS loads even though all the content is still in the HTML. Not to mention sites where the HTML is just a stub to load JS.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#439

Post by account42 »

ivanhoe wrote: post #284
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…

Literally ANY digital format can be converted to a modern version fully automatically once the need arises. You need to solve the problem once, build a tool, and from that moment on you can convert as many files as you need with a single click. This is way cheaper and easier than dealing with paper rot and ink blended by acids from air and paper.

This is overly optimistic. Even just for videos you are going to have to accept either additional quality loss or size bloat when converting older obscure codecs to something your average modern device can play.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#440

Post by iggldiggl »

anthk wrote: post #382
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,…

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

Then there are various typographical and layout features – at a very minimum cursive, bold and possibly underlines should be not that uncommon. Quite a few books use footnotes, which are a bit of a paint to represent in a plain text format that's lacking the ability to explicitly link footnote symbols with their corresponding texts. (So you either need to introduce hard pagination, or convert them to endnotes, neither of which is really satisfactory.)

Sometimes the pagination is explicitly played with, so even if your digital book doesn't use hard pagination, it'd still be useful to at least being able to force a new screen page.

Font sizes occasionally get used for creative effects or to otherwise convey meaning, and the same goes for font selection itself. Sometimes even colour is used.

And some books get quite creative in with playing with layout and typography effects. The Raw Shark Texts had some ASCII-art style pages, but utilising a proportional font (!) [1], and House of Leaves went totally bonkers in its use of creative typography (https://www.google.com/search?q=House+of+Leaves+typography&t...).

[1] Even if those were based on a fixed-width font, you still need a way of indicating to the e-book reader software "Hey, here's some ASCII art, please don't reflow the text here and don't put a page break in the middle of the art, either". With a proportional font you either need to make sure the exact same font you used for layouting also gets used for display, or just give up and include that text as an image (and an appropriate alt-text, especially if the text for the ASCII-art isn't just random gibberish, but actually meaningful text, too).

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