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A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

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Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#61

Post by toomuchtodo »

sailfast wrote: post #33

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc).

If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#62

Post by gowld »

WillAdams wrote: post #28
fhdkweig wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get. If there is enough space to have a room full of books, it would be better used as a publicly accessible set of stacks. The only real reason to have a librarian-only room is for books that are rare and valuable.

As I implied elsethread, the solution for that is better funding. Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job which he began.

Someone can ask for a copy in the mail, cheaper than pre-emptively printing and storing thousands of copies of every version of every book.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?ref_=search_f...

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#63

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bastawhiz wrote: post #10

My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place. I used to work in a library,…

>My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy.

These libraries do not coordinate the deaccessioning. If it ever gets down to 2 copies, there's a non-zero chance that they will deaccession their copies simultaneously, and then there are none.

You worked for a library. Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#64

Post by arjie »

Modern public libraries primarily serve other purposes than paper book lending. University libraries don’t face that constraint but with the Library of Congress and Google we have a safe copy for surviving civilizations. So the only question now is how one accesses the content.

I’ve fantasized (like other datahoarders) of personal archives - and I do have a few hundreds of gigabytes of textual content archived for myself and to LORA my machines into. Copyright law does make it hard to have a co-op of book scanners but I can scan all of mine for myself.

Perhaps the future will be universal access but in the event it is not, perhaps my children will benefit from the family archive - though a future Primer must necessarily sort out the vast quantities of it that are inexplicably fan fiction erotica.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#65

Post by gowld »

ceayo wrote: post #55
sailfast wrote: post #33

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

- E-Books smell awful. - It's fun to collect, to look at what you have. - You can remember the books, by looking at your shelves. - You /actually/ own something, instead of some random variable in Jeff Bezos' database saying you are /allowed to/ read it.

No one is stopping you from building your own library.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#66

Post by gowld »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #61
sailfast wrote: post #33

What’s wrong with e-books? Highlighting is awesome. Accessible and searchable! I have a number of paper books myself but it seems odd to need to have them all on a shelf outside of the need to show your identity to folks that walk into the room with you, or to have some form of art “on the wall” to help one think.

DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until c…

> If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.

Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#67

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

gammalost wrote: post #18

At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm. People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that

For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.

Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#68

Post by WillAdams »

jerf wrote: post #39
WillAdams wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I implied elsethread, the solution for that is better funding. Someone needs to take up Carnegie's mantle and finish the job which he began.

You need a limiting principle or there is no limit to the "better funding" you're asking for until you have a Library of Congress in every small town in America, to no positive effect. What's the limiting principle you propose? It has to be something real libraries and library funding sources can take action on, because they have to take real-world actions on them. So this is not a time for aspirational speeches or v…

The limiting principle should be that for a given ILL region/system, there is at least one copy of each book/edition which entered that system which can be loaned out.

As I noted, it's a pain for me to have to drive down to DC to get access to a book which _used_ to be in the local library system, but isn't anymore, or to purchase my own copy (which wasn't previously necessary).

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#69

Post by buildsjets »

jjkaczor wrote: post #36

As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child. OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same". Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get…

Digitalization through a destructive process is what was used to train or future overlords.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

Re: A dumpster arrived behind my university's library

#70

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jjkaczor wrote: post #36

As a book want-to-be-hoarder without enough room to actually do so, these stories always make me sad - I spent alot of time in quiet, cool empty libraries picking up random books as a child. OTOH - I personally don't have enough room for real books, so everything I have is digital on a NAS. It's there, but "not the same". Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get…

You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf).

Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels.

>Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t

He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.

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