Chopping books in half
theguardian.com
Chopping books in half
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Chopping books in half
#2I remember seeing something about the twitter outrage over this and thinking it was silly.
But I like the author's point: It's cool that people still care so much about books in the digital age.
Long live books, in any increment.
Re: Chopping books in half
#3Funny, I've flipped to thinking of my electronic copies of books as the permanent ones and the hard copies as just convenient printouts. With a few sentimental exceptions. Damaging a physical book is for me becoming less taboo than failing to properly backup my book drive. Every spare corner of my house is crammed with books but every year they feel more anachronous. Like an 8 track collection.
Re: Chopping books in half
#4Funny, I've flipped to thinking of my electronic copies of books as the permanent ones and the hard copies as just convenient printouts. With a few sentimental exceptions. Damaging a physical book is for me becoming less taboo than failing to properly backup my book drive. Every spare corner of my house is crammed with books but every year they feel more anachronous. Like an 8 track collection.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
Re: Chopping books in half
#5Funny, I've flipped to thinking of my electronic copies of books as the permanent ones and the hard copies as just convenient printouts. With a few sentimental exceptions. Damaging a physical book is for me becoming less taboo than failing to properly backup my book drive. Every spare corner of my house is crammed with books but every year they feel more anachronous. Like an 8 track collection.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago.
Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
Re: Chopping books in half
#6I remember seeing something about the twitter outrage over this and thinking it was silly. But I like the author's point: It's cool that people still care so much about books in the digital age. Long live books, in any increment.
Yeah, it's because on Twitter they don't perceive the _irony_ of someone chopping a book in half. It's always a firestorm for those guys, always holistically disparaging books, articles of clothing etc.
I say: long live the two separate parts of a divided book, and long may we laugh when the halves meet up -- fleeting though that opportunity may be.
Re: Chopping books in half
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago. Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
Digital media evidence stark access problems even over the course of a few years or decades.
We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone.
The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable.
Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well.
This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov
https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres...
https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv...
(This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
Re: Chopping books in half
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago. Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
Or as long as the service you bought it from cares to support it.
(Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
Re: Chopping books in half
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago. Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
And there probably will not be any hard drives in a thousand years from now.
Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable.
In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
Re: Chopping books in half
#10Funny, I've flipped to thinking of my electronic copies of books as the permanent ones and the hard copies as just convenient printouts. With a few sentimental exceptions. Damaging a physical book is for me becoming less taboo than failing to properly backup my book drive. Every spare corner of my house is crammed with books but every year they feel more anachronous. Like an 8 track collection.
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously.
Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.