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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

#271

Post by dagw »

irrational wrote: post #132
midoridensha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have many paperbacks from the 1950s to the present day. Some of the really old ones are a little yellow around the edges, but brittle and falling apart? Never. I have no idea what you are talking about.

brittle and falling apart? Never.

How often have you read them? Many of my most beloved cheap paperbacks from the 80s and 90s have been replaced at least once since they've literally fallen apart as I was reading them. Also my books from the 50s and 60s seem to be of higher quality than books from the 80s and 90s (or that could also just be survivor bias).

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#272

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

Many countries have their own digital archives, generally as part of their government's archives (so not just digital), I have worked on tools for sending data to the Danish Digital archive and was interviewing for a job there one time but I messed up the interview because I'm a dork.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#273

Post by KoftaBob »

jayeshhere wrote: post #204
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…

They actually store multiple copies. They even use IPFS to store it over decentralized network. But copyright is the main issue we don't see many services like open library or internet archive. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz

I haven't been able to figure out how to access the IPFS versions of the archive. They technically have a version of their site hosted through IPFS (https://www-dweb-cors.dev.archive.org/web), but when searching for a specific url like nytimes.com, it just redirects to the standard archive.org url.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#274

Post by hendrikrassmann »

adalacelove wrote: post #250
jstummbillig wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.

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…

To unlock that feature you have to buy a second phone.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#275

Post by zarzavat »

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.

Okay but the internet’s library of books specifically is libgen, and that is mirrored to a high degree of redundancy.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#276

Post by lqet »

shakna wrote: post #186
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…

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…

The day goes from deprecated to removed will be a very sad one :(

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#277

Post by ivanhoe »

The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books over the same period of time and worrying of humidity, acidity of paper, insects, mold, etc. And not to mention how super-expensive the paper-books restoration is, if (or better once when) they get damaged by time.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#279

Post by robinsonb5 »

ivanhoe wrote: post #277

The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot l…

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.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#280

Post by cnity »

ivanhoe wrote: post #277

The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot l…

xkcd as relevant as ever: https://xkcd.com/1683/
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