Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Digital books wear out faster than physical books

blog.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 453 posts

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#291

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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…

> The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out"

it depends.

once a broken copy is out for whatever reason, you have a broken copy.

also most of the formats used today to archive digital media are lossy (mpeg4, h264, jpeg etc)

> but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books

if we discount the electric bill.

> Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve

not really.

I used to own a huge collection of DVDs

they're as digital data as it gets, but no one owns a DVD player nowadays and many of them degraded to the point that even an high quality reader cannot read them properly.

problem is you don't get a blurry image like with analog media, you just get broken and/or unreadable data, so basically that data is lost forever.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#292

Post by martopix »

Look, I got an ebook for free from a publishing company (that wants me to adopt it for my course). Of course, you can't just download it: you have to sign up to their own website, where there is a dreadful reader.

What I mean by dreadful is: the PDF page does not feel my screen, therefore I have to scroll down. This is fine. Except that scrolling down does not show me the next pages, so reading is: scroll down, then click on "next page", then scroll down, then click on "next page", etc. etc.. Each page takes about 2 seconds to load.

In order to understand whether I'm interested in an academic book, I have to flick through it.

I got tired even before going through the front matter.

So for what concerns me, this ebook is already "worn out".

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#293

Post by peoplefromibiza »

ivanhoe wrote: post #289
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.

That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. We certainly know by now how to build a redundancy that will guaranty the data safety. For most of the libraries it's really a budget problem - they've been given huge expensive buildings with controlled air conditions for storing paper books and that's sort of taken for granted, but then governments take cuts on providing them with proper IT infrastructure and knowledgeab…

> That's what backups and RAID arrays are for.

the point is exactly that: if you have to rely on very complex setups to keep the data fresh, it means that the data is not safe.

can you imagine an hard disk surviving from the ancient Egypt to us?

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#295

Post by oblio »

armchairhacker wrote: post #177
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.

I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay... They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never…

You will also happy to read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Once something is mainstream and non-perishable, odds of it going away go down and it's foreseeable that it will be around for at least as long as it's already been around.

This effect is super strong in tech, for base technologies, with lots of integrations, especially around enterprise/governmental systems (which don't get changed unless someone makes a strong business case why the change makes more money) and consumer hardware (which tends to linger for aeons since it's so distributed).

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#296

Post by phforms »

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…

I wonder how this difference plays out if we are looking at a timespan of centuries instead of decades. Multiple generations of computers or various kinds of computing and reading technology would have to be stored and maintained along with the digital books that depend on them. And those are physical devices that degrade in many ways and require a power source to be used.

However, this might be a non-issue if we find ways to emulate the functionality of those devices authentically and integrate it into ever-evolving hardware, even if it turns out to be drastically different from what it was before. It is important to consider that the difference in appearance of even a single character between the real device and its emulation could significantly change a book in form and even in content.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#297

Post by tim333 »

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…

There are of course naughty book services using bittorrent and the like that store a lot of stuff without worrying about the copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis is popular.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#298

Post by jonathanstrange »

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…

It's not hard to store books correctly, though. My father collected around 30,000 books during his lifetime. (He was a professor at a higher education facility for librarians.) Most of them are from 20th Century but many also from 19th Century and a few of them are up to several hundred years old. They're all perfectly readable. The only issue is dust.

It pains me a lot that the collection will eventually have to be sold at large by the meter and his library will disappear because nobody in my family has the space for so many books.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#299

Post by oblio »

vixen99 wrote: post #248

Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine. On the other hand my paperback copy of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality (2004) is falling to bits with chunks of pages departing from the spine.

> Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine.

You either got very lucky or that thing is not actually from 1643.

That book is probably worth tens of thousands of dollars if it's genuine.

Extremely unlikely, though :-)

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#300

Post by yywwbbn »

oblio wrote: post #287
thaumasiotes wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone. Root it.

Not an option. Rooting the device voids the warranty. It's not a reasonable thing to ask the average person.

> Rooting the device voids the warranty.

I’m pretty sure it would depend on the country you’re in . Even if that’s actually the case in the US

Post reply on HN