The picture I saw must have been a joke, it showed Infinite Jest divided in half, but that's ridiculous, as you don't read it front to back, you read it jumping from text to notes to text to notes (and, when you're lucky, from notes to notes to the notes).
Chopping books in half
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Re: Chopping books in half
#32> “Books are not holy relics,' Trefusis had said. 'Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying. Think how many children are put off reading by prissy little people ticking them off whenever they turn a page carelessly. The world is so fond of saying that book s should be "treated with respect". But when are we told that _words_ should be treated with respect? From our earliest years we are taught to revere only the outward and visible. Ghastly literary types maundering on about books as "objects"...”
Stephen Fry, The Liar
Re: Chopping books in half
#33Throwing books away is surprisingly hard, even for completely useless ones (manuals for software that doesn't exist anymore, or really bad novels). I threw a few of those in the bid a few weeks ago, and it felt really weird.
Re: Chopping books in half
#34Earlier 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.
In a thousand years, how many of the hard drives dug up will be encrypted?
Re: Chopping books in half
#35Contemporary (and most older) paperbacks, I'd say go ahead. I'd feel very differently if they were out of print and nicely bound (or not, but scarce).
But paperbacks? Yeah, the 'Twitter outrage' is a gross over-reaction: what do they think is going to happen to these copies otherwise? At best they're probably mostly eventually unwanted inheritances, donated to a charity shop; poor condition ones discarded, some sold, rest eventually discarded when they don't sell too.
Re: Chopping books in half
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That only works if someone puts in the effort to actually keep copying this data. Personal anecdote time: I work for a large games developer, at a studio that has existed for 30 years now. Recently we've dug out some archived material for the very first games the studio worked on, and guess what? It's nearly all lost. 9/10 floppies don't read at all. As far as we can tell, the source code for those original games fro…
You didn't print the documentation on a thermal printer? I have lost documentation because it was printed on thermo paper which degrades in months.
Re: Chopping books in half
#37You're cutting your books' bindings at between "signatures." Those are the 16-page little booklets bound together to make the big book. Each signature is made by folding and cutting a single large sheet of paper coming off the press, if it's a page press and not a warp (paper roll) press. Those 16-page signatures used to be called "octavo" or "8vo" in the early days of printing.
This is a time-honored practice in bookmaking. Why shouldn't a very long book be published in multiple volumes? Before modern very- thin and very- cheap paper this was common practice. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote and published the Lord of the Rings as a trilogy because his publisher didn't want to make his work too expensive or heavy for the mass market of post WWII Britain.
Go for it. You're not disrespecting the author, the editor, or the printer. And, modern bindings don't really command much respect anyway.
(Not books you've borrowed from libraries or other people, duh. That could rile up a librarian or your friends big time.)
Re: Chopping books in half
#38Funny, 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.
My books are increasingly decoration and a statement of identity that utility objects. I buy hard-copies of books I might like to have on display, mostly, and mainly care about keeping those books I have a sentimental attachment to because of where and when I read them rather than for the sake of maybe one day re-reading it. It's increasingly rare for me to pick them up to read. But one thing that has made me think a…
There’s something to be said for the pedagogical value of furniture. A sense of literary chronology, at least, can be absorbed by way of a shelving order, just living life in a house with books so shelved. A selection of books can and almost must, given physical limitations, indicate importance—see the Project Gutenberg index for the opposite.
Re: Chopping books in half
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but look what happened when we tried to digitise and preserve a 1000 year old book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
> They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public. > ... > It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms). Copyright is a huge impediment to the long-term preservation of digita…
Projects like this should be "hacked" and the data released into the wild. It's insane that we so willingly lock up vast amounts of culture and media behind copyright law which hasn't even been around in its current form for 100 years, yet its impact will be felt for centuries to come.
Re: Chopping books in half
#40If a paperback is sufficiently old, it might just break apart on you. I can think of at least two that have come apart in my hands during the last few years.
I recycled them. A book once severed is going to keep shedding pages. It's fine to read once, but probably will not stand up to a second or subsequent reading. On the whole, I'd just as soon not buy books that I'm not going to look into again after the first reading.
Having said that, Crime and Punishment is not really a scarce resource, nor I suppose Infinite Jest or Middlesex. I'd bet that I could buy all three at a used bookstore for less than $30. The author may be stepping up the recycling date for the books, but by how much?