I still can open 20 years ol PDF
Digital books wear out faster than physical books
301–310 of 453 posts
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.
Saying anyone is "responsible" for a suicide is disingenuous
People are absolutely, 100% responsible for his death.
A young person near the beginning of their career got sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, for downloading some PDFs of scientific articles.
It's not like someone asked him to delete the PDFs and he killed himself in protest. His life was ruined to make an example out of him.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#303Earlier 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, 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.
The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG.
However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#304Had this same thought the other day. I got Lost Men In London (by Olaf Stapledon) from the public library the other day and kept wondering why the paper used for the pages was so thick compared to most books you buy nowadays.
I flipped back to the first few pages and saw that book was printer in 1934. I was amazed to realize the book was nearly 90 years old and held up really well. Sure the cover was worn and paged yellowed with the time, but it was in pretty great condition for something that old
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but all of those deprecated elements can still be rendered just fine by some of the current browsers. And even if, say, you couldn't display an index page with frameset, then the stuff inside the frames is just plain old html files anyway, which you can display easily. bgcolor, etc. all still render fine in current browsers as well. The main thing is that information which is important to people will get convert…
> The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular. Vs. decent-quality old "dead tree" books, properly stored, can be ignored for centuries and still be perfectly fine. You might want to ask a good historian or librarian about all the incredibly important (historically, to us, now) documents which we…
Oral history. And before someone says anything, Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, the 4 day one. Done every year. Still.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone. Root it.
How do you know the phone doesn't have multiple levels of root and you're only breaking the topmost one?
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#307What if we had a world where digital books were just .txt files? E-book readers can format the book with any font, margins, or layout they want, but the book itself is just a plain text file. Is such a world possible?
I believe that simple text files can bring books to life regardless of the technology used. Even if all e-readers are gone, you can still use Vim or Notepad to read books. Even if the editor went away, I could code a small editor to convert the bytes in the file to characters on the screen.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#308Physical 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…
> 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.
If you dispense with the notion that publishers control that data, it actually becomes incredibly easy to achieve all of this and more. Worried about data loss? Make more digital copies, spread them on more media. Worried about shifting formats? Convert to plaintext, mobi, ePub or PDF - those will be supported in open source software indefinitely. Still worried about files trapped in proprietary formats that you don’t know how to convert? Fire up a VM.
As long as you can get files from under online DRM, the files are safer than ever.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#309> 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…
Sounds like it is actually hard to store books correctly.
I couldn't even be bothered to bring my couple of hundred children's books when I moved from my parents house, let alone 30 000.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sounds like it is actually hard to store books correctly. I couldn't even be bothered to bring my couple of hundred children's books when I moved from my parents house, let alone 30 000.
It's hard to get the storage space if you don't have it, but it's not hard to store them. You put them on shelves in a dry room and they will last hundreds of years. That was my point.