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500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time
- peter_d_sherman 8y agoExcerpt: "After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”." Amazing.
- mathnmusic 8y agoI wish there were a Wikipedia-like alternative for Blinkist.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoI've had an idea rolling around in my head for a while now - a mix of wikipedia, spotify, and blinkist. The idea would be book summaries, in written and audio form, for both entire books and chapter-by-chapter. They could be submitted by anyone, and ranked/upvoted in terms of accuracy and quality. Ad/subscription revenue would be shared with content creators.
- alanbernstein 8y agoInteresting, with a few different levels of detail, readers could get into a book in a "progressive refinement" sort of way. You could stop after your desired level of detail is reached, rather than stopping after chapter 3 because it got boring.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoYes definitely. Or choose particular chapters that you think would be relevant for you.
- cwingrav 8y agoI wonder how far away we are for this being automated? I'm sure it could be done now, but accuracy, especially for more dense and difficult books, would be lacking.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoI'd imagine there are some cases that would be fairly difficult for automation. Take a philosophy book, for example. I have no idea how automation would provide an overview of what happens in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Some written material requires going beyond the text and explaining the ideas themselves.
- quickthrower2 8y agoBeing paid to just read a book and no expectation other than to write a summary. Awesome!
- sharmi 8y agoWell, it is not that simple. You no longer have the liberty to stop reading if you find it boring. You have to provide a summary, even if you don't understand or if the book is not deserving. In other words, what you once loved becomes work. Net loss - one hobby you might have truly loved.
- opan 8y agoThe way you describe it reminds me of how I've heard video game QA testing described by friends who did it briefly. At first it sounds like you get paid to play games, but in practice it's not your favorite type, sometimes you have to do repetitive actions to try to recreate a bug, etc.
- degenerate 8y agoI had a roommate that reviewed porn. At our age it sounded like the best job ever, but he showed us his review sheets. He had to document the timestamp of every lick, rub, fart, moan, squirt, insertion, scene change, et al. He absolutely hated it.
- quickthrower2 8y agoI did paid beer testing for market research once. It wasn’t fun! Had to take sips of dozens of out of date beers, all the same brand and fill in long forms about each one tasted.
- girzel 8y agoI'm a writer, translator, and literary promoter. Sometimes I think I've never done anything more difficult than reading long works of literature and summarizing them faithfully in one or two paragraphs. It's absolutely brutal mental and compositional work.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y agoWhat's your opinion about services which provides summary for the books, such as blinkist? Do you think those services are an asset or that it affects the book negatively? Do you think, if the original author wrote the summary; it would make a difference? I have built news aggregators apps which uses summary from original description of author & also built bots which summarizes content; I'm conflicted between the value of a summary provided by the author /reader. I know that a book cannot be compared with a news article.
- arvidkahl 8y agoFrom what I learned from listening to an interview with a Blinkist founder Holger Seim on the Factory Berlin Facebook page, they employ experts in the fields that the books are about to summarize them. So while this is not an author-provided summary, it is (seemingly) closer than a mere reader summary.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y agoYes, they have mentioned that in their FAQ as well. But still, even though they're professional; they would still be a reader. Edit:Typo
- byproxy 8y agoI feel a work of art is its entirety. Could you summarize Beethoven's 3rd in a few chords? Maybe, but think of the context you're missing out on. A novel exists as it is and it's more than plot. It's style and concept and form and feeling and sometimes you have to read the whole thing before you realize you got something of worth out of it. Sometimes you don't. But a summary can't possibly tell you this.
- _the_inflator 8y agoThis is why I am so grateful for living now. Now content extraction is done by algorithms and automation. Speeds up the process.
- joe_the_user 8y agoWilson-Lee: "It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summarie" It's exciting that we should soon get a window into the very first books that appeared after the explosion of printed matter that followed the invention of the Gutenberg press.
- caprese 8y agoWatch it be like 2009 Twitter
- xefer 8y agoAs a comment to that article references: it’s certainly a great story, but it makes it seem that this is the catalogue of the library, when in fact it is one of 16 volumes, 14 of which are already known. The referenced page at The Arnamagnæan Institute stays: “There were 16 volumes of indices in all; 14 of these are in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, where what remains of Colón’s library is kept. The other two were presumed missing — but now it seems that one of them wound up in the collection of Árni Magnússon.“ [1] It’s great that this was found (and one is still missing) but perhaps not quite as profound as the article would lead one to believe. [1] https://manuscript.ku.dk/news/a-new-discovery-in-the-arnamagnaean-collection/ https://manuscript.ku.dk/news/a-new-discovery-in-the-arnamag...
- tmalsburg2 8y agoIs there a digital version of these summaries that one could read?
- KuhlMensch 8y agoIt will be release in 2020 according to the article
- skookumchuck 8y ago"They are also working to digitise the manuscript, in collaboration with the Arnamagnæan Institute." Send it to me. I'll have it digitized in about an hour. Just turn the pages and click with my phone. Yes, I know that professional archivists would rather give birth to a goat than do that, but consider: 1. It's the text that's important, and a handheld phone camera captures that just fine. Try it and see. 2. It's immediate. 3. It's cheap. 4. The worry about damaging it irretrievably will be alleviated, as now a backup exists.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoStop trying to re-solve already-solved problems.
- skookumchuck 8y agoAre they solved? The quote indicated it had not been digitized and implied it would take significant effort. The Vatican library has never been digitized, and nobody really knows what all is in there. The HP library burned down before anybody digitized it.
- snvzz 8y ago>The Vatican library has never been digitized, and nobody really knows what all is in there. Seems like a clear case where public interest should override private property.
- Freak_NL 8y agoI'm sure the citizens of the Vatican City State will rise up and demand public access any day now.
- darkpuma 8y agoMaybe the sovereignty of the Vatican should be clawed back. I wouldn't be the first of Mussolini's decisions to be undone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateran_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateran_Treaty
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- drharby 8y agoIm currently reading Island at the Center of the World about dutch new york, new amsterdam. And the source material is basicly one or two books because the dutch west india company sold their records as scrap paper. Rooms full of records, granted yhe papet were records over 200 years old. I wondet how much history we've lost