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People used to access printed materials largely because, well, there was no other choice. Today digital is the native medium of authoring and creation. Sharing,

People used to access printed materials largely because, well, there was no other choice. Today digital is the native medium of authoring and creation. Sharing, copying, and indexing come “for free” where historically those were high-cost.

mimixco 7y ago
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of information that's locked up only in books. The more obscure or specialized your need, the less likely it is to be found on the web. Countless books will never be digitized because there's no profit motive to do so. And HathiTrust, while useful, keeps most of its PDFs behind a 'paywall' so that you can only download them if you are physically sitting at a partner University. I can't think of a dumber restriction on a digitized book than making you drive to a university campus to download it.
- asark 7y ago
  I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given topic, when researching online. You don't even have to go that deep. If you're lucky you can spend 30min digging around and find a scanned PDF on some foreign university library's site or something. If not.... [EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there is something more to find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's just a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles, introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography. That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people. Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might hope.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Fortunately, digitisation seems to be proceeding for reasons other than proft motive. https://b-ok.org https://b-ok.org https://libgen.io https://libgen.io https://archive.org https://archive.org
0815test 7y ago
Sharing, copying and indexing are things that you can't do if DRM gets in the way. If the alternative is a printed book vs. a fake digital book that you can't actually use effectively because of DRM, I'll take the printed book 100% of the time. Related: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
tokai 7y ago
>Sharing, copying These two are not allowed with digital academic sources.

mimixco 7y ago

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of information that's locked up only in books. The more obscure or specialized your need, the less likely it is to be found on the web. Countless books will never be digitized because there's no profit motive to do so. And HathiTrust, while useful, keeps most of its PDFs behind a 'paywall' so that you can only download them if you are physically sitting at a partner University. I can't think of a dumber restriction on a digitized book than making you drive to a university campus to download it.

asark 7y ago
I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given topic, when researching online. You don't even have to go that deep. If you're lucky you can spend 30min digging around and find a scanned PDF on some foreign university library's site or something. If not.... [EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there is something more to find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's just a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles, introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography. That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people. Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might hope.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Fortunately, digitisation seems to be proceeding for reasons other than proft motive. https://b-ok.org https://b-ok.org https://libgen.io https://libgen.io https://archive.org https://archive.org

0815test 7y ago

Sharing, copying and indexing are things that you can't do if DRM gets in the way. If the alternative is a printed book vs. a fake digital book that you can't actually use effectively because of DRM, I'll take the printed book 100% of the time. Related: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

tokai 7y ago

>Sharing, copying These two are not allowed with digital academic sources.