7 ms·

Funny, 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

Funny, 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.

wbl 7y ago
We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  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.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Digital media evidence stark access problems even over the course of a few years or decades. We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone. The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable. Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well. This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov http://www.digitalpreservation.gov https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/preservation-issues https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres... https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserving-our-future-the-importance-of-digital-preservation https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv... (This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Correction: 1890 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 Though antecedents existed dating to the 18th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
  - fourthark 7y ago
    Or as long as the service you bought it from cares to support it. (Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    And there probably will not be any hard drives in a thousand years from now. Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable. In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      > it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results. Funny, that’s exactly the role monks used to play in keeping many of these afforementioned documents readable. And “less flammable” matters little when we’re talking about house or library fires, during which sufficient heat to make iron pliable can be easily achieved. The advantage of digital backups there is that the (well planned) backups don’t live in the same place as the original. And since we’re talking about Mass Market paperbacks, can we talk about how fragile those things are these days? Sure, one from 30+ years ago is in decent condition - probably better condition than a new one hot off the press. The glue they use anymore is terrible - having pages fall out during the first read is pretty commonplace anymore. I’d give better odds to a 30 year old paperback that’s lasted this long than a new book to make it another 30 years.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        The reason monks played a role in the hand-transcribing (and error-inducing) manu scripts was because mechanical reproduction didn't exist. Estimates are that in all of Europe as of 1400 there were on the order of 40,000 titles or editions, and about 15 million volumes, total. A large library might have a few thousand volumes (University of Paris ~1200 CE: 2,000, the Vatican, ~1400, ~5,000). As of 1800, the British Museum (now the British Library) contained only 50,000 volumes. Individual books, scrolls, parchments, and cuneiform tablets (https://cdli.ucla.edu https://cdli.ucla.edu) can survive thousands of years. The larger problem for more recent woodpulp paper texts is one that's common to many digital storage media: poor chemical stability. Acid-treated paper will crumble to dust. Archival-grade cotton rag will last centuries or more. So long as you're talking flame and heat, you might care to check the ratings of your CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD, and SDD media before feeling too secure. Quality of current-gen paper print media is indeed low. Hardcover, for a price, delivers markedly better durability. Keep in mind too that you're applying survivorship bias to your sampling of 30-year-old paperbacks -- the ones that wouldn't survive 30 years ... haven't. (I've numerous old books which are now in pretty sorry condition. And others which remain robust. Details matter.)
  - angrygoat 7y ago
    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#Preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
    - neurobro 7y ago
      > 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 digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.
      - Brave-Steak 7y ago
        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.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    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 from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely. And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      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.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    In a thousand years, how many of the hard drives dug up will be encrypted?
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously. Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.
  - wbl 7y ago
    That is incorrect. The big loss was papyrus to vellum where the monks had to make hard choices. Anything written on vellum was expensive so carefully prserved: there weren't a lot of books.
    - bregma 7y ago
      One word: palimpsest.
- theamk 7y ago
  On the other side, I have already lost all of the printed photos from 2000 (I moved houses a few times...) but I still have the digital files from that year. Same with audio recordings - I have lost the tapes, but mp3’s are still around. Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card. (And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)
- Thorrez 7y ago
  GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years. https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/
peapicker 7y ago
Until there is an EMP that blows away all those stored electrons - and backups. Books looks a lot better after that.
- anchpop 7y ago
  That seems less likely than, say, a house fire or a conventional bomb
  - brewdad 7y ago
    Yet a citywide EMP seems far more likely than the next Great Chicago Fire.
- falcolas 7y ago
  I had this discussion recently. Here’s the hat trick of digital over paper: an ebook can be unpacked and printed on paper! All of the contents are human readable - it’s mostly HTML and CSS - and can be re-encoded into an ebook with no loss of fidelity. It can also be easily read (see aforementioned HTML and CSS) without any difficulties, even in its encoded format on paper.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Unlike what common people believe, EMP won't damage magnetic storage media, and definitely won't touch optical media. Flash memory is vulnerable. You might have to replace microprocessors in all the connected devices though if the fuses don't work correctly.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  All books in existence can be stored on my harddrive, while they won't fit into my bag.
adventured 7y ago
The last time I moved I had to throw out a large collection of books. I tried to give them all to numerous organizations and nobody would take them, including a public library that didn't want them (for free). They were all in pristine condition. I love physical books and I just can't stand to lug them around with me when I move. So now it's all Kindle, for better and worse.
- brewdad 7y ago
  That's a shame. My public library probably wouldn't take them for circulation but they will take any usable book for their semi-annual book sale to fund new purchases. Unsold books are offered for free to schools and a few other local groups in the days after the sale. Anything left after that probably gets recycled or sent to the landfill.
- levesque 7y ago
  Do you really own those ebooks locked in various DRMs and only accessible from specific devices?
vidarh 7y ago
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 about this for years is that part of the reason I have read the books I have was growing up surrounded by my dads book-collection, and parts of the music I listen to are down to exploring my parents record collection. And even the books I never got around to reading but were aware of were part of what connected me to my parents, and by extension to the previous generation. The more the media we consume gets siloed into apps, the more it alters how the transmission of culture happens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we ought to be aware of and consider the effects of, because it makes it seem likely to me at least that the generational gaps are going to get bigger as filter bubbles contribute to make it less likely for children to explore and learn to understand previous generations (and vice versa) - e.g. I see how vastly different my sons Netflix account looks like vs. mine. Of course part of that is natural - he's presented material suited for younger viewers (though not using a "childrens profile" as that excludes a lot of his favourite anime), but because it also so strongly skews towards the interests he has demonstrated, it exclude a lot of child friendly material he probably would like, based on my experience showing things to him, but that doesn't match what he's watched on there so far, and so the bubble self-reinforces. And unlike the physical environment of the past there isn't the same strong presence of alternative suggestions in the form of seeing passively what parents like - countering that with recommendations is not easy. I'm not particularly sentimental about this, but I do wonder what the long term effects on society will be as those ties are increasingly loosened, and it also places those who control those recommendation systems in an incredibly powerful position to shape culture and identity, and I'm not sure whether we should be more concerned of the risk of that being consciously abused by someone at some point vs. the unintended consequences of not consciously managing it. It feels like we're sleepwalking into something. It could very well turn out amazingly well, but it could also turn out badly, and we don't seem to understand what the impacts may be.
- baroomba 7y ago
  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.

wbl 7y ago

We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.

yoz-y 7y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Digital media evidence stark access problems even over the course of a few years or decades. We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone. The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable. Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well. This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov http://www.digitalpreservation.gov https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/preservation-issues https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres... https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserving-our-future-the-importance-of-digital-preservation https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv... (This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Correction: 1890 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890 Though antecedents existed dating to the 18th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
- fourthark 7y ago
  Or as long as the service you bought it from cares to support it. (Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  And there probably will not be any hard drives in a thousand years from now. Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable. In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    > it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results. Funny, that’s exactly the role monks used to play in keeping many of these afforementioned documents readable. And “less flammable” matters little when we’re talking about house or library fires, during which sufficient heat to make iron pliable can be easily achieved. The advantage of digital backups there is that the (well planned) backups don’t live in the same place as the original. And since we’re talking about Mass Market paperbacks, can we talk about how fragile those things are these days? Sure, one from 30+ years ago is in decent condition - probably better condition than a new one hot off the press. The glue they use anymore is terrible - having pages fall out during the first read is pretty commonplace anymore. I’d give better odds to a 30 year old paperback that’s lasted this long than a new book to make it another 30 years.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The reason monks played a role in the hand-transcribing (and error-inducing) manu scripts was because mechanical reproduction didn't exist. Estimates are that in all of Europe as of 1400 there were on the order of 40,000 titles or editions, and about 15 million volumes, total. A large library might have a few thousand volumes (University of Paris ~1200 CE: 2,000, the Vatican, ~1400, ~5,000). As of 1800, the British Museum (now the British Library) contained only 50,000 volumes. Individual books, scrolls, parchments, and cuneiform tablets (https://cdli.ucla.edu https://cdli.ucla.edu) can survive thousands of years. The larger problem for more recent woodpulp paper texts is one that's common to many digital storage media: poor chemical stability. Acid-treated paper will crumble to dust. Archival-grade cotton rag will last centuries or more. So long as you're talking flame and heat, you might care to check the ratings of your CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD, and SDD media before feeling too secure. Quality of current-gen paper print media is indeed low. Hardcover, for a price, delivers markedly better durability. Keep in mind too that you're applying survivorship bias to your sampling of 30-year-old paperbacks -- the ones that wouldn't survive 30 years ... haven't. (I've numerous old books which are now in pretty sorry condition. And others which remain robust. Details matter.)
- angrygoat 7y ago
  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#Preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
  - neurobro 7y ago
    > 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 digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.
    - Brave-Steak 7y ago
      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.
- gambiting 7y ago
  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 from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely. And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    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.
- catalogia 7y ago
  In a thousand years, how many of the hard drives dug up will be encrypted?
BurningFrog 7y ago
Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously. Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.
- wbl 7y ago
  That is incorrect. The big loss was papyrus to vellum where the monks had to make hard choices. Anything written on vellum was expensive so carefully prserved: there weren't a lot of books.
  - bregma 7y ago
    One word: palimpsest.
theamk 7y ago
On the other side, I have already lost all of the printed photos from 2000 (I moved houses a few times...) but I still have the digital files from that year. Same with audio recordings - I have lost the tapes, but mp3’s are still around. Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card. (And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)
Thorrez 7y ago
GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years. https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/

peapicker 7y ago

Until there is an EMP that blows away all those stored electrons - and backups. Books looks a lot better after that.

anchpop 7y ago
That seems less likely than, say, a house fire or a conventional bomb
- brewdad 7y ago
  Yet a citywide EMP seems far more likely than the next Great Chicago Fire.
falcolas 7y ago
I had this discussion recently. Here’s the hat trick of digital over paper: an ebook can be unpacked and printed on paper! All of the contents are human readable - it’s mostly HTML and CSS - and can be re-encoded into an ebook with no loss of fidelity. It can also be easily read (see aforementioned HTML and CSS) without any difficulties, even in its encoded format on paper.
AstralStorm 7y ago
Unlike what common people believe, EMP won't damage magnetic storage media, and definitely won't touch optical media. Flash memory is vulnerable. You might have to replace microprocessors in all the connected devices though if the fuses don't work correctly.
Kaiyou 7y ago
All books in existence can be stored on my harddrive, while they won't fit into my bag.

adventured 7y ago

The last time I moved I had to throw out a large collection of books. I tried to give them all to numerous organizations and nobody would take them, including a public library that didn't want them (for free). They were all in pristine condition. I love physical books and I just can't stand to lug them around with me when I move. So now it's all Kindle, for better and worse.

brewdad 7y ago
That's a shame. My public library probably wouldn't take them for circulation but they will take any usable book for their semi-annual book sale to fund new purchases. Unsold books are offered for free to schools and a few other local groups in the days after the sale. Anything left after that probably gets recycled or sent to the landfill.
levesque 7y ago
Do you really own those ebooks locked in various DRMs and only accessible from specific devices?

vidarh 7y ago

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 about this for years is that part of the reason I have read the books I have was growing up surrounded by my dads book-collection, and parts of the music I listen to are down to exploring my parents record collection. And even the books I never got around to reading but were aware of were part of what connected me to my parents, and by extension to the previous generation. The more the media we consume gets siloed into apps, the more it alters how the transmission of culture happens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we ought to be aware of and consider the effects of, because it makes it seem likely to me at least that the generational gaps are going to get bigger as filter bubbles contribute to make it less likely for children to explore and learn to understand previous generations (and vice versa) - e.g. I see how vastly different my sons Netflix account looks like vs. mine. Of course part of that is natural - he's presented material suited for younger viewers (though not using a "childrens profile" as that excludes a lot of his favourite anime), but because it also so strongly skews towards the interests he has demonstrated, it exclude a lot of child friendly material he probably would like, based on my experience showing things to him, but that doesn't match what he's watched on there so far, and so the bubble self-reinforces. And unlike the physical environment of the past there isn't the same strong presence of alternative suggestions in the form of seeing passively what parents like - countering that with recommendations is not easy. I'm not particularly sentimental about this, but I do wonder what the long term effects on society will be as those ties are increasingly loosened, and it also places those who control those recommendation systems in an incredibly powerful position to shape culture and identity, and I'm not sure whether we should be more concerned of the risk of that being consciously abused by someone at some point vs. the unintended consequences of not consciously managing it. It feels like we're sleepwalking into something. It could very well turn out amazingly well, but it could also turn out badly, and we don't seem to understand what the impacts may be.

baroomba 7y ago
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.