6 ms·

Book Review: Double Fold

125 points by mhb 5y ago

cafard 5y ago
"Guillotining books is unnecessary in order to acquire a good image". I don't know. I remember fondly a copier with a rounded screen at some university library years ago (University of Colorado?) where one could plunk down a bound volume and get a good copy without damaging the spine. I did foolishly buy a book--specially ordered--which turned out to have been printed from page images taken by copying on a flat-platen copier. Better than fifty percent of the pages lost anything from a letter to several letters in the "gutter". "based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust". Some are, some aren't. Some years back my parents shipped me the set of Mark Twain I had read as a boy. An awful lot of the pages were falling apart. Perhaps our family hadn't protected them well enough from light and air--but it's hard to see how one can read a book without exposure to both. We recycle probably 10" of newspapers--The Washington Post and The New York Times--ever week. In the days before the newspapers lost all the revenue from classified ads, it would have been twice that. So a year of a big metropolitan paper from the 1990s could amount to forty feet of newspaper. That's a fair bit to make room for. I have some sympathy for the librarians there.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  We talk a lot about archiving stuff - great, but I hardly see the same emphasis on finding things. Search is equally important because thats where the rubber meets the road - actual utility of archive is realized and benefits of long term archives are reaped. Of course, there are queries such as "Find all newspapers for July 26, 1931" if something important had happened on that day - this would be an O(1) query for a library if they've indexed newspapers by date. Finding all mentions of "Bankruptcy of Cooks Mills in Lawson, Texas in 1931" is much harder problem if it is a physical storage. I'd be ok with converting all newspaper archives in digital format that's searchable.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Saving the physical versions is preservation of cultural history. The information content should definitely be digitized.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      How much of the physical version should be preserved? For how long? Singletons are probably not enough. But why save the physical aspects? Why not simply digitize people discussing it, take pictures of the original form, etc.? Why invest the time and energy maintaining items of dubious future need?
      - dEnigma 5y ago
        ,he said, ripping the first Gutenberg bible into shreds after copying it.
        Aloha 5y ago
        a copy of a daily newspaper from Los Angeles in 1937 is not the same as the Gutenberg Bible. Newspapers were meant to be disposable, then and now, its good to store the information, but I'm highly skeptical of the need to hold onto the physical copies after scanning.
        tomrod 5y ago
        I think it's worthwhile to keep a few foundational books around, especially those that set a language or were otherwise milestones in technology and cultural progress. We should not be hoarders. There is a balance to be struck. I recommend considering folks can be multifaceted and aren't solely bound to one's opposing opinion as they read down a comment chain. Good day.
      - afiori 5y ago
        at least a few of everything forever is a good starting point, as we move more and more into digital spaces it will become be even more feasible to archive physical copies when they exist (whit everything I also include WalMart depliants)
- ghaff 5y ago
  My understanding is that there are specialized copy devices that can do a decent job of bound volumes. But to the basic point... Paper takes up a lot of space. You can't keep physical copies of everything forever. It is unfortunate that it seems as if film and poor quality scans replaced physical copies in some cases too early. But libraries do run out of space, especially well-indexed space.
  - lisper 5y ago
    > You can't keep physical copies of everything forever Actually, maybe that would be a good way to sequester carbon.
    - dmurray 5y ago
      It's about a thousand times more expensive per ton to store the paper in libraries in archival condition than to bury it in a bog, so not really.
      - lisper 5y ago
        True, but you get value from newspapers that you don't get from bogs so it could even out.
    - nkrisc 5y ago
      An even more efficient way would be to just not cut down the trees to make paper in the first place.
      - a1369209993 5y ago
        Actually, that's a specific thing that does not work (at least long term). Trees die and rot if not cut down, and the carbon from that process has to be absorbed by the younger trees growing in the same space. So once a (mature) forest exists at a given location, it will no longer absorb any more carbon unless some of the trees are cut down and used for something that doesn't allow their carbon content to return to the atmosphere.
- coliveira 5y ago
  The issue is that in America most books are printed on lower quality paper to reduce costs. This kind of paper decays much faster. To see how better quality books look like, look at high end academic publications, which are still produced to be stored in libraries for a long time.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  The problem of disintegrating paper is low-quality, acidic, "pulp" paper. Acid-free high-rag (containing actual cotton cloth) paper is archival quality and can and does last centuries. https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper Pulp paper is largely an artefact of the 19th and 20th centuries: cheaper than rag, but also far less durable. It remains in use and is suitable for ephemeral content, but materials meant for long duration are created with archival-quality paper, inks, and other treatments.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Anyone that has taken Edward Tufte's[0] Data Visualization course (I don't know if he gives it anymore), has seen his favorite props, which are a couple of copies of Euclid's Geometry. Supposedly, these are real, 400-year-old books, printed by a 17th-century mathematician. He likes them, because of pop-out examples of geometric shapes. I think they are more modern reproductions, but I could be wrong. They are in great shape. [0] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
smoldesu 5y ago
The irony that I'm reading this on Substack is not lost on me.
- jimhefferon 5y ago
  I'm not sure why the downvotes. I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot for instance that links have a half-life of two years. Of course, links differ from content, but the point is that online content is ephemeral (the wonderful Wayback machine nonwithstanding).
  - tomComb 5y ago
    But for some online content - substack, clubhouse, snapchat - that is there idea. Just sayin that not all online content should be linked in together.
- gwern 5y ago
  The irony... that you're reading some brutally simplified, crude, static, easily-archived HTML text whose fulltext copy has also been mailed out to thousands of readers[1] and archived in their personal mail readers and computers? A lot of bad things one could, and I have, said about Substack's technology, but "it will linkrot and can't be archived" is not one of them. [1] ACX is #2 on the Technology Substack leaderboard so it has 'thousands'; since my own newsletter is ~6k and Scott is many times more popular than I am in our circles, I'd guess the number of email copies of this ACX post is closer to 50k than 1k.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    You made me check the HTML of substack, and you're right, once you find the "article" tag it is precisely this, the article. In addition to everything you said, making a substack scrapper to extract precisely the article would be trivial.
HenryKissinger 5y ago
We as a society need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is valuable. The hypothetical future value of most past data is less than the cost of preserving it.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It can be hard to know what should be kept and be tossed. And reasonable people can disagree about which applies. But it's certainly a fair point that we probably don't want to preserve every byte of ephemera forever.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It's mildly amusing to glance at a copy of my high school newspaper from eons ago. But I still can't see any value in it.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things like that. Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their families. I think we don't need to keep every single high school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to choose which ones to keep.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
matheist 5y ago
Note that this is not written by Scott Alexander --- it's part of his "your book review" series in which readers submit book reviews and he invites his audience to read them and vote on them.
- fastball 5y ago
  That is explicitly stated in the opening paragraph.
WalterBright 5y ago
I expect a lot is lost because of copyright laws that discourage scanning.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  That is not the focus of this book; I don't believe this is a problem libraries have had.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes, in fact, copying for reasons of preservation and research is one of the few copyright exceptions that libraries actually have as opposed to the far-ranging get out of jail free card that many people seem to think they have.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      There are numerous cases of media being perserved strictly through unauthorised copying, falling well outside even the broadest interpretation of any library exception. The Google Books project would be a case in point, as well as (AFAIU) the early stages of the Internet Archive's book-scanning project. Numerous early television programmes were only preserved through off-the-air copies by viewers. Up through the early 1970s, television news programmes did not generally preserve broadcasts, or even have a research library (see Epstein's News from Nowwhere, 1973). I'm not sure where the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (dating to August 5, 1968) originated (Wikipedia claims the Nashville affiliate provided recordings), though I recall a case in which a member of the public, Marion Stokes, recorded nightly news broadcasts for decades. https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/ https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc... https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-mari...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
caseyross 5y ago
I know we as HN readers have a tendency to look in the comments for a TL;DR, but this time, do yourself a favor and read the article first. You won't find anything below that wasn't already covered, with more nuance and historical context, in the original linked piece.
karaterobot 5y ago
This review implies that the main use case of microfilm transfer was to free up shelf space by destroying books and putting them on microfilm. To my knowledge, that is not the case: the main use case was for periodicals like newspapers, magazines, and journals, not books. And certainly, microfilm was not intended to free up shelf space in the library: most items in a library's collection aren't on the shelves, they're stored in warehouses and basements. Paying to store miles of old newspapers was not sustainable for most library systems, and despite what this review implies, newsprint does not last forever. The alternative to microfilm was not that we would have pristine copies of our history easily accessible to every library patron, it was that most copies of a periodical would simply be destroyed. The remit of public libraries is not to preserve books, but to provide access to information. There's a crucial difference. Microfilm was not ideal, but in a pre-digitization world it was about the best option available to provide access to those old periodicals that would otherwise have been lost, or at least hard to access.
- afiori 5y ago
  the point of the book of that for many publication not even one library opted to keep physical copies and that when the new York times offered cloth paper for libraries (the same paper used in centuries old books) they refused. overall it turned out paper has a longer shelf live than microfilms
WalterBright 5y ago
This explains some of the crummy B+W scans of some old books on archive.org - they were scanned from microfilm.

125 points by mhb 5y ago

"Guillotining books is unnecessary in order to acquire a good image". I don't know. I remember fondly a copier with a rounded screen at some university library years ago (University of Colorado?) where one could plunk down a bound volume and get a good copy without damaging the spine. I did foolishly buy a book--specially ordered--which turned out to have been printed from page images taken by copying on a flat-platen copier. Better than fifty percent of the pages lost anything from a letter to several letters in the "gutter". "based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust". Some are, some aren't. Some years back my parents shipped me the set of Mark Twain I had read as a boy. An awful lot of the pages were falling apart. Perhaps our family hadn't protected them well enough from light and air--but it's hard to see how one can read a book without exposure to both. We recycle probably 10" of newspapers--The Washington Post and The New York Times--ever week. In the days before the newspapers lost all the revenue from classified ads, it would have been twice that. So a year of a big metropolitan paper from the 1990s could amount to forty feet of newspaper. That's a fair bit to make room for. I have some sympathy for the librarians there.

systemvoltage 5y ago
We talk a lot about archiving stuff - great, but I hardly see the same emphasis on finding things. Search is equally important because thats where the rubber meets the road - actual utility of archive is realized and benefits of long term archives are reaped. Of course, there are queries such as "Find all newspapers for July 26, 1931" if something important had happened on that day - this would be an O(1) query for a library if they've indexed newspapers by date. Finding all mentions of "Bankruptcy of Cooks Mills in Lawson, Texas in 1931" is much harder problem if it is a physical storage. I'd be ok with converting all newspaper archives in digital format that's searchable.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Saving the physical versions is preservation of cultural history. The information content should definitely be digitized.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    How much of the physical version should be preserved? For how long? Singletons are probably not enough. But why save the physical aspects? Why not simply digitize people discussing it, take pictures of the original form, etc.? Why invest the time and energy maintaining items of dubious future need?
    - dEnigma 5y ago
      ,he said, ripping the first Gutenberg bible into shreds after copying it.
      - Aloha 5y ago
        a copy of a daily newspaper from Los Angeles in 1937 is not the same as the Gutenberg Bible. Newspapers were meant to be disposable, then and now, its good to store the information, but I'm highly skeptical of the need to hold onto the physical copies after scanning.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        I think it's worthwhile to keep a few foundational books around, especially those that set a language or were otherwise milestones in technology and cultural progress. We should not be hoarders. There is a balance to be struck. I recommend considering folks can be multifaceted and aren't solely bound to one's opposing opinion as they read down a comment chain. Good day.
    - afiori 5y ago
      at least a few of everything forever is a good starting point, as we move more and more into digital spaces it will become be even more feasible to archive physical copies when they exist (whit everything I also include WalMart depliants)
ghaff 5y ago
My understanding is that there are specialized copy devices that can do a decent job of bound volumes. But to the basic point... Paper takes up a lot of space. You can't keep physical copies of everything forever. It is unfortunate that it seems as if film and poor quality scans replaced physical copies in some cases too early. But libraries do run out of space, especially well-indexed space.
- lisper 5y ago
  > You can't keep physical copies of everything forever Actually, maybe that would be a good way to sequester carbon.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    It's about a thousand times more expensive per ton to store the paper in libraries in archival condition than to bury it in a bog, so not really.
    - lisper 5y ago
      True, but you get value from newspapers that you don't get from bogs so it could even out.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    An even more efficient way would be to just not cut down the trees to make paper in the first place.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      Actually, that's a specific thing that does not work (at least long term). Trees die and rot if not cut down, and the carbon from that process has to be absorbed by the younger trees growing in the same space. So once a (mature) forest exists at a given location, it will no longer absorb any more carbon unless some of the trees are cut down and used for something that doesn't allow their carbon content to return to the atmosphere.
coliveira 5y ago
The issue is that in America most books are printed on lower quality paper to reduce costs. This kind of paper decays much faster. To see how better quality books look like, look at high end academic publications, which are still produced to be stored in libraries for a long time.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The problem of disintegrating paper is low-quality, acidic, "pulp" paper. Acid-free high-rag (containing actual cotton cloth) paper is archival quality and can and does last centuries. https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper Pulp paper is largely an artefact of the 19th and 20th centuries: cheaper than rag, but also far less durable. It remains in use and is suitable for ephemeral content, but materials meant for long duration are created with archival-quality paper, inks, and other treatments.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Anyone that has taken Edward Tufte's[0] Data Visualization course (I don't know if he gives it anymore), has seen his favorite props, which are a couple of copies of Euclid's Geometry. Supposedly, these are real, 400-year-old books, printed by a 17th-century mathematician. He likes them, because of pop-out examples of geometric shapes. I think they are more modern reproductions, but I could be wrong. They are in great shape. [0] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

smoldesu 5y ago

The irony that I'm reading this on Substack is not lost on me.

jimhefferon 5y ago
I'm not sure why the downvotes. I see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot for instance that links have a half-life of two years. Of course, links differ from content, but the point is that online content is ephemeral (the wonderful Wayback machine nonwithstanding).
- tomComb 5y ago
  But for some online content - substack, clubhouse, snapchat - that is there idea. Just sayin that not all online content should be linked in together.
gwern 5y ago
The irony... that you're reading some brutally simplified, crude, static, easily-archived HTML text whose fulltext copy has also been mailed out to thousands of readers[1] and archived in their personal mail readers and computers? A lot of bad things one could, and I have, said about Substack's technology, but "it will linkrot and can't be archived" is not one of them. [1] ACX is #2 on the Technology Substack leaderboard so it has 'thousands'; since my own newsletter is ~6k and Scott is many times more popular than I am in our circles, I'd guess the number of email copies of this ACX post is closer to 50k than 1k.
- Zababa 5y ago
  You made me check the HTML of substack, and you're right, once you find the "article" tag it is precisely this, the article. In addition to everything you said, making a substack scrapper to extract precisely the article would be trivial.

HenryKissinger 5y ago

We as a society need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is valuable. The hypothetical future value of most past data is less than the cost of preserving it.

ghaff 5y ago
It can be hard to know what should be kept and be tossed. And reasonable people can disagree about which applies. But it's certainly a fair point that we probably don't want to preserve every byte of ephemera forever.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's mildly amusing to glance at a copy of my high school newspaper from eons ago. But I still can't see any value in it.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    The argument that I hear often is that people in 200/300 years would precisely love that kind of thing. My history book in high school was filled with things like that. Articles from journals, letters from soldiers sent to their families. I think we don't need to keep every single high school newspaper, but I wouldn't know where to start if I had to choose which ones to keep.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I.e. "scan it all and let god sort it out" :-)
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I love this quote from here: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits. -------- One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.

matheist 5y ago

Note that this is not written by Scott Alexander --- it's part of his "your book review" series in which readers submit book reviews and he invites his audience to read them and vote on them.

fastball 5y ago
That is explicitly stated in the opening paragraph.

WalterBright 5y ago

I expect a lot is lost because of copyright laws that discourage scanning.

bpodgursky 5y ago
That is not the focus of this book; I don't believe this is a problem libraries have had.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes, in fact, copying for reasons of preservation and research is one of the few copyright exceptions that libraries actually have as opposed to the far-ranging get out of jail free card that many people seem to think they have.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    There are numerous cases of media being perserved strictly through unauthorised copying, falling well outside even the broadest interpretation of any library exception. The Google Books project would be a case in point, as well as (AFAIU) the early stages of the Internet Archive's book-scanning project. Numerous early television programmes were only preserved through off-the-air copies by viewers. Up through the early 1970s, television news programmes did not generally preserve broadcasts, or even have a research library (see Epstein's News from Nowwhere, 1973). I'm not sure where the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (dating to August 5, 1968) originated (Wikipedia claims the Nashville affiliate provided recordings), though I recall a case in which a member of the public, Marion Stokes, recorded nightly news broadcasts for decades. https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/ https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc... https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-mari...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

caseyross 5y ago

I know we as HN readers have a tendency to look in the comments for a TL;DR, but this time, do yourself a favor and read the article first. You won't find anything below that wasn't already covered, with more nuance and historical context, in the original linked piece.

karaterobot 5y ago

This review implies that the main use case of microfilm transfer was to free up shelf space by destroying books and putting them on microfilm. To my knowledge, that is not the case: the main use case was for periodicals like newspapers, magazines, and journals, not books. And certainly, microfilm was not intended to free up shelf space in the library: most items in a library's collection aren't on the shelves, they're stored in warehouses and basements. Paying to store miles of old newspapers was not sustainable for most library systems, and despite what this review implies, newsprint does not last forever. The alternative to microfilm was not that we would have pristine copies of our history easily accessible to every library patron, it was that most copies of a periodical would simply be destroyed. The remit of public libraries is not to preserve books, but to provide access to information. There's a crucial difference. Microfilm was not ideal, but in a pre-digitization world it was about the best option available to provide access to those old periodicals that would otherwise have been lost, or at least hard to access.

afiori 5y ago
the point of the book of that for many publication not even one library opted to keep physical copies and that when the new York times offered cloth paper for libraries (the same paper used in centuries old books) they refused. overall it turned out paper has a longer shelf live than microfilms

WalterBright 5y ago

This explains some of the crummy B+W scans of some old books on archive.org - they were scanned from microfilm.