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It's really funny to think about how the advances of technology keeps changing how we perceive books. 7TB is even a commodity disk these days. And it's a lot l

It's really funny to think about how the advances of technology keeps changing how we perceive books. 7TB is even a commodity disk these days. And it's a lot less than the torrent of scientific papers that floated around some time ago (that was ~18TB IIRC).

ars 4y ago
It's 7TB compressed. If it's text you'd need about 70TB to decompress it. It's probably mostly images though, so probably not quite that bad.
- emj 4y ago
  I've tried to do lossy compression of epubs with some lines of bash scripts; i.e. removing the images and fonts that were not needed. Many epubs could be downsized to a third of their size, but then I found a book that needed the supplied fonts and gave up. When doing lossy compressions can not have those kind of bugs. What I also found was that many of the images in the epubs were already unuseable and nothing like their counter parts in phsyical books.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I don’t understand this. Are they epubs of comics or something? Epubs are already compressed (zip).
    - robonerd 4y ago
      It's not terribly uncommon to find an epub with several megabytes of cover art and a few hundred kilobytes of text.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kristofferR 4y ago
      Good compression of lots of epub files can likely be way more efficient, as deduplication/compression algorithms can be run on lots of books at the same time. Especially so with a good dictionary.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Things can be rendered from compressed container files. For HTML with images, even slow-but-strong compression like LZMA is already fast enough to render pages as fast as you can click through them, even on fairly old hardware. Kiwix .ZIM file format is a good example. The entire Gutenberg Library is a single ~65 Gb file, and you can read any book from it without unpacking anything.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I foresee storage density reaching the point that for most ordinary people "online" becomes rather unimportant. What would be the effects of technology when computers behave as in early science fiction, as stand-alone oracles? [1] [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  How would the appeal of streamers and live data/content settle out in that case? Sometimes context is available in the moment that makes it easier for all parties to consume and analyze in that moment as well. Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case. This is saying nothing of live data tools as well, even weather data...
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > How would the appeal of streamers and live data/content settle out in that case? It would be mostly unaffected. As another commenter (Michael) says, communication, news and collaboration are distinct from storage as needs/functions. What you say here is fascinating: > Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case. There have always been bookish or gossipy people. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy both make note of that in stories about English culture. The balance of those qualities may have changed in the internet age. Perhaps the degree of reach via one-to-many communications has amplified the ephemeral gossip side. The scholarly life less so. Though it's enhanced by repositories like Gutenberg, Internet Archive and SciHub and the like, a "reader" (to use Bill Hicks's take) can still only process one media at a time. But as Ted Nelson pointed out, if you have all of the worlds writing at your fingertips, all hyperlinked and with awesome semantic search tools, reading becomes a quite different non-linear experience. That's something centralised walled gardens subtracted from the WWW as its 1990s conceit. That 90's vision of a multi-modal, multi-media "internet community" in which people read common news, converse and reference together hasn't really survived "Social Media". But then it was always a weal approximation to something like a group seminar in the university library rather than the town square or local pub.

ars 4y ago

It's 7TB compressed. If it's text you'd need about 70TB to decompress it. It's probably mostly images though, so probably not quite that bad.

emj 4y ago
I've tried to do lossy compression of epubs with some lines of bash scripts; i.e. removing the images and fonts that were not needed. Many epubs could be downsized to a third of their size, but then I found a book that needed the supplied fonts and gave up. When doing lossy compressions can not have those kind of bugs. What I also found was that many of the images in the epubs were already unuseable and nothing like their counter parts in phsyical books.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I don’t understand this. Are they epubs of comics or something? Epubs are already compressed (zip).
  - robonerd 4y ago
    It's not terribly uncommon to find an epub with several megabytes of cover art and a few hundred kilobytes of text.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristofferR 4y ago
    Good compression of lots of epub files can likely be way more efficient, as deduplication/compression algorithms can be run on lots of books at the same time. Especially so with a good dictionary.
int_19h 4y ago
Things can be rendered from compressed container files. For HTML with images, even slow-but-strong compression like LZMA is already fast enough to render pages as fast as you can click through them, even on fairly old hardware. Kiwix .ZIM file format is a good example. The entire Gutenberg Library is a single ~65 Gb file, and you can read any book from it without unpacking anything.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I foresee storage density reaching the point that for most ordinary people "online" becomes rather unimportant. What would be the effects of technology when computers behave as in early science fiction, as stand-alone oracles? [1] [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

themodelplumber 4y ago
How would the appeal of streamers and live data/content settle out in that case? Sometimes context is available in the moment that makes it easier for all parties to consume and analyze in that moment as well. Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case. This is saying nothing of live data tools as well, even weather data...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > How would the appeal of streamers and live data/content settle out in that case? It would be mostly unaffected. As another commenter (Michael) says, communication, news and collaboration are distinct from storage as needs/functions. What you say here is fascinating: > Since transient, ethereal meme culture is also basically emergent culture now, it's difficult not to also foresee a greater cultural divide in such a case. There have always been bookish or gossipy people. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy both make note of that in stories about English culture. The balance of those qualities may have changed in the internet age. Perhaps the degree of reach via one-to-many communications has amplified the ephemeral gossip side. The scholarly life less so. Though it's enhanced by repositories like Gutenberg, Internet Archive and SciHub and the like, a "reader" (to use Bill Hicks's take) can still only process one media at a time. But as Ted Nelson pointed out, if you have all of the worlds writing at your fingertips, all hyperlinked and with awesome semantic search tools, reading becomes a quite different non-linear experience. That's something centralised walled gardens subtracted from the WWW as its 1990s conceit. That 90's vision of a multi-modal, multi-media "internet community" in which people read common news, converse and reference together hasn't really survived "Social Media". But then it was always a weal approximation to something like a group seminar in the university library rather than the town square or local pub.