7 ms·

Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.

anthk 4y ago
LOL. Were are you from? I have books from 1800 at home.
- nix23 4y ago
  Maybe from Hogwarts...have you seen want they do with their books?
  - anthk 4y ago
    Seriously, here in Europe books are treated with a lot of care because books were and are relatively expensive, unlike mangas in Japan which were sold like chip bags. Maybe a lot of them have a folded page or such, but the content it's readable. Try that with IDE disks from a Pentium II.
    - nix23 4y ago
      Ok, i folded the disk and after many hour of testing i have to say that your are right, it's not working anymore, however for the sake of correctness it was a Pentium4 era harddisk. But yeah being swiss i know what you mean ;)
version_five 4y ago
This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine
- serf 4y ago
  go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load. I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme. Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    > Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years >> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.
    - version_five 4y ago
      (also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)
      - chaxor 4y ago
        It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud". Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.
      - lazyasciiart 4y ago
ncallaway 4y ago
> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months? It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > citations My own experience - having a brand new paperback litter pages on my first read. Or buying a book only to find that the last signature was a duplicate of the one prior to it. I've also had a manga spine break on a second reading, literally dropping a whole section of pages on my lap.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    How are you reading them? Are you bending the cover to the back while reading?
Eupraxias 4y ago
Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape. When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  For me, if I can really sit and enjoy reading and that's all I'm doing I prefer a physical book. But, electronic books do have a real convenience to them that I have to admit. If I'm reading one-handed (holding a baby, eating a sandwich, etc) I really appreciate a kindle for reading. Also, when traveling, the ability to bring 50 books with me on a flight, or camping, while taking up no space is amazing. But, yea, for the endurance of the storage media, physical books definitely have an edge in my eye.
chaxor 4y ago
A big point being made in this thread is that the technology for physical storage of the media becomes obsolete quickly. One could argue that the physical book itself is the original storage technology. But, as many have said, that book on Floppy disk is harder to access in today's world, and in the future, a 7200RPM hard disk external USB drive will probably be very difficult to use. It's already somewhat of a hassle for many devices using usb-C, rather than usb-A. So when we move to storing archives or cold storage (likely where most books will go) on DNA, information is provided by LLM AI, and all our devices have no ports whatsoever - it's pretty likely that external hard drive will require a lot of effort and money to get the contents out.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I have a SCSI hard drive or two I cannot access.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
I have paperbacks over 100 years old that are still easily readable. It is in the shelf. Before that it was on my grandfathers shelf. The transformation was quite easy. Shelf ot Shelf. Somewhere on an Amazon server I have a couple of thousand Kindle eBooks. How long will Kindle device be around and useable? They may disappear at any moment really. I have also bought book and publications in other formats. PDFs, Word docs, plain text, epub, etc. If I die tomorrow, and someone was interested in my literarily habits, they could go to my shelf and find that paperback, put it in their pocket and put it on their own bookshelf. My Kindle books will be unseeable and untouchable. (ands this might happen before I kick the bucket and I won't be able ot read them either. already a couple of books and publications are missing All my computer file books on a cloud somewhere or some harddisk will be invisible as well. If someone took an interest in my laptop to look at my digital bookshelf. of non-Kindle files. Well, it is a MacBook and strongly encrypted from what I understand. I dont think a future interested person will have an easy time looking at my shelf. Perhaps I should start gluing thumb drives to my bookshelf at regular intervals. How kong will usb thumb drives be around? How long do they last? I have a nice collection of floppy disks, computer cassettes (with programs), ZX Microdrive disks, Iomega zip drives, and a stack of backup streamer tapes of different formats/sizes. I have no idea what system they used and what it would take to read even one of them, I also have some movies in "HD DVD" format and a laserdisc or two. Not to mention a large assortments of memory cards for cameras that mostly contain RAW formats of long forgotten cameras. All these data storage ideas were sensible at the time. A thumb drive is sensible now. I have no idea for how long it will be.
- vel0city 4y ago
  There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android. There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble. I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap. All those digital mediums are not lost, and all of those digital files can be transferred to more current storage mediums without any loss in resolution. You're right that storing important files on your MacBook isn't a good archival strategy. It is a recipe for certain disaster. Its essentially storing your books loosely in the trunk of your car along with your gym bag and every now and then an open case of beer. It's not the place to store things long term, just a place to put things while you're working on them. If your logicboard dies, it'll take the storage with it.
irrational 4y ago
I have trade paperbacks from when the 1970s. My father has some from the 1950s. They are all perfectly fine. Maybe the ones from the 1950s are a little yellow around the edges, but that hardly affects the ability to read them.

anthk 4y ago

LOL. Were are you from? I have books from 1800 at home.

nix23 4y ago
Maybe from Hogwarts...have you seen want they do with their books?
- anthk 4y ago
  Seriously, here in Europe books are treated with a lot of care because books were and are relatively expensive, unlike mangas in Japan which were sold like chip bags. Maybe a lot of them have a folded page or such, but the content it's readable. Try that with IDE disks from a Pentium II.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Ok, i folded the disk and after many hour of testing i have to say that your are right, it's not working anymore, however for the sake of correctness it was a Pentium4 era harddisk. But yeah being swiss i know what you mean ;)

version_five 4y ago

This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine

serf 4y ago
go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load. I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme. Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years >> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.
  - version_five 4y ago
    (also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)
    - chaxor 4y ago
      It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud". Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago

ncallaway 4y ago

> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months? It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.

falcolas 4y ago
> citations My own experience - having a brand new paperback litter pages on my first read. Or buying a book only to find that the last signature was a duplicate of the one prior to it. I've also had a manga spine break on a second reading, literally dropping a whole section of pages on my lap.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  How are you reading them? Are you bending the cover to the back while reading?

Eupraxias 4y ago

Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape. When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.

ncallaway 4y ago
For me, if I can really sit and enjoy reading and that's all I'm doing I prefer a physical book. But, electronic books do have a real convenience to them that I have to admit. If I'm reading one-handed (holding a baby, eating a sandwich, etc) I really appreciate a kindle for reading. Also, when traveling, the ability to bring 50 books with me on a flight, or camping, while taking up no space is amazing. But, yea, for the endurance of the storage media, physical books definitely have an edge in my eye.

chaxor 4y ago

A big point being made in this thread is that the technology for physical storage of the media becomes obsolete quickly. One could argue that the physical book itself is the original storage technology. But, as many have said, that book on Floppy disk is harder to access in today's world, and in the future, a 7200RPM hard disk external USB drive will probably be very difficult to use. It's already somewhat of a hassle for many devices using usb-C, rather than usb-A. So when we move to storing archives or cold storage (likely where most books will go) on DNA, information is provided by LLM AI, and all our devices have no ports whatsoever - it's pretty likely that external hard drive will require a lot of effort and money to get the contents out.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
I have a SCSI hard drive or two I cannot access.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

I have paperbacks over 100 years old that are still easily readable. It is in the shelf. Before that it was on my grandfathers shelf. The transformation was quite easy. Shelf ot Shelf. Somewhere on an Amazon server I have a couple of thousand Kindle eBooks. How long will Kindle device be around and useable? They may disappear at any moment really. I have also bought book and publications in other formats. PDFs, Word docs, plain text, epub, etc. If I die tomorrow, and someone was interested in my literarily habits, they could go to my shelf and find that paperback, put it in their pocket and put it on their own bookshelf. My Kindle books will be unseeable and untouchable. (ands this might happen before I kick the bucket and I won't be able ot read them either. already a couple of books and publications are missing All my computer file books on a cloud somewhere or some harddisk will be invisible as well. If someone took an interest in my laptop to look at my digital bookshelf. of non-Kindle files. Well, it is a MacBook and strongly encrypted from what I understand. I dont think a future interested person will have an easy time looking at my shelf. Perhaps I should start gluing thumb drives to my bookshelf at regular intervals. How kong will usb thumb drives be around? How long do they last? I have a nice collection of floppy disks, computer cassettes (with programs), ZX Microdrive disks, Iomega zip drives, and a stack of backup streamer tapes of different formats/sizes. I have no idea what system they used and what it would take to read even one of them, I also have some movies in "HD DVD" format and a laserdisc or two. Not to mention a large assortments of memory cards for cameras that mostly contain RAW formats of long forgotten cameras. All these data storage ideas were sensible at the time. A thumb drive is sensible now. I have no idea for how long it will be.

vel0city 4y ago
There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android. There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble. I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap. All those digital mediums are not lost, and all of those digital files can be transferred to more current storage mediums without any loss in resolution. You're right that storing important files on your MacBook isn't a good archival strategy. It is a recipe for certain disaster. Its essentially storing your books loosely in the trunk of your car along with your gym bag and every now and then an open case of beer. It's not the place to store things long term, just a place to put things while you're working on them. If your logicboard dies, it'll take the storage with it.

irrational 4y ago

I have trade paperbacks from when the 1970s. My father has some from the 1950s. They are all perfectly fine. Maybe the ones from the 1950s are a little yellow around the edges, but that hardly affects the ability to read them.