3 ms·

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

by 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
    No it isn’t: I’ve found books missing half the pages in a thrift store.
movedx 4y ago
This. My wife runs a podcast about trashy novels and some of the books she gets her hands on... or not, as it were in some cases, because the digital version is a must.

by serf 4y ago

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
  No it isn’t: I’ve found books missing half the pages in a thrift store.

movedx 4y ago

This. My wife runs a podcast about trashy novels and some of the books she gets her hands on... or not, as it were in some cases, because the digital version is a must.