6 ms·

Saving 4M books from landfill

185 points by raybb 4y ago

ranting-moth 4y ago
I think the people in the frontline of this preservation deserve to have their portrait and bio etched in stainless steel for their effort. The value this will have, both now and hundreds of years (assuming it'll still exists!) will be immeasurable, especially as we now seem to be entering the AI era of human history.
- archgoon 4y ago
  [dead]
- abracadaniel 4y ago
  Ceramic will have to do for now https://www.businessinsider.com/the-internet-archives-100-ceramic-statues-2014-4?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-internet-archives-100-ce...
tikeswarbhoi 4y ago
[flagged]
totetsu 4y ago
I wonder if the future of archiving will not just involve keeping exact digital copies of everything but instead of keeping AI models trained on large amounts of data that we would otherwise throw away or never know how to use. Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore and I thought sure maybe those photos of those peoples lives an now irrelevant to sentimentality but they are a key into a time and place in the latent image space. We should be collecting all this stuff to compress it into datasets.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nick123567 4y ago
  Funny thing is the article mentions machine learning as one of the consumers of the digitized books. Maybe some of the money going to machine learning now may actually contribute to preserving original source material.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I am not sure it's going to help the accuracy concerns already dogging this tech to mix in centuries-old texts.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore This kills me. And yet I have boxes and boxes of photos and slides of relatives I never met, many of whom died before I was even born. I feel some obligation to keep them. So they’ve been with me for decades, moving from house to house, a ball and chain of sorts. Will my young son care about it? I don’t know. Why do I feel obligated to keep them? These people lived lives as full as and rich and as real as mine and yours. And the only memory of those lives is in some old photos that in some cases names can’t even be identified.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Such is life. Everyone has their own lives to deal with that they can't be bothered with old stories. That's why I'm so glad my grandfather wrote a book about his life when he was in his late 60s. You'd think it would be boring, but his life as an immigrant to Canada from Finland was fascinating, and he only included the interesting bits. The book is only about 150 pages of easy reading, and even people who barely knew him have enjoyed it. So I'm quite confident that he at least will be remembered by his descendants. A couple of years ago I even digitized it into a website, which makes it so easy to share among the family.
  - dchuk 4y ago
    I likely won’t ever get around to building this, but I feel strongly a genealogy/family media focused web app would be so useful. Scan and upload old photos, maybe have ai upscale and clean the, up, let your family tag the various old people in each photo. I have started asking my family to give me all of the old physical pictures we have so I can scan and upscale them. But then there’s no good place to share and tag them all for a large family.
    - karencarits 4y ago
      Sites like https://geni.com https://geni.com would allow you to upload and trash photos
    - masklinn 4y ago
password4321 4y ago
https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I share the same obsession as archive.org. There were library books that for one reason or another made an impression on me as a kid. Sadly of course those old books have been rotated out of the system. Books that replaced them didn't impress me. (Though perhaps as I have aged I am less impressionable?) There were some great science and chemistry books for kids when I was young — to be replaced with "grossology" books. I liked the books that showed future automobiles, spacecraft but I understand why those are dated. I'm not sure I have seen anything that has the same sense of optimism to replace them though. Or maybe I just prefer the early space-art illustration and concept art in those books done by artists wielding gouache long before CG made everything look bland and lifeless. In any event I tracked many of these books down on eBay and purchased them. (So often "DISCARD" stamped inside the front cover, a library card pocket inside the back cover.) Because I am worried that I am becoming a hoarder I was inclined to instead scan many of the books I had collected and then return the original to the sea of used books. I have uploaded to archive.org everything I scanned. And I am happy to have in fact also found many other cool books there that I had assumed were going to be lost to time (thinking now about "The Boy Mechanic" bookstore example).
- pengaru 4y ago
  Kudos for your efforts to preserve and upload your picks to archive.org. It's such a bummer that public libraries won't have these physical objects on shelves in a discoverable form and place, where people can just stumble upon and page through them. I've picked through a couple public library "removed from circulation sales" and always find at least one gem there's no obvious good cause for removal. It's hard to not become a hoarder in such situations. Already brought two such finds home: Bombs Over Bikini [0] and Alaska Crude [1]. They're tiny, and dense with historically relevant photographs. It seems strange to remove them, I suspect it's partly because their contents are dark/depressing/embarrassing to the nation in hindsight. But that's arguably their value IMHO. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-bikini https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-biki... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude
  - 4y ago
xbruteforce 4y ago
We can only hope the books will be used for good, and not for training AI to enslave us.
karaterobot 4y ago
> a library’s main goal is to preserve information over time That is absolutely not a library's main goal. A library's main goal is to provide access to information, not preserve it. Archive.org is thinking about what an archive is for. That's is understandable, but don't let their confusion confuse you.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  By definition a library houses a collection of books and other media. Allowing borrowing by members of the public is optional. Maintaining a collection another way of saying preserving information over time. So I would argue IA is correct. But if your local libraries are anything like mine, the focus is far less about books and more about providing a community space.
  - wirrbel 4y ago
    Carnegie was iirc denied access to libraries which led him to promote public libraries that enable learning. From my perspective it’s fair that not every town opts to keep a physical archive of every book. However it would be great if every book that is decommissioned is scanned if not already digitally preserved and each new book should probably submitted for archival purposes in digital form by the publisher to the national library directly nowadays. Just as the laws typically require a physical copy of the book to submitted to the national libraries (here in Germany it’s the „state“ library that received books, in order to reduce the risk of book destruction in case of fascist take over and Gleichschaltung. This would be a concern for a centralized archive.org I would hope there is a great backup strategy in place that can prevent deletions from the archive
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    That definition would make any bookstore a library. Perhaps that means it is lacking specificity, because nobody uses the word "library" and means a bookstore.
    - teruakohatu 4y ago
bolangi 4y ago
It's not necessary for a government to burn books if people (and libraries) just throw them away.
piceas 4y ago
Love it. We're making good use of their picture books collection. It's great to come across older books that are new to us and we would wouldn't likely come across elsewhere. Also handy to have a huge supply of books in a non-local language. Our library is good but necessary limited in that regard. A couple big downsides are that the websites are a pain to use and the quality of the scans are occasionally very poor. Scanned books with ripped pages or lift-the-flap books are annoying. Scans of tactile books are amusing but ultimately also a waste of time.
politelemon 4y ago
> Then a subset of those books are used for digital lending, interlibrary loan and machine learning. Why only a subset of books? I'm guessing some relation to copyright or something similar? It's a shame that the most common way to access digital books with libraries these days, is through a user-hostile DRM-infected system, held hostage by Adobe and publisher imposed limitations. With that in mind I can only praise what Archive is doing, even if it's a subset being made available.
- jccalhoun 4y ago
  I would guess copyright is the reason but that is just a guess.
specproc 4y ago
I've been using BWB for my book shopping for a while now. Not quite as speedy or as broad in selection as Amazon, but a much nicer option and it's rare not to find what I want. Well worth giving a go.
foreigner 4y ago
Does anybody know of a library service that will ship you paper books when you check them out, and then you ship them back to check them back in? Sort of a ghost library, like the way Netflix originally worked with DVDs.
ForestCritter 4y ago
I've found quite a few books I wanted from better world books. That they resell the used books at good prices is what I like about them. That they do these other partnerships makes me like them even better.

185 points by raybb 4y ago

I think the people in the frontline of this preservation deserve to have their portrait and bio etched in stainless steel for their effort. The value this will have, both now and hundreds of years (assuming it'll still exists!) will be immeasurable, especially as we now seem to be entering the AI era of human history.

archgoon 4y ago
[dead]
abracadaniel 4y ago
Ceramic will have to do for now https://www.businessinsider.com/the-internet-archives-100-ceramic-statues-2014-4?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-internet-archives-100-ce...

tikeswarbhoi 4y ago

[flagged]

totetsu 4y ago

I wonder if the future of archiving will not just involve keeping exact digital copies of everything but instead of keeping AI models trained on large amounts of data that we would otherwise throw away or never know how to use. Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore and I thought sure maybe those photos of those peoples lives an now irrelevant to sentimentality but they are a key into a time and place in the latent image space. We should be collecting all this stuff to compress it into datasets.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nick123567 4y ago
Funny thing is the article mentions machine learning as one of the consumers of the digitized books. Maybe some of the money going to machine learning now may actually contribute to preserving original source material.
emodendroket 4y ago
I am not sure it's going to help the accuracy concerns already dogging this tech to mix in centuries-old texts.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Recently I saw a family throwing away all the photo albums of their deceased relatives that nobody cared about anymore This kills me. And yet I have boxes and boxes of photos and slides of relatives I never met, many of whom died before I was even born. I feel some obligation to keep them. So they’ve been with me for decades, moving from house to house, a ball and chain of sorts. Will my young son care about it? I don’t know. Why do I feel obligated to keep them? These people lived lives as full as and rich and as real as mine and yours. And the only memory of those lives is in some old photos that in some cases names can’t even be identified.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Such is life. Everyone has their own lives to deal with that they can't be bothered with old stories. That's why I'm so glad my grandfather wrote a book about his life when he was in his late 60s. You'd think it would be boring, but his life as an immigrant to Canada from Finland was fascinating, and he only included the interesting bits. The book is only about 150 pages of easy reading, and even people who barely knew him have enjoyed it. So I'm quite confident that he at least will be remembered by his descendants. A couple of years ago I even digitized it into a website, which makes it so easy to share among the family.
- dchuk 4y ago
  I likely won’t ever get around to building this, but I feel strongly a genealogy/family media focused web app would be so useful. Scan and upload old photos, maybe have ai upscale and clean the, up, let your family tag the various old people in each photo. I have started asking my family to give me all of the old physical pictures we have so I can scan and upscale them. But then there’s no good place to share and tag them all for a large family.
  - karencarits 4y ago
    Sites like https://geni.com https://geni.com would allow you to upload and trash photos
  - masklinn 4y ago

password4321 4y ago

https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I share the same obsession as archive.org. There were library books that for one reason or another made an impression on me as a kid. Sadly of course those old books have been rotated out of the system. Books that replaced them didn't impress me. (Though perhaps as I have aged I am less impressionable?) There were some great science and chemistry books for kids when I was young — to be replaced with "grossology" books. I liked the books that showed future automobiles, spacecraft but I understand why those are dated. I'm not sure I have seen anything that has the same sense of optimism to replace them though. Or maybe I just prefer the early space-art illustration and concept art in those books done by artists wielding gouache long before CG made everything look bland and lifeless. In any event I tracked many of these books down on eBay and purchased them. (So often "DISCARD" stamped inside the front cover, a library card pocket inside the back cover.) Because I am worried that I am becoming a hoarder I was inclined to instead scan many of the books I had collected and then return the original to the sea of used books. I have uploaded to archive.org everything I scanned. And I am happy to have in fact also found many other cool books there that I had assumed were going to be lost to time (thinking now about "The Boy Mechanic" bookstore example).

pengaru 4y ago
Kudos for your efforts to preserve and upload your picks to archive.org. It's such a bummer that public libraries won't have these physical objects on shelves in a discoverable form and place, where people can just stumble upon and page through them. I've picked through a couple public library "removed from circulation sales" and always find at least one gem there's no obvious good cause for removal. It's hard to not become a hoarder in such situations. Already brought two such finds home: Bombs Over Bikini [0] and Alaska Crude [1]. They're tiny, and dense with historically relevant photographs. It seems strange to remove them, I suspect it's partly because their contents are dark/depressing/embarrassing to the nation in hindsight. But that's arguably their value IMHO. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-bikini https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-biki... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude
- 4y ago

xbruteforce 4y ago

We can only hope the books will be used for good, and not for training AI to enslave us.

karaterobot 4y ago

> a library’s main goal is to preserve information over time That is absolutely not a library's main goal. A library's main goal is to provide access to information, not preserve it. Archive.org is thinking about what an archive is for. That's is understandable, but don't let their confusion confuse you.

teruakohatu 4y ago
By definition a library houses a collection of books and other media. Allowing borrowing by members of the public is optional. Maintaining a collection another way of saying preserving information over time. So I would argue IA is correct. But if your local libraries are anything like mine, the focus is far less about books and more about providing a community space.
- wirrbel 4y ago
  Carnegie was iirc denied access to libraries which led him to promote public libraries that enable learning. From my perspective it’s fair that not every town opts to keep a physical archive of every book. However it would be great if every book that is decommissioned is scanned if not already digitally preserved and each new book should probably submitted for archival purposes in digital form by the publisher to the national library directly nowadays. Just as the laws typically require a physical copy of the book to submitted to the national libraries (here in Germany it’s the „state“ library that received books, in order to reduce the risk of book destruction in case of fascist take over and Gleichschaltung. This would be a concern for a centralized archive.org I would hope there is a great backup strategy in place that can prevent deletions from the archive
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  That definition would make any bookstore a library. Perhaps that means it is lacking specificity, because nobody uses the word "library" and means a bookstore.
  - teruakohatu 4y ago

bolangi 4y ago

It's not necessary for a government to burn books if people (and libraries) just throw them away.

piceas 4y ago

Love it. We're making good use of their picture books collection. It's great to come across older books that are new to us and we would wouldn't likely come across elsewhere. Also handy to have a huge supply of books in a non-local language. Our library is good but necessary limited in that regard. A couple big downsides are that the websites are a pain to use and the quality of the scans are occasionally very poor. Scanned books with ripped pages or lift-the-flap books are annoying. Scans of tactile books are amusing but ultimately also a waste of time.

politelemon 4y ago

> Then a subset of those books are used for digital lending, interlibrary loan and machine learning. Why only a subset of books? I'm guessing some relation to copyright or something similar? It's a shame that the most common way to access digital books with libraries these days, is through a user-hostile DRM-infected system, held hostage by Adobe and publisher imposed limitations. With that in mind I can only praise what Archive is doing, even if it's a subset being made available.

jccalhoun 4y ago
I would guess copyright is the reason but that is just a guess.

specproc 4y ago

I've been using BWB for my book shopping for a while now. Not quite as speedy or as broad in selection as Amazon, but a much nicer option and it's rare not to find what I want. Well worth giving a go.

foreigner 4y ago

Does anybody know of a library service that will ship you paper books when you check them out, and then you ship them back to check them back in? Sort of a ghost library, like the way Netflix originally worked with DVDs.

ForestCritter 4y ago

I've found quite a few books I wanted from better world books. That they resell the used books at good prices is what I like about them. That they do these other partnerships makes me like them even better.