5 ms·
The new bibliomaniacs
- black6 4mo ago> Buyers and sellers alike pointed to the same reason: growing up in the digital age has intensified the desire for analogue objects and tangible connections to the past. There is something special about holding history in your hands. Books don't change. The online written word is subject to revision and change, as are ebooks. A physical volume which one owns and holds cannot be memory-holed.
- bonoboTP 4mo agoDigital files that you store on your own storage media with free software also can't change (without your intervention). But in new generations many only have phones, not even laptops.
- black6 4mo agoAbsolutely, and the future where everything digital is "in the cloud" seems closer and closer every day. RAM and SSD costs skyrocketing sure is squeezing out the consumer and making her more dependent on cloud-based services.
- Shellban 4mo agoI am just hoping that the cost will eventually go down in a few years, and we will be able to start homelabbing again. My server drives are not going to last forever...
- dylan604 4mo agoThere's plenty of books that have revisions, but yes, the first version does not physically change. Then again, other than collectors, I don't know many people that have multiple books of each revision/reprint of the same book. To your point, it's not like you can read a book, go to bed, and then wake up to a modified book. However, you could damage your book and go to have it replaced with a different version. Say you loan/give your copy away knowing you can get a new one easier than having your recipient get a copy for themselves. Your new one could be different. It's happened to me
- everdrive 4mo agoI've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- eudamoniac 4mo agoAfter I started reading essays printed in books, like Emerson's, I realized there is no blogger alive that is worth reading anymore. Something to consider.
- everdrive 4mo agoWhat essays can you recommend?
- eudamoniac 4mo agoEmerson, Samuel Johnson, Wallace, Orwell, Hume, Kant, Foucault, Evola, most philosophers you've heard of
- dhosek 4mo agoIt’s not merely that—I’ve found that reading a book on a technical topic is a faster route to understanding than trying to learn it from random webpages spewed forth by the google.
- voidhorse 4mo agoAmen. I never understood how such an avid blog reading community existed when, compared to published essays, the vast bulk of it is drivel. I guess I simply hadn't realized that many people out there may have never read a formal or published essay. What a shame.
- eudamoniac 4mo ago
- cyanydeez 4mo agoI feel like most of these types of beliefs are in the realm of people's desires to differentiate themselves rather than anything intrinsic about how they do it. There's studies on mammal populations, and as their preferred number of group sizes increases, the 'differentiable' traits also increased. So mammals that preferred to live in large groups had more visible differences in phenotypes than small groups. If social systems are just an extension of phenotypes to some degree, then all that's really happening is people wanting to differentiate and they have a small differentiable desire in any given direction. but you be you.
- willrshansen 4mo agoalso r/datahoarder
- keiferski 4mo agoThe problem with ebooks to me is that they have no real physical presence (obviously) and therefore I have a harder time remembering if I read them, and where I read them. On the other hand I have a ton of physical books on my shelf, and can specifically look at one, remember what it’s about, and where I read it. The book itself is a kind of memory totem, and over time I’ve built up a nice little physical collection of what I’ve “emptied into my mind”, to quote Franklin. I don’t have the same thing for the ebooks I’ve read, and it gives me a weird feeling of amnesia.
- Insanity 4mo agoI highlight often when reading on my kindle. I have created a small program that scrapes my highlights and sends me a daily email with one of them. I get it before I wake up and it’s the first thing I read once I check my email (usually that happens after my morning reading). I find that this helps remember books that I read years ago, and usually the single quote is enough to jolt a series of memories about the book. That said, I also own physical books and they are in glass bookshelves around my office and living room. I do like the looks of them and they can be a conversation starter as well when friends come over.
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- stuxnet79 4mo agoCould you share more details on how you were able to set this up? Do you use Koreader?
- Insanity 4mo agoI wrote a python script that I run locally which scrapes read.amazon.com (think this is the URL, I’ll double check when I’m home). Kindle highlights are automatically synced there. The Python scraper extracts all highlights into a json file and stores this in S3. I have a Lambda function which runs daily, selects a random highlights, and emails it to me. I’m using AWS SES for sending out the emails. I think it’s all essentially free tier AWS stuff, so basically 0 cost. I’ve not fully automated it, I need to run the scraper manually but that’s easy enough to do whenever I’m at my desktop. It’s a bit hacked together but it works lol.
- warumdarum 4mo agoIm just contemplating that the cultural filter function that was the recognition of a work by the pulic is deactivated. Even a book that just drowns without any splash may reincarnate as an "idea" from the training material. Yes, the author is forgotten, but the idea lives on.
- vmsp 4mo agoI didn't know I was part of a trend, that's pretty cool. I've been buying originals related to the Portuguese Estado Novo and Carnation Revolution for some years. A ton of ad-hoc, clearly political, publishers spawned right after the revolution and I've been thinking of digitizing some of the stuff I have for historical purposes.
- armchairhacker 4mo agoPersonally, I don’t see any advantage of a real book over an ebook (locally stored) in an e-ink reader. And there are disadvantages: ergonomics, space, cost, environment. EDIT: books last longer (decades or centuries) than SSDs. But M-DISCs can allegedly last for millennia.
- AlotOfReading 4mo agoKeep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with. That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.
- dylan604 4mo agoI hope you're saying that is only applicable to you personally and not applying that to every other human on the planet. There are plenty of real world advantages a physical book has over an ebook, even if you can't think of them. On of my favorites was not having to turn my book off during airplane take off and landing. Also, books do not run out of battery so they do not need to be recharged. You can have multiple books open at the same time, admittedly, this is more for during research times and not just a simple reading session. But I'm not going to sit here typing out every single difference I can think of just because you can't think of any
- Novosell 4mo agoWhy would you need to turn off the ereader? Just put it in airplane mode.
- iLoveOncall 4mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot less to do with "seeking tangible connections to the past", and much more with the fact that there are a few book collecting Youtubers who's short form content is getting popular and shows how much people can theoretically earn with old books.
- esp0x 4mo ago[dead]
- ynac 4mo agoThe signs sure seem to be indicating a Gen Z rollback to the analog and middle tech. Newspapers, books, cursive clubs, letter writing (pen pals), cassettes and albums, printed photographs, even carb/gas based auto hacking. These are just in my circle, but I have seen stories in the paper too. Anyone else seeing interesting trends from the youngers? I especially like to see the blending of new and old - like building a music server for VLPFM neighborhood station, hyper local phone co, text clubs on paper, etc.
- tokioyoyo 4mo agoAs you mentioned, it’s trends. There’s nothing really sticky or mass-adoption like. This also isn’t necessarily new, as polaroids have been trending for over a decade now. Most of the same kids still scroll instagram, listen on spotify and etc. At least that’s what I’m seeing around me.
- groan 4mo agoNot sure why this comment is downvoted. As someone who regularly buys old stuff, the price goes up and down with trends that bare little resemblance to any “return to form”. It’s mostly people looking to turn a quick buck before they go onto some other trinket. We sit and wait it out, or wait for sellers who are not clued in on a given hype cycle.
- lubujackson 4mo agoThe interesting thing to me is how media choices like these are becoming elements of identity, kind of like how if you were into 'zines there was a shared mindset and some assumptions about your beliefs and cultural approach baked into that. When everything becomes monoculture, the bar to stand apart can be almost any vector.
- eudamoniac 4mo ago[dead]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 4mo agoPersonally I would want to collect books which are now out of print, for the sake of preserving information. I don't understand the appeal of first editions or autographed copies.
- Finnucane 4mo agoI have a fair number of autographed books, but I work in publishing so a lot of them are signed by friends and people I've worked with. Which means there's no way I'd willingly part with them. I'm less interested in 'collecting' as such so much any more. And my cookbooks all show visible signs of use.
- dhosek 4mo agoI was more of a collector as a younger person than I am now (as evidenced by my 2000-volume personal library). I generally only sought out first editions by authors that I really loved (Graham Greene being the primary exemplar). Most of the signed books I have are either written by friends (oddly the Pulitzer prize winner in my friend circle isn’t from my writing life but from my music life) or were purchased second-hand and already signed. I will admit that I’ll generally prefer a reader edition of a book over a collector edition—I own both of Greene’s retracted novels, one was dirt cheap from a second-hand bookshop in Canada and has a slightly warped spine so that the book viewed from the top is a parallelogram rather than a rectangle, and the other I paid a bit more for, but not at the extremes of price because it has a library rebinding (from the era of libraries rebinding hardcover books to increase their shelf life, a practice which has since been replaced with plastic-wrapping the dust jacket).
- wpollock 4mo agoFor what it's worth, in the U.S. at least you can connect to your local library with an app named "libby". I used this frequently on my Android phone to download books and magazines, and you can connect with the InterLibrary Loan system too. My use of the public library is much, much higher than before, when I had to travel to the physical library branch to check out books or read magazines.
- mbeex 4mo agoRegarding the feeling of something missing by reading on electronic devices, expressed in a few comments: Some (not all) answers I was able to find in Maryanne Wolf's book "Reader, Come Home". Main concept there is what she calls deep-reading, a complex back and forth between different brain areas and the hemispheres, that needs time and is replaced by specific forms of skimming on the mentioned devices. In particular, the shift between hemispheres allows for integration into the reader's personal store of knowledge and, more broadly, into their own worldview. The "wasted" time is essential for memory building and consolidation. Add enforced linear reading without immediate availibility to break the flow by googling/notifications/jumping to whatever, also consider haptics and more. Similar effects can also be found in handwriting vs typing, manual sketching etc.