5 ms·

"I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawl

by TillE 12y ago

"I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling." This remains absolutely true. Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow information readily available, and providing access to out-of-copyright works. But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books, except when Google is actually scanning and OCR'ing those books.

tokai 12y ago
It is only a matter of time before it is not true anymore. Digital materials is the name of game in world of libraries now. I worked at the research library of a large technical university, and we only kept our physical collection to avoid student protests. (Throwing books away have a strange effect on non-librarians) This trends is slowly creeping into the public libraries as well.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  From all the people that would be distressed at the idea of throwing books, I was thinking librarians would be the first of them !
greenyoda 12y ago
On the web we also have the vast collection of Google Books (just because it's out of copyright doesn't mean it's uninteresting or useless), research papers from every academic area, high quality open source software to learn from, newspapers from around the world, etc. - which you won't find in most local libraries. Yes, lots of what's on the web is shit, but there's a lot of good stuff too.
nly 12y ago
> Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow information readily available Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge. > But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals. The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch Wikipedia. In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I mostly use those kinds of online sources, because I'm usually on the internet and rarely in libraries, just in terms of proportion of my time, and I rather strongly disagree that those sources are anywhere near as good as a library, at least for what I'm looking for. It's a huge breath of fresh air to find a good book on a subject, because it more often than not actually covers what's going on in a way that is far more opaque in dozens of StackExchange posts, blog posts, mailing list archives, etc. The rational exposition is just much better, if you can find a good book: explaining not only what's going on but also why and how, how it connects to other things, how it came about, where to look for more information, etc. It's really frustrating to work without access to a good research library for that reason, because you get only these much more scattered bits and pieces on many topics. Two areas that I've come across semi-recently where this is particularly true: DSP and logic programming. There are some good books on those subjects, and they are very much better than trying to piece together Google results, especially trying to learn an area.
  - nly 12y ago
    I guess a lot of it depends on how you learn best. I like to go deep, but it has to be on my terms. Sucking in books never gives me a sense of accomplishment unless I'm actively trying to 'rediscover' what is being taught for myself. I prefer to use reference material to open up lines of thought, then I go away and try to 'reinvent' it for myself, baby steps. I come back later to have the material nudge me in the right direction or get me over hurdles. Sometimes it's too hard and I'll drop material for something else, even if it's not as deep, or go without, rather than grind on, because I'd rather not know than 'know' and not truly understand. Fully-formed 'rational exposition' of a new topic or area of study is just a terrifying thing for me because I'm worried I'll be swept up in all that exposition and not prod the holes in my understanding, perhaps not even see them. Later on I then feel I have to remember 'what the author taught me' rather than unravelling of the topic itself. Visiting a complete exposition later, after a bit of folly, I feel much more confident in both myself and the material. It's very inefficient in terms of time, but then I can spend a lifetime learning and still know next to nothing anyway.
- WoodenChair 12y ago
Jach 12y ago
"Apparently there once was a kind of obsolete proto-blog that was called a 'book.'" [1] But even real books, the internet has made them very accessible. You can find PDFs for all sorts of new books if you know where to look -- not everything, yet, but a lot. Amazon has as good a search interface as any library's DOS terminal I've ever used (I'd argue much better). All the fascinating facts, stories, and amazing information are on the web, too, along with a bunch of other stuff. I'd say the author just needs to refine his webcrawling. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/universalism-postwar-progressivism-as.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/univers...
vacri 12y ago
Well, it's not literally true, though it is close to being so - there are some libraries out there that are literally just a few dog-eared books on a rack. But more importantly, the converse is true - people find things online that they'd never find out another way. Witness the meme of getting lost exploring links on Wikipedia. That's a relatively new phenomenon, to read an encyclopaedia that way. When I was a kid, we had World Book Encyclopedia, and I read every volume cover-to-cover... but most people didn't do that. Wikipedia (and the internet in general) has given the wider public the ability to get lost in a reference work. Ultimately the article is making a false dichotomy fallacy. There's no reason why you have to have only one or the other. This being said, 2003 was a fairly early time and the public experience of the internet was still maturing. British English and American English users were still in violent opposition as to the name of '#', for example...
lmm 12y ago
Have you read the stuff on Medium? Maybe not a full book yet, but you can find the equivalent of a multi-page magazine feature on many, many subjects.
pixl97 12y ago
Almost every one of those books you find in the library is on the internet, the reason you're not finding them is payment. Publishers don't put their books for free in on the net, they want to make a living. Libraries on the other hand, pay publishers for the books, but only have a limited number of copies. You can probably access most of these books behind a paywall, but paywalls filter out search engines like Google. It is kind of silly comparing the modern internet to a library, because technologically, the Internet and computer wins by a large margin. Every book in my local library can be digitized and put on my computer, and I'll still have a huge amount of space available. My computer can make unlimited copies of that information. My computer can OCR the information and the content of the books can be searchable, something a physical copy library cannot do. I can share my entire library with everyone on the planet with an internet connection. I'll repeat, this is not a problem with webcrawling. It's a problem with financial incentives.

by TillE 12y ago

tokai 12y ago

It is only a matter of time before it is not true anymore. Digital materials is the name of game in world of libraries now. I worked at the research library of a large technical university, and we only kept our physical collection to avoid student protests. (Throwing books away have a strange effect on non-librarians) This trends is slowly creeping into the public libraries as well.

jmnicolas 12y ago
From all the people that would be distressed at the idea of throwing books, I was thinking librarians would be the first of them !

greenyoda 12y ago

On the web we also have the vast collection of Google Books (just because it's out of copyright doesn't mean it's uninteresting or useless), research papers from every academic area, high quality open source software to learn from, newspapers from around the world, etc. - which you won't find in most local libraries. Yes, lots of what's on the web is shit, but there's a lot of good stuff too.

nly 12y ago

> Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow information readily available Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge. > But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals. The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch Wikipedia. In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.

_delirium 12y ago
I mostly use those kinds of online sources, because I'm usually on the internet and rarely in libraries, just in terms of proportion of my time, and I rather strongly disagree that those sources are anywhere near as good as a library, at least for what I'm looking for. It's a huge breath of fresh air to find a good book on a subject, because it more often than not actually covers what's going on in a way that is far more opaque in dozens of StackExchange posts, blog posts, mailing list archives, etc. The rational exposition is just much better, if you can find a good book: explaining not only what's going on but also why and how, how it connects to other things, how it came about, where to look for more information, etc. It's really frustrating to work without access to a good research library for that reason, because you get only these much more scattered bits and pieces on many topics. Two areas that I've come across semi-recently where this is particularly true: DSP and logic programming. There are some good books on those subjects, and they are very much better than trying to piece together Google results, especially trying to learn an area.
- nly 12y ago
  I guess a lot of it depends on how you learn best. I like to go deep, but it has to be on my terms. Sucking in books never gives me a sense of accomplishment unless I'm actively trying to 'rediscover' what is being taught for myself. I prefer to use reference material to open up lines of thought, then I go away and try to 'reinvent' it for myself, baby steps. I come back later to have the material nudge me in the right direction or get me over hurdles. Sometimes it's too hard and I'll drop material for something else, even if it's not as deep, or go without, rather than grind on, because I'd rather not know than 'know' and not truly understand. Fully-formed 'rational exposition' of a new topic or area of study is just a terrifying thing for me because I'm worried I'll be swept up in all that exposition and not prod the holes in my understanding, perhaps not even see them. Later on I then feel I have to remember 'what the author taught me' rather than unravelling of the topic itself. Visiting a complete exposition later, after a bit of folly, I feel much more confident in both myself and the material. It's very inefficient in terms of time, but then I can spend a lifetime learning and still know next to nothing anyway.
WoodenChair 12y ago

Jach 12y ago

"Apparently there once was a kind of obsolete proto-blog that was called a 'book.'" [1] But even real books, the internet has made them very accessible. You can find PDFs for all sorts of new books if you know where to look -- not everything, yet, but a lot. Amazon has as good a search interface as any library's DOS terminal I've ever used (I'd argue much better). All the fascinating facts, stories, and amazing information are on the web, too, along with a bunch of other stuff. I'd say the author just needs to refine his webcrawling. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/universalism-postwar-progressivism-as.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/univers...

vacri 12y ago

Well, it's not literally true, though it is close to being so - there are some libraries out there that are literally just a few dog-eared books on a rack. But more importantly, the converse is true - people find things online that they'd never find out another way. Witness the meme of getting lost exploring links on Wikipedia. That's a relatively new phenomenon, to read an encyclopaedia that way. When I was a kid, we had World Book Encyclopedia, and I read every volume cover-to-cover... but most people didn't do that. Wikipedia (and the internet in general) has given the wider public the ability to get lost in a reference work. Ultimately the article is making a false dichotomy fallacy. There's no reason why you have to have only one or the other. This being said, 2003 was a fairly early time and the public experience of the internet was still maturing. British English and American English users were still in violent opposition as to the name of '#', for example...

lmm 12y ago

Have you read the stuff on Medium? Maybe not a full book yet, but you can find the equivalent of a multi-page magazine feature on many, many subjects.

pixl97 12y ago

Almost every one of those books you find in the library is on the internet, the reason you're not finding them is payment. Publishers don't put their books for free in on the net, they want to make a living. Libraries on the other hand, pay publishers for the books, but only have a limited number of copies. You can probably access most of these books behind a paywall, but paywalls filter out search engines like Google. It is kind of silly comparing the modern internet to a library, because technologically, the Internet and computer wins by a large margin. Every book in my local library can be digitized and put on my computer, and I'll still have a huge amount of space available. My computer can make unlimited copies of that information. My computer can OCR the information and the content of the books can be searchable, something a physical copy library cannot do. I can share my entire library with everyone on the planet with an internet connection. I'll repeat, this is not a problem with webcrawling. It's a problem with financial incentives.