Chopping books in half
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.
We do have century-plus-old digital media archives -- the Hollerith card was invented for use on the 1880 US Census. Paper, punched-tape, mag-tape (I've held steel rolls, they're ... fairly massive), and numerous hard and floppy-drive formats have come ... and gone.
The advantages of ink on paper (or chisled stone or stylused clay) is that the reading itself is unmediated. That is, once a person is trained in how to read symbols, a task we're reasonably competent at accomplishing by about age 12 for 95%+ of the population, if not earlier and more, the content itself is simply readable.
Digital formats require decoding, dedicated readers, interfaces, power supplies, often device drivers and quite frequently data format decoding as well.
This is a significant issue, with considerable resources dedicated to it:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov
https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/digital-preservation/pres...
https://www.georgetowntech.org/blogfulltext/2018/9/9/preserv...
(This discussion occurs as I'm working on updating content on the Google+ exodus and access to, or lack, content stored (or not) in the Internet Archive from that now-defunct, but still providing HTTP-200 responses, website.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1890
Though antecedents existed dating to the 18th century.
(Granted, Project Gutenberg is probably as immortal as you describe. Kindle less so.)
Books are not as flammable as all that and generally survive higher temperatures than magnetic disks can. And books are generally printed in thousands of copies so they are replicated and distributed too. They also don't suffer to the same extent from technological change. It is now rather difficult to find computers that have floppy disk drives for instance, parallel ATA is also not especially common either. In addition magnetic media is not as robust even at normal temperatures. So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable.
In principle you might be right but it only works if there is an archivist who maintains the archive by repeatedly copying the content to new storage systems and distributing the results.
Funny, that’s exactly the role monks used to play in keeping many of these afforementioned documents readable.
And “less flammable” matters little when we’re talking about house or library fires, during which sufficient heat to make iron pliable can be easily achieved. The advantage of digital backups there is that the (well planned) backups don’t live in the same place as the original.
And since we’re talking about Mass Market paperbacks, can we talk about how fragile those things are these days? Sure, one from 30+ years ago is in decent condition - probably better condition than a new one hot off the press. The glue they use anymore is terrible - having pages fall out during the first read is pretty commonplace anymore.
I’d give better odds to a 30 year old paperback that’s lasted this long than a new book to make it another 30 years.
Estimates are that in all of Europe as of 1400 there were on the order of 40,000 titles or editions, and about 15 million volumes, total. A large library might have a few thousand volumes (University of Paris ~1200 CE: 2,000, the Vatican, ~1400, ~5,000). As of 1800, the British Museum (now the British Library) contained only 50,000 volumes.
Individual books, scrolls, parchments, and cuneiform tablets (https://cdli.ucla.edu) can survive thousands of years. The larger problem for more recent woodpulp paper texts is one that's common to many digital storage media: poor chemical stability. Acid-treated paper will crumble to dust. Archival-grade cotton rag will last centuries or more.
So long as you're talking flame and heat, you might care to check the ratings of your CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD, and SDD media before feeling too secure.
Quality of current-gen paper print media is indeed low. Hardcover, for a price, delivers markedly better durability. Keep in mind too that you're applying survivorship bias to your sampling of 30-year-old paperbacks -- the ones that wouldn't survive 30 years ... haven't.
(I've numerous old books which are now in pretty sorry condition. And others which remain robust. Details matter.)
In the long run, the same is true of print books. The advantage of digital media is that copying is infinitely less expensive.
A lot of works that we know had a big impact on culture, for example, are only known through us through quoted fragments in the works of others. Heraclitus "On Nature" (though even the title is not certain) is one example - a work significant enough that over a hundred fragments were preserved through quotations in the work of others significant enough for their works to have survived, but still the fragments makes up only a tiny portion of his work.
And for every significant work we have fragments of, or know of, there are bound to be huge numbers of works we don't know of because they were only ever mentioned in other works we have lost.
We may have become better at protecting paper copies, but they still require someone to carefully maintain the archives and ensure new copies are made once, inevitably, the number of copies of the works will dwindle with damage.
Having it on paper does not remove the need of an archivist; and the sheer volume required for paper copies means that even with a tiny number of locations suffering environmental damage every year, over time the number of copies will dwindle and new copies will need to be made.
This is true of digital copies as well, but the ease of making them and the density makes it increasingly possible to store larger number of copies, and re-copy them regularly. The biggest hindrance today, I think, is curating the increased volume of material published only, more than the challenge of ensuring there are enough copies.
> So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable.
The amount of archived productions of material for home computers from further back than that suggests that while if there is only a single archive extant, chances are you might be right, it doesn't take many copies before the odds of successful complete retrieval are quite good.
Sure, there is a risk there will be a gap in which we lose material that was only published on more perishable material, but that would by no means be the first time that has happened either - what survives to date is largely the subset that was important enough to be made available in the most durable means and then copied and re-copied because people at the time found them important; not by any means everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...
> ...
> It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms).
Copyright is a huge impediment to the long-term preservation of digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.
Personal anecdote time:
I work for a large games developer, at a studio that has existed for 30 years now. Recently we've dug out some archived material for the very first games the studio worked on, and guess what? It's nearly all lost. 9/10 floppies don't read at all. As far as we can tell, the source code for those original games from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely.
And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.
Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.
Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card.
(And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)
You might have to replace microprocessors in all the connected devices though if the fuses don't work correctly.
But one thing that has made me think about this for years is that part of the reason I have read the books I have was growing up surrounded by my dads book-collection, and parts of the music I listen to are down to exploring my parents record collection. And even the books I never got around to reading but were aware of were part of what connected me to my parents, and by extension to the previous generation.
The more the media we consume gets siloed into apps, the more it alters how the transmission of culture happens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we ought to be aware of and consider the effects of, because it makes it seem likely to me at least that the generational gaps are going to get bigger as filter bubbles contribute to make it less likely for children to explore and learn to understand previous generations (and vice versa) - e.g. I see how vastly different my sons Netflix account looks like vs. mine. Of course part of that is natural - he's presented material suited for younger viewers (though not using a "childrens profile" as that excludes a lot of his favourite anime), but because it also so strongly skews towards the interests he has demonstrated, it exclude a lot of child friendly material he probably would like, based on my experience showing things to him, but that doesn't match what he's watched on there so far, and so the bubble self-reinforces.
And unlike the physical environment of the past there isn't the same strong presence of alternative suggestions in the form of seeing passively what parents like - countering that with recommendations is not easy.
I'm not particularly sentimental about this, but I do wonder what the long term effects on society will be as those ties are increasingly loosened, and it also places those who control those recommendation systems in an incredibly powerful position to shape culture and identity, and I'm not sure whether we should be more concerned of the risk of that being consciously abused by someone at some point vs. the unintended consequences of not consciously managing it.
It feels like we're sleepwalking into something. It could very well turn out amazingly well, but it could also turn out badly, and we don't seem to understand what the impacts may be.
Stephen Fry, The Liar
But I like the author's point: It's cool that people still care so much about books in the digital age.
Long live books, in any increment.
The original 2001 edition of Fantastic Beasts and where to find them (JK Rowling) was presented as a copy of the book that Harry borrowed from the Hogwarts Library. As such, it had notes and scribbles (and a hangman game) from the trio.
The publisher made a lot of changes with the 2017 re-release, mainly new illustrations, and content changes to get it in line with the new canon of the movies. A few original (but really terribly) illustrations from Rowling were dropped or made better.
The scribbles and comments were left out as well. So I decided to scribble in those myself. Was quite fun to scribble on the contents page of the book and write "==chudley cannons==".
The wiki has a list of comments: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fantastic_Beasts_and_Whe... if you'd like a chuckle.
But paperbacks? Yeah, the 'Twitter outrage' is a gross over-reaction: what do they think is going to happen to these copies otherwise? At best they're probably mostly eventually unwanted inheritances, donated to a charity shop; poor condition ones discarded, some sold, rest eventually discarded when they don't sell too.
This is a time-honored practice in bookmaking. Why shouldn't a very long book be published in multiple volumes? Before modern very- thin and very- cheap paper this was common practice. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote and published the Lord of the Rings as a trilogy because his publisher didn't want to make his work too expensive or heavy for the mass market of post WWII Britain.
Go for it. You're not disrespecting the author, the editor, or the printer. And, modern bindings don't really command much respect anyway.
(Not books you've borrowed from libraries or other people, duh. That could rile up a librarian or your friends big time.)
I recycled them. A book once severed is going to keep shedding pages. It's fine to read once, but probably will not stand up to a second or subsequent reading. On the whole, I'd just as soon not buy books that I'm not going to look into again after the first reading.
Having said that, Crime and Punishment is not really a scarce resource, nor I suppose Infinite Jest or Middlesex. I'd bet that I could buy all three at a used bookstore for less than $30. The author may be stepping up the recycling date for the books, but by how much?