Book Review: Double Fold
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
"based on a pseudoscientific notion that books on wood-pulp paper are quickly turning to dust". Some are, some aren't. Some years back my parents shipped me the set of Mark Twain I had read as a boy. An awful lot of the pages were falling apart. Perhaps our family hadn't protected them well enough from light and air--but it's hard to see how one can read a book without exposure to both.
We recycle probably 10" of newspapers--The Washington Post and The New York Times--ever week. In the days before the newspapers lost all the revenue from classified ads, it would have been twice that. So a year of a big metropolitan paper from the 1990s could amount to forty feet of newspaper. That's a fair bit to make room for. I have some sympathy for the librarians there.
Singletons are probably not enough. But why save the physical aspects? Why not simply digitize people discussing it, take pictures of the original form, etc.? Why invest the time and energy maintaining items of dubious future need?
Newspapers were meant to be disposable, then and now, its good to store the information, but I'm highly skeptical of the need to hold onto the physical copies after scanning.
We should not be hoarders. There is a balance to be struck.
I recommend considering folks can be multifaceted and aren't solely bound to one's opposing opinion as they read down a comment chain.
Good day.
(whit everything I also include WalMart depliants)
Paper takes up a lot of space. You can't keep physical copies of everything forever. It is unfortunate that it seems as if film and poor quality scans replaced physical copies in some cases too early. But libraries do run out of space, especially well-indexed space.
Actually, maybe that would be a good way to sequester carbon.
I suggest you walk past a paper mill sometime to truly understand how environmentally horrific they are. The one up near me finally paid to put scrubber systems on their air exhaust. Before then when the wind was blowing the right direction it made all of north portland smell like rotting cabbage. Even with the scrubbers you still smell it at the airport occasionally.
Another fun detail is the parking lot workers park in has a drive through car wash/rinse device. The employees use it every shift when they leave... or at least they should if they don't want the acid fumes to eat the paint off their car.
Paper mills cause far more pollution than any potential carbon sequestration benefit, which would be temporary in the long term anyhow. Books will rot unless you put them in a controlled atmosphere.
But my tongue was part-way in my cheek when I suggested this because you'd have to warehouse an awful lot of newspapers to make a dent in the carbon problem.
"we should make more paper to save the earth from co2" is some real... whatever.
You both know better and can do better. Are you willing?
Acid-free high-rag (containing actual cotton cloth) paper is archival quality and can and does last centuries.
https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/paper
Pulp paper is largely an artefact of the 19th and 20th centuries: cheaper than rag, but also far less durable. It remains in use and is suitable for ephemeral content, but materials meant for long duration are created with archival-quality paper, inks, and other treatments.
He likes them, because of pop-out examples of geometric shapes.
I think they are more modern reproductions, but I could be wrong. They are in great shape.
And certainly, microfilm was not intended to free up shelf space in the library: most items in a library's collection aren't on the shelves, they're stored in warehouses and basements.
Paying to store miles of old newspapers was not sustainable for most library systems, and despite what this review implies, newsprint does not last forever. The alternative to microfilm was not that we would have pristine copies of our history easily accessible to every library patron, it was that most copies of a periodical would simply be destroyed.
The remit of public libraries is not to preserve books, but to provide access to information. There's a crucial difference. Microfilm was not ideal, but in a pre-digitization world it was about the best option available to provide access to those old periodicals that would otherwise have been lost, or at least hard to access.
overall it turned out paper has a longer shelf live than microfilms
The Google Books project would be a case in point, as well as (AFAIU) the early stages of the Internet Archive's book-scanning project. Numerous early television programmes were only preserved through off-the-air copies by viewers. Up through the early 1970s, television news programmes did not generally preserve broadcasts, or even have a research library (see Epstein's News from Nowwhere, 1973).
I'm not sure where the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (dating to August 5, 1968) originated (Wikipedia claims the Nashville affiliate provided recordings), though I recall a case in which a member of the public, Marion Stokes, recorded nightly news broadcasts for decades.
https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc...
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-mari...
[1] ACX is #2 on the Technology Substack leaderboard so it has 'thousands'; since my own newsletter is ~6k and Scott is many times more popular than I am in our circles, I'd guess the number of email copies of this ACX post is closer to 50k than 1k.
"We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments."
That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits.
--------
One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month).
She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster.
Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
> Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?
You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get out of your high school newspaper (especially as the ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary records continues to advance).
The problem I find is that I have a ton of stuff that's neither "must keep" or "trash can" but, while I don't really begrudge it the space in my house, for now, it's also not stuff I'm going to spend hours and hours scanning against some future want.
Where I think we collectively have an issue is when we're super into someone else archiving it. And that they then need to figure out a way to finance it all.
I've come to observe that we're much too much dominated by a clerkish worldview - the imperial chinese civil service exams (sold in the West as meritocracy) have mostly taken over the world.
And what file clerk does not shudder at the thought of not keeping archives?
Now think how things were done before there were written exams, and before it was practical to keep thorough records of just about everything.
Different worldviews. And ours now is shaped by clerks.