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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

How many books have you read that were published in the 1800s?

I’m betting close to zero.

Unfortunately, most people 200 years from now won’t care about the 70 petabytes the Internet Archive has saved.

Don’t misunderstand: I am glad they do this and love their work. I just think we overestimate the long-term value of this info beyond a very small set of future historians or social historians.

Most people have their lives to live in this moment, and if they have a chance to look backwards before they were born, it’s not a big piece of their time.

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Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Emily Dickenson, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Charlotte Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Victor Hugo, Grimm bros., Goethe, Darwin, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Pushkin ...

It's a pretty good century for literature and other books.

Also, lots of people are interested in history. Those can be best sellers.

You must be biased against the French, mentioning only Hugo in your list! What about Dumas, Stendhal, Balzac, Zolya, Flaubert, Maupassant, George Sand, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valery???!

(That's only from a Russian, pretty sure actual French will add dozens more to this list)

And that's just France. Imagine how long this list could be ...!

I was reading every newspaper that mentioned spanish flu from the 1910's when covid was starting. I never would have thought that I would have been wishing for easier access to full text search newspaper archives. Here we are :p

How many times have you clicked a link and found the page 404 or redirect you somewhere else? That is the real value of the web archive to me. Wikipedia uses it a lot as well, they automatically snapshot any link used as a reference and if the page goes away they automatically swap the link for a web archive version.

Reading a reference 50 or even 200 years old is not absurd. A post detailing some research findings which is referenced in wikipedia is still greatly valuable. Youtube historians often reference ancient patents to uncover the history of old items.

Interesting point about managing against link rot.

But what got me is Youtube historians and their "ancient patents..." I want to see the ones for reinventing the wheel.

Quite a spectacularly wrong take on multiple levels.

So much great literature comes from centuries before our own. And considering that the internet is likely to be around forever or as long as humans persist, a snapshot of its initial decades will one day be one of the greatest "archaeological" treasures.

Perhaps your main point is that you do not care for their work nor for the work of literature written before your time. You need not apply your yardstick to anything else in a bid to gauge its value.

But 70 petabytes worth? Most people in this thread mention a few dozens authors. Maybe this amounts to a few hundred books. Not 70 petabytes (and counting).

Sure, no human has ever read 70 petabytes worth of books.

An archive is not the same as a local public library. The latter holds a small collection of mostly frequently accessed items (e.g. the published works of Dickens, Austen, etc.). The former holds a much larger collection of rarely accessed items (e.g. every letter written by/to Dickens that survived, every political pamphlet published in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century , etc.).

If your point is that most items in the archive will be rarely accessed, I don't think anyone will disagree with you, but suggesting that the literature of the nineteenth century is no longer of any interest was perhaps not the best way of making that point.

I hope you're wrong. Video and pictures coupled with text are a goldmine for me. I would've loved to see a 'vlog' from the 1800s honestly. What was it like for a perfectly normal person, not a career writer? I don't think we have a lot of that, or if we do, it's from a singular viewpoint, and we're subject to their view and biases.

I found a archive of videos in my city from 1970, a street-view like recording of select roads. I pored over it for a couple hours, noting the buildings that were still there, the completely empty hills now filled with houses, etc. That kind of stuff is really cool.

How many books have you read that were written by people who read books published in the 1800s?

> How many books have you read that were published in the 1800s? I’m betting close to zero.

Quite a few actually, and I'm not an outlier. Plus there are many adaptations and derivative works that exist.

>I’m betting

You are betting very wrongly. People use large amounts of older literature. Maybe not in your territory - well, be aware then that many cultures do.

>Unfortunately, most people

That the median individual should be considered a parameter is very controversial. (Contextually: services are very easily for interested minorities.)

>overestimate the long-term value

As if Project Gutenberg had not arguably been one of the most important endeavours in history.

>if they have a chance to look backwards

It is a fundamental part of education...

Just add a few more that are popular

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

- Henry David Thoreau

- Rudyard Kipling (jungle book)

- Anna Sewell (black beauty) - Walt Whitman (leaves of grass)

- Edgar Allan Poe

- Alexander Dumas (Count of Monte Cristo, musketeers)

- Tocqueville (democracy in America)

when I read for the first time Balzac's novel - nucingen Bank (1839) [1] and about business 'mindset' at the time I was mesmerized [1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Nucingena (no wiki for english lang at least no hyperink)

19th century literature is full of treasures.

Eh, Shelly, Dickens, Twain and Wells are all I can think of. Not zero, but a vanishingly small percentage.

I've read several from that time period. There are loads of good books from the 1800s.

Yes. But 70 petabytes worth?

70 petabytes of anything didn't exist in stored form in the 1800s so that's a ridiculous standard, but...

The value here is genuinely historical. In a hundred years, how will we track the etymology of common terms that originated in this age?

Memes make preserving the internet extremely important. Terms and ideas evolve so quickly that the history of language and thought will become obscure almost instantly. Even now it can be almost impossible to understand some internet terms if you weren't part of the subculture that spawned them at the exact time they were spawned.

Do you know what hunter2 means? Do you know it because of bash.org?

A person doesn't have to read all this material. The material has to be stored because our future society will have descended from this material, and if they don't have it they won't know how they got there.

You know, except for the bit where civilisation collapses over the next hundred years as the planet warms and hot countries invade cooler, developed countries looking for living space.

Via librivox for me and many others i consume 1800s content almost daily

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