Borges' infinite Library Of Babel with infinite books re-created in VRChat

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9 points·SLHamlet··4 comments

It would be interesting to build something like this but with real books from Z-Library or something. Not saying that's necessarily ethical or not.

But it would be interesting to see the physical scale of large archives.

There is a fairly faithful representation of the Library of Babel[0]. It implements the library and the contents of the book as described in the short story. Good luck finding the works of Shakespeare or the short story itself!

[0] https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

You could quite ethically do it with Project Gutenberg, and I agree it would be interesting to see.

In this case it would rather defeat the purpose of the infinite library though. I mean, in theory all the works on Z Library are in there, somewhere...

> I mean, in theory all the works on Z Library are in there, somewhere...

Interesting to consider works excluded from the Library of Babel. Books aren't just a vector of EBDIC characters and whitespace. There are figures, captions, indices, tables, blurbs, notes, frontmater like publishing history, title pages, dedications, lists of figures, and backmatter like appendices, glossaries, epilogues, afterwords. In between the can be chapter, sections, free verse, lyrics, typographic art, and even art reproductions on archival paper pasted in with mucilage that long since lost it's stick. Some pages me even be left blank intentionally, due to oversight, or driven by malignant spirits.

Now if the Library of Babel were written using SGML... you'd have two problems.

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