Ceasing print publication of ACM journals and transactions
acm.org
acm.org
Reading, especially technical material, on screen is still an inferior experience to paper. Even with my Remarkable. Flipping pages is slow, browsing is slow, it's impossible to have multiple documents open side by side.
Maybe I'm just an old grouch. But I'm not happy about this.
Yes.
Reading on iPad is great.
I think tablets are a decent secondary substitute for print-form only for publications like this with figures and images, and where the activity is more browsing rather than linear.
For general reading (eg fiction) I think print is optimal, followed by e-ink with normal tablets considerably down the list.
The ease of access to a library bumps up the utility of the ereader and tablet considerably.
Interesting that my impression is more or less the opposite: I can read on a tablet all right, but leafing through is annoying and switching back and forth between three or four places in a big (thousand-page) reference book is so annoying as to be nearly impossible. The first, because rendering PDF pages (understandably) takes time, and the second, because I’ve seen no bookmarks interface as seamless and convenient as leaving a loose sheet of paper or even just your finger in the necessary place—they’re all much too fiddly.
I haven't found anything better than paper for technical docs, but getting a PDF and printing the few pages I need is amazing.
E-ink is mechanical [1] so also relies on reflected light rather than being a light source.
More energy would mean more stimulation?
The eye was designed to look mainly at reflected light?
There is potential damage from consistant over stimulation?
Maybe its not a great idea to constantly shine light directly into your eyes?
Correct!
> but I have a hunch that the light hitting your eye from a direct light source is higher energy than that from a reflected light source?
Incorrect!
There's no concept of photons that have or have not been bounced, or are "direct" or "indirect". Also, you probably want to talk about intensity, not energy. Energy has to do with frequency (the color of light), intensity has to do with the amount of total light.
> More energy would mean more stimulation?
As it stands this says that blue light is more stimulating than red. Amusingly, this is true! But not in the sense that you meant it. It has to do with how our rods and cones work and how your circadian rhythm is calibrated. People use red light not to screw up their night vision so much.
Perhaps you mean more intensity? That's actually false!
Sunlight is incredibly strong. Far stronger than any artificial light you have normally.
> Maybe its not a great idea to constantly shine light directly into your eyes?
I'm sorry to say this would require the removal of your eyes.
But seriously. What matters is not "direct" or "indirect" light, which is a meaningless concept. What matters is relative contrast. E-ink feels better because the contrast in intensity between it and the background you're on is lower.
A few years ago, I wanted a photo near a window with one half on sunlight and the other half in shadows. I tried to adjust the camera, the distance, direct or indirect sunlight, the illumination inside the room to illuminate the "shadow". It was impossible, the sun is too bright compared with usual light sources. I finally gave up and faked it with gimp :) .
How many times researchers go find article PDF on notnamed site, then print it for reading and annotating, just as one would do with a copy from a printed journal.
> The magazines Communications of the ACM, ACM InRoads, interactions, and XRDS: Crossroads will continue in print.
if that was the main problem, the problem could solved with some investment be equipping oneself with multiple e-readers.
The speed of flipping pages is annoying but improving year after year and IMO it's borderline acceptable nowadays if all you need is to go on the next page.
But I totally agree on the utter unbrowsability of e-books; and for technical content that matters a lot
Technical documents are exactly the sort of thing with which you need to repeatedly flip back and forth to random pages of the document, checking figures, tables, definitions etc. That experience is intrinsically difficult to manage on an e-reader.
Digital is a great transmission format but a ridiculously lousy archive one.
It is. We have built rockets for 700+ years, a V2 reached space in 1944 and we went to the moon over half a century ago, over a decade before even the compact disc (1982).
If society collapses completely, I think it will be decades, possibly centuries before we even consider trying to read these. At that time, many DVDs might not be readable by DVD players anymore.
Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S. The Internet Archive has archived much of the public internet. There are other resources like arXiv, Zenodo, etc. Many of these organizations are very conscientious about data retention and longevity.
Is there even more data that could be saved in principle? Of course. But the amount of data we're talking about is already so much dramatically larger than what we have about, say, the antiquities, that it seems like an absurd comparison. The problem in the future (excluding extinction-level events) will be wading through that data, which even in the handful of resources I've mentioned above will be so far beyond any single human's ability to understand that it's just unfathomable.
> Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S. The Internet Archive has archived much of the public internet.
Those are both very centralized.
The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that.
> Is there even more data that could be saved in principle? Of course. But the amount of data we're talking about is already so much dramatically larger than what we have about, say, the antiquities, that it seems like an absurd comparison.
That sheer amount of data may work against preservation in another way: too much noise distracting from identifying and preserving the valuable stuff.
> The problem in the future (excluding extinction-level events) will be wading through that data, which even in the handful of resources I've mentioned above will be so far beyond any single human's ability to understand that it's just unfathomable.
Not necessarily: all that data is very fragile. Besides format conversion and migration issues (about that flash-based website...), you have site/platform longevity, and the time-bomb of cloud hosting costs (someone stops paying a bill? Poof, it's gone). Then you have the spectre of a dark age: a few decades of a teetering industrial base after a major world war that destroys a couple of high-tech manufacturing centers, and that data is pretty much all gone.
MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too?
Hard disks and normal optical disks probably could too, as long as you have a sufficiently large redundant array of them with error-detection on your bookshelf— If it can't last that long, just keep doubling the number of starting drives until it can.
If you want to get fancy, you can try to pay for something around HD-Rosetta, or Microsoft/Hitachi/Soton's printed glass tech.
And then of course if you wanna get simple, you could always stick your digital data into a mountable book/scroll of printed QR codes (or equivalent).
Of course, none of these options are actually deployed at any significant scale.
But I'm not sure you can realistically expect any arbitrary book to last for centuries either. IIRC Modern print media uses acidic paper as a cost-cutting measure, causing it to become brittle and crumble over time…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper
"[…] causes huge losses in library and archives collection […] 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s […] have all the features of acidic paper. […] established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission […] it is not possible to save all the documents from the 19th and 20th centuries […] In recent years, most books have been printed on acid-free paper […]".
> MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too?
1) I don't think they actually make real M-Discs anymore (the DVDs). There are some M-Disc branded BD-Rs, but I don't think those use any different technology than standard BD-Rs.
2) They're not stand-alone, and by that I mean they need a player or they're unreadable. IMHO, it's unlikely there will be many working DVD/Blu-ray players in 100 years, and very unlikely there will be any players for "some specialized tape."
I've been working a bit with VHS recently, and it's eye opening to see a once ubiquitous format start to drift into unreadability (it's not there yet, but a lot of the specialized equipment needed to do a good job is becoming expensive, hard-to-find, and breaking down).
But you'll have a million AI generated recipes for Apple Pie from spam websites of the era to console you.
And good luck finding the relevant information in the middle of all that noise.
Link rot is a major problem that people don't recognize, especially for information that was only ever online. Most of the obscure web sites I used to read and hang out on are gone and many of the things I remember are now completely unverifiable because I didn't save a copy of every web site that ever influenced me.
My own unfinished game project from my teenage years vanished from the internet without a trace after I lost interest and I lost all of the code along with all of my other data from my teen years in a hard drive crash around the time I finished high school. My mods I made for games and never distributed are sitting on old laptops in my closet I haven't even turned on in years that may or may not even work anymore. I imagine everybody else who's been heavily online in the past has similar stories of just how ephemeral digital information is.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23826342/cnet-content-prun...
Do they delete it? My understanding is that they simply unpublish it— Lost from the Internet, then, but not necessarily forever.
> and I lost all of the code along with all of my other data from my teen years in a hard drive crash around the time I finished high school.
Technically that data wasn't lost for good either with the hard drive crash. Provided there's an academic, personal, economic, cultural, etc. incentive to read it, I'm sure any old inflation-adjusted $50 magnetic microscope from the year 2080 would have been able to get it all back in a matter of moments.
Overall, I agree with your point. LOCKSS (the principle, not the project) and KISS, and checksum and ECC, etc. HD-Rosetta/NanoRosetta's cool but doesn't seem super scalable or readable, MDisc was exciting but was also a market flop, and Memory of Mankind's ceramic tablets and the Arch Mission Foundation's glass hologram thingies have even bigger practicality problems— For now, so long as digital storage availability increases exponentially, you can probably just spin up Borg or something and keep accumulating backups of old files indefinitely.
But overall, anything that you don't actively invest the overhead to save can be assumed to be lost.
And that kind of touches disinformation campaigns. There is a lot of noise being deliberately and maliciously added so that it out represents any information someone wants to suppress. An AI model trained on this corpus will have all the wrong ideas.
Historians will have plenty of information to sift through from this era in 500 years. Will they have a complete collection of ACM Journals? Perhaps not. Will they have ample information to get a clear picture of society from this era, and clear timelines of events, etc.? I would say yes, better than any other time so far.
I think people conflate "a lot of information won't survive in 500 years" with "we're going to lose everything."
I have literally thousands of pictures on my phone / in cloud storage. Odds are none of them will survive 500 years. That's OK, from a historical perspective -- 95% of them are cat pictures or memes anyway. 5% might document something interesting if it was all a historian had to puzzle together a picture of what life was like in the 2020s.
But it won't be, because we're literally producing trillions of digital artifacts. If even 1% (or probably even .1% or .01%) of those survive they'll have a richer visual representation of the 2020s than we have of other times in history.
(Whether we'll have any historians or humans in 500 years time, that's the real question.)
This is not true. The Library of Congress has a copy of works that have been registered for copyright with them. I am sure millions of works are created in the US every year that never get registered with the Library of Congress.
While a registration with the LOC isn't a bad idea, in the USA at least authors of written works automatically have copyright of their work, regardless of whether they have registered it for copyright with the LOC.
Something like this occurring seems inevitable given a long enough timeline, and 500 years doesn't seem that far away.
I think that copying over on new media will be much safer, particularly as the cost of storage is ever cheaper, and a cheap consumer drive today can store many times all the books that have been written in the world to date in text format.
It would be comparatively easy to maintain historical continuity of old data over time, as long as storage costs keep decreasing. Could also have a system like Git or Fossil, that automatically retains history, or just move stuff to an `archive.subdomain` when you're done hosting it. The Internet Archive's budget was only $36 million in 2019; it seems like it'd also add barely a rounding error for any government or large corporation to sponsor it as a safe place to park data long-term.
The problem is that people don't always copy old data to new media, or make redundant copies of current data, and do the other things you need to do to keep digital data safe. Instead we leave it sitting on old hard drives that are slowly rotting away, or simply remove/unpublish/delete it when it's no longer getting enough views. And this is exacerbated by the fact that the systems we use don't provide easy and scalable ways to preserve data by default, so it incurs extra effort and cost to do so.
Society-level information retention and integrity doesn't directly help push out new monetizable products, so there's little economic incentive for anybody to care about it.
The culturally important stuff will probably survive, because people will copy that, just as has always been the case. But as was also the case through history, much more will also be lost, which kinda sucks, especially given the sheer amount of information produced and at risk these days, and the thought that we probably could save all or most of it given modern technology.
but how many selfies from medieval era do you want to preserve? Instagram is receiving 10s of millions new photos a day.
I used to print stuff out to read as I find backlit screens and notifications on my tablet annoying when you are trying to grok a paper or read a textbook.
Mine is a Boox Max 3, though Sony had an offering aimed at lawyers etc and I think some people like ones by remarkable too, though I have never tried them as my one hasn't broken yet and they are rather expensive.
Still, I can take what would have been a big stack of paper with me to the coffee shop / park / forest and like the ability to search for text strings.
Maybe I should see if there is a 'give me a random page' button in my software or if a spotify / netflix style recommendation engine would work well for books and papers.
Have never seen a remarkable in the flesh, though that would annoy me.
Its nice that you have a stack of books, but I also don't really want a stack of books even in tiny form factor. I want, maybe one or two books at a time, and I don't want to worry about them getting stolen/dropped/spilled on/not being charged/need an account to login to. I also don't want to search on a tiny bad UI for which book it is I actually want to read.
So for me e-readers remain a non-starter. Give me a real book any day. IFF I want to search it I have a tablet if I'm doing work or taking a note on it. And other than leaving it behind, I'm not afraid of someone swiping it when I order another coffee.
Check out the physical ebook for Fist of the North Star as an example of this:
https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/hands-on-review-of-the-...
Later if I want to find something in the book my memory of it includes that feel, which helps get to the right general area easily. I’ll also often remember if it was on a left or right page, and if it was near any particular graphics.
The best thing you can do is just delete the JPX layer because it's probably just the background of the page. It'll destroy non-bitonal images, but the book will render literally about 1000 times faster.
Keeping that compressor locked away probably killed the format because PDF can package up a straight image compression just as well, but the JPX decompression is a dog.
What is your process for getting stuff on the device, and for keeping it organized (or at least finding back what you're currently reading)?
I then download things from Google Drive and open them in the Boox Neo Reader app (the reader that ships with the device) which seems to organize things OK and track which page you were on (though I only tend to be using 2 or 3 textbooks actively at a time)
Maybe there is a better workflow, but that seemed to work at the time when I bought the device and have served my needs. I have never met another Boox owner in my life to compare workflows with and it isn't something I have thought about looking for. Perhaps someone could write an app or SaaS to simplify it...
Charles Simonyi said in his Bravo Demo about electronic documents "there is no such thing as an original anymore" https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/q_Na1SJXSBg?t=371s
I may execute a special right of termination of my 15-year membership.
It also sucks for folks who want the content, but don’t want to have to pay a subscription in perpetuity.
Maybe getting rid of the print option also obviates the need to do page layout, but if the publications are still made available in PDF or ePub formats, there will still be a need.
There is. It’s called a copy shop.
You have it the other way round: copy shops for books exist – they are called print-on-demand book services. Amazon is doing a whole lot for example.
These are production lines with huge digital presses, running almost completely automated, spitting out individual books each tied to a specific order (starting from one copy).
The average copy shop and its glorified office printers will never match it in quality, and especially not in quality per dollar.
"Not sure if I can just take a pdf(epub..etc) file to a copy shop and just ask them to print the book for me. Wouldn't they be concerned about copyrights?"
and their comment got voted down and killed. It's a good question, though. Can you take a random book to a copy shop and have it printed? I've never tried it and I don't know, but I'm curious.
Before scanners were common and affordable, I had one heck of a time duplicating a professional photo of my parents. The photographer had died, and none of the local copy shops would dupe it for me without a release (which I eventually just forged, because it was getting ridiculous). It seems at least plausible that the same shops might say "nah, that's clearly not your own work, and we won't print it".
How does this work in real life?
Perhaps it's time I obtain one of those A4 e-ink readers!
It's so embarrassing that the C.S. cobbler has no accessible shoes. I lean on ArXiv and HTML output but I am losing out on some research and conversations which saddens me.
Though papers accepted through a conference, mostly require one of the authors registering for such conference; which seems fair to me as the effort to organize them is non-trivial.
Libraries are archiving physical stuff. Digital stuff is pretty hit-or-miss.
Worse, digital stuff is owned by a monopoly that's actively making it harder to find or get anything online, when it is made available to libraries at all.
Add on top the problem with DRM - if there are no physical libraries (bad idea) suddenly, how many libraries should there be? Who gets to make that decision? DRM is predicated on not letting everyone get a copy, but this flies directly in the face of the point of libraries, where everyone may share a copy. You either can have infinite libraries in which case DRM is redundant and should be removed, or you can only have very few, in which case DRM is literally nothing other than a tool of oppression, and should be removed (by executing by firing squad the cranks hoisting their vision of a only-rich-people-get-stuff world).
There are ways in this post-physical copy world of making sure creators get paid still, but lets just say, the incentives are just not there.
The library of Congress is exempted from most (all?) DRM restrictions.
https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=original-format:software,+e-r...
Essentially, CLOCKSS member libraries operate scrapers to download and archive copies of all covered journals. If a journal publisher disappears or deletes its back issues, the CLOCKSS members have agreements allowing them to republish the contents.
So there are a bunch of academic libraries holding copies of the content of academic journals for long-term preservatino.
But yeah, probably most people won’t archive them.
At the same time even if just one person archives them, it’s extra easy to copy them worldwide if something bad happens to the original source.
Not an extra hard problem , but lots of misaligned incentives.
We're doing a good job at digitizing the past. The next thing we have to do is analog the future. Books can be forgotten for 750 years and still work. I'm not so sure about hard drives.
Warehousing things out in the middle of nowhere like death valley or the mojave sounds just tops. It's the stuff that's plentiful now that we don't think about that will eventually become scarce.
Think the pile of junk mail you get in your mailbox that you toss in the garbage. Things like cereal boxes from the 1970s go for, well this one recently went for $1,225: https://www.ebay.com/itm/364459062533 ... 12 pack of tab for $225: https://www.ebay.com/itm/374743094689 ... it's the stuff we all think is trash that becomes scarce. Look at 90s CRTs...they're worth thousands
When organizations stop their print publications, they become just another content website.
> ACM wants to be as environmentally friendly as possible
Distribution is declining, so total environmental cost per issue is declining naturally. Even then, it's a sunk cost. No matter how many readers use the printed journal or how often they read it, the cost is the same. But, every time a reader uses a computer, e-reader, whatever there's now an additional cost. If you want to cease printing for financial reasons, just say that and don't use the fig leaf of environmental friendliness.
Quite ironic actually.
New publications aren't a sunk cost, they involve fresh lumber and pulp (even using recycled paper rarely involves 100% recycled material), new printing, new shipping. A present or future cost, which cannot be a sunk cost since sunk costs are things spent in the past.
To keep a PDF of that issue online and accessible(assuming you have an account, remember your password, charged your tablet) requires constant energy usage to power the servers in the datacenter. It also require periodic hardware replacement in the data center.
I suspect that over the lifetime of the paper journal it's PDF copy will require the consumption of far more energy and materials than the paper one did.
Electronic documents are great. I've got nothing against them. But let's not fool ourselves(or let ourselves be fooled) by all the greenwash pumped out by people trying to please investors.