This is the coolest thing I've read this year. It reads like science fiction. Who would even imagine it's possible to read text from a 2000 year-old rolled up burnt-crisp paper?
It looks like, from what we can gather, the author decides that should something be hard to get, that doesn’t lead to greater enjoyment. But, it seems that the archaeologists have found an awful lot of joy in how “rare” access to these scrolls is!
So much has been lost to well-meaning archaeologists who dug up and threw away things that they didn't think were important. They tried cleaning and preservation techniques on artifacts without testing, sometimes ruining them in the process. They ripped things out of context, and "restored" them based on guesses that were sometimes flagrantly wrong.
Of course they couldn't be expected to know everything that would come in the future, so blame can sometimes perhaps be muted. But it's especially positive that they extricated these particular objects very carefully and just waited for a way to extract information that they could hardly have hoped for.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (ChatGPT helped with the search)
> The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanned by being shredded into tiny pieces, which are then scanned and digitized, with the text being reconstructed from the scans. This process is a part of the broader themes of the book, which include the effects of technology on society and the concept of "wearable computing" and augmented reality. Vernor Vinge, a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and Hugo Award-winning author, is well-known for his works in the science fiction genre, especially for exploring the concept of the technological singularity.
Similarly, a friend recently read Ghost Fleet and I decided to pick it up and read it. The first chapter seemed familiar, and every once in a while there were "scenes" that I absolutely remembered having read years prior, but I had no memory of the overall plot.
Thanks for reminding me about Rainbows End.
That's not a sci-fi novel, that's OpenAI's business model!
Instead of relying upon machinery, some zillionaire has their body dry frozen and stashed in a lunar south pole crater, with a foundation funding interstellar propulsion research to move the body to the coldest stable points discovered along the way towards the Boomerang Nebula (1° Kelvin) and research to revive back from burnt-crisp state.
The foundation incites all sorts of advancements along the way like working out practical fusion and ever more exotic energy generation, AGI, gravity manipulation, Drexlerian nanotech, Dyson swarm, star wisps, self-modifying bodies and so on, in its quixotic quest to fulfill its mandate.