A content of a book is more important than the book itself. If the contents are preserved then what's the need of collecting the rare original copies other than cultural or heritage reasons?
On a purely aesthetic media-nerd level it's also interesting. Books aren't just their plaintext. There is craftsmanship and artistry involved in how a work is intended to be presented, and without examples of the original prints this context can be lost.
On a similar note, old movies are notoriously eclectic about different cuts and editions with scenes missing or added or lost to time. Having and preserving original reels is invaluable (especially because they're much more fragile in storage than books).
Imagine watching Buster Keaton while a guy is actually playing live music and breaking out slide whistles while the crowd cheers and smokes and waves their hats - it's an experience that's closer to going to a club and seeing a comedy act, than streaming movies on the couch. That particular experience is largely inaccessible to us today because we don't have pristine fully staffed 1920s cinemas that we can walk into. But if you have an original printing of a book, you can in fact just 'walk in' and see what it was supposed to be like. :)
With such discussions we often move from facts to emotions of specific individuals/groups. Some people feel strong emotions about absolute preservation of such items. Others, not so much, priorities in our lives lie elsewhere.
More for paintings, and less so for books (except very old handwritten ones), is that the ink or paint used has its own characteristics. It might look very different from different angles due to the light reflecting off the pigment in different ways. Doesn't matter how high a resolution scan you have, it's going to be hard to scan that, and even harder to display it on a screen.
Scanning systems are set up generally to only scan "regular" media without any surprises.
It's not trivial to "preserve 100%" of a physical item at all. You can't hold a digitized copy or take samples. You can't get at anything that's beyond the resolution and nature of your scan.
The notion that digital copies simply contain all relevant information is on its face naive because it's inherently lossy to create a scan of a physical item.
Poe wrote a Manuscript. That's the original. Do we have the manuscript? No? Then we do not have and have long since decided to "not give a shit about" the original.
At the time, the way to make your Manuscript (one document you wrote) accessible to a large number of potential readers was to publish it, which is why these books exist. But if Poe had instead been alive in 2024 and made a TikTok that would be the same, why don't you focus on preserving each hard disk used by TikTok? Does it feel irrelevant? But these are the vitally important originals, aren't they?
[Edited to fix spelling of TikTok, I'm sorry I'm old]
Usually the last edition produced during the author's life and under the author's supervision gives you the most reliable indication of the author's intention, what they call the "copy-text" in textual criticism, I think, but there are some interesting exceptions. For example, many people think the first edition of Mary Shellely's "Frankenstein" is better than a later edition, in which the older author appears to have wanted to make certain passages more respectable, less shocking, and thus arguably spoilt the work she produced in her youth. But that's presumably a matter of opinion. For scientific textual criticism we need all the editions, all the manuscripts, any manually corrected proofs or published copies that the author has written on, ...
But on the other hand, most of the value is in the core thing, not the variation. Modulo special cases like the "Wicked Bible" (which has a misprinting in the Ten Commandments) we care about that and not the variation.
It's easy to say that Blade Runner is an important movie. Hard up for preservation capacity if we're choosing obviously Blade Runner beats Ghostbusters 2. Easy. Ghostbusters 2 wasn't a terrible movie but it's no Blade Runner. OK, how about the "Director's Cut"? Sure OK, two copies of Blade Runner. The "Final Cut"? Ugh. Fine, OK, let's have three versions of Blade Runner rather than kick one out for a sub-par sequel to Ghostbusters. There are four more commercially released versions of the movie. That's too many. At some point we should cut our losses and say no, another Blade Runner is not worth it, we'll have Ghostbusters 2 instead thanks.
† That's deliberately not an accurate translation, but we all know what I'm talking about.
Do you presume that nobody is bothering to try to preserve natively digital culture? Because I assure you people do. Do you presume nobody will care in the future? Why would that be the case?
What a strange, smugly uninformed angle.
In the early days of books, especially before the printing press, they were primarily considered works of art. You'd have ornate flourishes at the start of a chapter because it took so long to copy manually, adding something visually appealing wouldn't have made it take much longer to create in the grand scheme of things. There might be beautiful illustrations with vibrant colours competing for attention as much as the textual content.
Even with much newer books, you can tell the difference. One I remember from my childhood is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh with its illustrations by E. H. Sheppard. To most readers, the illustrations are as much a part of the book as the text, and yet there are cheap versions that contain the text only which are probably interesting if you've never seen the original but just feel incomplete and disappointing if you have.
With Victorian printing, you'd sometimes have outlines of illustrations printed in black and white and then someone would colour them in by hand with watercolour prior to sale. Every book would be slightly unique. I've only seen one such book when I was very young, something my mum had rescued from her grandfather's collection as a child.
Whilst new books are also great (there's nothing quite like opening a new hardbook, having a smell of it and settling down to read), old books are also wonderful, not just for the contents because also the look and feel of them that transports you back to another time. I've got a few (probably not valuable) old books that are over 100 years old, and in those days people would usually add a handwritten note on the first page saying who was buying it for who and what the occasion was, and often in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that itself is art now. This is just a glimpse into the history of the book and the world as it was at the time this book was new, that just add richness to the book itself.
Reading a book isn't just about the contents, as there's so much more to sense when handling something physical, especially old books that aren't perfect in some way and so have their own story that's different to every other copy.
But we're long past that, we can digitise the images, paper texture, layout choices, almost everything if we choose. There are a handful of things we might justify keeping anyway, but on the whole the digitisation is just a marked improvement.
Sure you could keep a secret digital archive to pass hand to hand for circumstances when (as has just happened to the internet archive) thousands or millions of books are suddenly banned. But you're relying on access to open computer architectures that don't phone home your reading of those books (like Microsoft's 'Recall'). You're reliant on power. You're reliant on compatibility into the future. With a printed book, you have a physical object, duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and distributed. A physical book can be read by daylight in a refugee camp, a war zone, a desert.
It may seem a silly example, but if the Roman or better yet the Aztec empire had written their manuscripts digitally - we likely wouldn't have a single record from that era. They would have been erased through chaos or deliberate eradication. Don't be so quick to dismiss the physical.
what are some other technologies that we still use without any modifications on the original invention, like the physical book?
If you live anywhere near an antiquarian book fair (NY or CA are the ones I know) I'd highly encourage you to check it out. The books on display are absolutely stunning in both their physical beauty and the way they connect us to the past.
[0]: https://wicker.com
there is a market for collectible books. i have a signed first edition of book that retails for $1250. people pay that much for this particularly copy. that might seem crazy to you, and that's fine, but that doesn't stop me from trying to sell it to people who care about that.
physical copies of books are a perfect invention that hasn't changed since it was originally invented. you don't need electricity to read them. you just need sunlight. not to mention the physical beauty of some books.
most physical copies of books are near worthless, though.