Chopping books in half

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/22/book-murderer-tear-apart-love-alex-christofi

by merrier • 6 years ago

60 44 6 years ago

theguardian.com

post_below• 6 years ago

I remember seeing something about the twitter outrage over this and thinking it was silly.

But I like the author's point: It's cool that people still care so much about books in the digital age.

Long live books, in any increment.

hirundo• 6 years ago

Funny, I've flipped to thinking of my electronic copies of books as the permanent ones and the hard copies as just convenient printouts. With a few sentimental exceptions. Damaging a physical book is for me becoming less taboo than failing to properly backup my book drive. Every spare corner of my house is crammed with books but every year they feel more anachronous. Like an 8 track collection.

wbl2• 6 years ago

We have readable thousand year old documents. Hard drives not so much.

yoz-y• 6 years ago

At least one of the reasons why is that there were no hard drives a thousand years ago.

Sure, stone and to some extent paper might be more durable. But the replication and transfer capabilities of digital media can ensure that the knowledge will not disappear in a fire, as long as the civilisation persists.

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

Those are some very rare exceptions, if we're going to take this argument seriously.

Something like 99.999% of the books from 1020 are gone.

theamk• 6 years ago

On the other side, I have already lost all of the printed photos from 2000 (I moved houses a few times...) but I still have the digital files from that year. Same with audio recordings - I have lost the tapes, but mp3’s are still around.

Sure, digital is requires a bit of effort, but redundancy is amazing. Every 5-10 years I move the files on the new medium, and it becomes easier and easier. I used to need a fragile, heavy HDD that cost hundreds of dollars - and now all I need a $30 MicroSD card.

(And microsd cards are amazing.. I love the fact that they need no mechanical readers to get worn out, and that the protocol is so simple it can be implemented from scratch in a week with minimal documentation)

Thorrez• 6 years ago

GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/

peapicker• 6 years ago

Until there is an EMP that blows away all those stored electrons - and backups. Books looks a lot better after that.

anchpop• 6 years ago

That seems less likely than, say, a house fire or a conventional bomb

falcolas2• 6 years ago

I had this discussion recently. Here’s the hat trick of digital over paper: an ebook can be unpacked and printed on paper! All of the contents are human readable - it’s mostly HTML and CSS - and can be re-encoded into an ebook with no loss of fidelity. It can also be easily read (see aforementioned HTML and CSS) without any difficulties, even in its encoded format on paper.

AstralStorm• 6 years ago

Unlike what common people believe, EMP won't damage magnetic storage media, and definitely won't touch optical media. Flash memory is vulnerable.

You might have to replace microprocessors in all the connected devices though if the fuses don't work correctly.

Kaiyou• 6 years ago

All books in existence can be stored on my harddrive, while they won't fit into my bag.

adventured• 6 years ago

The last time I moved I had to throw out a large collection of books. I tried to give them all to numerous organizations and nobody would take them, including a public library that didn't want them (for free). They were all in pristine condition. I love physical books and I just can't stand to lug them around with me when I move. So now it's all Kindle, for better and worse.

brewdad2• 6 years ago

That's a shame. My public library probably wouldn't take them for circulation but they will take any usable book for their semi-annual book sale to fund new purchases. Unsold books are offered for free to schools and a few other local groups in the days after the sale. Anything left after that probably gets recycled or sent to the landfill.

levesque• 6 years ago

Do you really own those ebooks locked in various DRMs and only accessible from specific devices?

vidarh3• 6 years ago

My books are increasingly decoration and a statement of identity that utility objects. I buy hard-copies of books I might like to have on display, mostly, and mainly care about keeping those books I have a sentimental attachment to because of where and when I read them rather than for the sake of maybe one day re-reading it. It's increasingly rare for me to pick them up to read.

But one thing that has made me think about this for years is that part of the reason I have read the books I have was growing up surrounded by my dads book-collection, and parts of the music I listen to are down to exploring my parents record collection. And even the books I never got around to reading but were aware of were part of what connected me to my parents, and by extension to the previous generation.

The more the media we consume gets siloed into apps, the more it alters how the transmission of culture happens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we ought to be aware of and consider the effects of, because it makes it seem likely to me at least that the generational gaps are going to get bigger as filter bubbles contribute to make it less likely for children to explore and learn to understand previous generations (and vice versa) - e.g. I see how vastly different my sons Netflix account looks like vs. mine. Of course part of that is natural - he's presented material suited for younger viewers (though not using a "childrens profile" as that excludes a lot of his favourite anime), but because it also so strongly skews towards the interests he has demonstrated, it exclude a lot of child friendly material he probably would like, based on my experience showing things to him, but that doesn't match what he's watched on there so far, and so the bubble self-reinforces.

And unlike the physical environment of the past there isn't the same strong presence of alternative suggestions in the form of seeing passively what parents like - countering that with recommendations is not easy.

I'm not particularly sentimental about this, but I do wonder what the long term effects on society will be as those ties are increasingly loosened, and it also places those who control those recommendation systems in an incredibly powerful position to shape culture and identity, and I'm not sure whether we should be more concerned of the risk of that being consciously abused by someone at some point vs. the unintended consequences of not consciously managing it.

It feels like we're sleepwalking into something. It could very well turn out amazingly well, but it could also turn out badly, and we don't seem to understand what the impacts may be.

baroomba• 6 years ago

There’s something to be said for the pedagogical value of furniture. A sense of literary chronology, at least, can be absorbed by way of a shelving order, just living life in a house with books so shelved. A selection of books can and almost must, given physical limitations, indicate importance—see the Project Gutenberg index for the opposite.

captn3m0• 6 years ago

I did something similar just yesterday.

The original 2001 edition of Fantastic Beasts and where to find them (JK Rowling) was presented as a copy of the book that Harry borrowed from the Hogwarts Library. As such, it had notes and scribbles (and a hangman game) from the trio.

The publisher made a lot of changes with the 2017 re-release, mainly new illustrations, and content changes to get it in line with the new canon of the movies. A few original (but really terribly) illustrations from Rowling were dropped or made better.

The scribbles and comments were left out as well. So I decided to scribble in those myself. Was quite fun to scribble on the contents page of the book and write "==chudley cannons==".

The wiki has a list of comments: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fantastic_Beasts_and_Whe... if you'd like a chuckle.

okaleniuk• 6 years ago

I would prefer being chopped in half to be buried alive in a book cabinet. And I'm not even a book, I'm a person.

corecoder• 6 years ago

The picture I saw must have been a joke, it showed Infinite Jest divided in half, but that's ridiculous, as you don't read it front to back, you read it jumping from text to notes to text to notes (and, when you're lucky, from notes to notes to the notes).

MarcScott• 6 years ago

“Books are not holy relics,' Trefusis had said. 'Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying. Think how many children are put off reading by prissy little people ticking them off whenever they turn a page carelessly. The world is so fond of saying that book s should be "treated with respect". But when are we told that _words_ should be treated with respect? From our earliest years we are taught to revere only the outward and visible. Ghastly literary types maundering on about books as "objects"...”

Stephen Fry, The Liar

bambax• 6 years ago

Throwing books away is surprisingly hard, even for completely useless ones (manuals for software that doesn't exist anymore, or really bad novels). I threw a few of those in the bid a few weeks ago, and it felt really weird.

OJFord• 6 years ago

Contemporary (and most older) paperbacks, I'd say go ahead. I'd feel very differently if they were out of print and nicely bound (or not, but scarce).

But paperbacks? Yeah, the 'Twitter outrage' is a gross over-reaction: what do they think is going to happen to these copies otherwise? At best they're probably mostly eventually unwanted inheritances, donated to a charity shop; poor condition ones discarded, some sold, rest eventually discarded when they don't sell too.

OliverJones• 6 years ago

You're cutting your books' bindings at between "signatures." Those are the 16-page little booklets bound together to make the big book. Each signature is made by folding and cutting a single large sheet of paper coming off the press, if it's a page press and not a warp (paper roll) press. Those 16-page signatures used to be called "octavo" or "8vo" in the early days of printing.

This is a time-honored practice in bookmaking. Why shouldn't a very long book be published in multiple volumes? Before modern very- thin and very- cheap paper this was common practice. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote and published the Lord of the Rings as a trilogy because his publisher didn't want to make his work too expensive or heavy for the mass market of post WWII Britain.

Go for it. You're not disrespecting the author, the editor, or the printer. And, modern bindings don't really command much respect anyway.

(Not books you've borrowed from libraries or other people, duh. That could rile up a librarian or your friends big time.)

cafard• 6 years ago

If a paperback is sufficiently old, it might just break apart on you. I can think of at least two that have come apart in my hands during the last few years.

I recycled them. A book once severed is going to keep shedding pages. It's fine to read once, but probably will not stand up to a second or subsequent reading. On the whole, I'd just as soon not buy books that I'm not going to look into again after the first reading.

Having said that, Crime and Punishment is not really a scarce resource, nor I suppose Infinite Jest or Middlesex. I'd bet that I could buy all three at a used bookstore for less than $30. The author may be stepping up the recycling date for the books, but by how much?

arkades• 6 years ago

He's rebinding them, too, with cardboard - which is to say, turning them into half hardcovers. You could argue he's not even reducing their lifespan.

Chopping books in half

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