Some can, most can’t. I’ve got a Bantam paperback copy of Moby Dick from 1985. It’s pretty much on its last legs. The pages are disintegrating and turning golden yellow, but the binding is still intact. Not sure if it will last another 63 years or so.
OTOH, I have a full set of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that is entirely readable and mostly in good condition, with nothing except gentle handling, regular dusting, and infrequent treatment of the leather binding to prevent red rot (because I don't read them frequently enough to prevent the condition with oil from my skin).
Edit: it wasn't hard to find a page discussing the phenomenon of acidic paperbacks: https://library.uoregon.edu/catdept/presbind/brittle
Not really. The paper's acidic, which means that the paper degrades to the point of not being usable without a huge amount of intervention. I have trade paperbacks which are under 20 years old whose paper are downright brittle.
> but libraries canno
Which is, I hate to say, irrelevant to the discussion of preserving digital documents. Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not.
Libraries are how humanity at large preserves documents! Sure, I might have a wonderful collection of books on my hard drive, but other than me (and whoever knows about my torrents), nobody's benefiting from that; whereas everyone with a local library knows (at least, in theory) that they can find information there.
When I kick the bucket, what happens to my hard drive? If somebody knew about it and cared enough, they might subsume its contents into their collection; and then the information would be safe for another… few decades? To quote Randall Munroe (https://xkcd.com/1909/ title text):
> I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.
And that's cool.
Now then, should Libraries be getting shafted like this? Fuck no. Can any actions I take - short of running for office and making my way up to the federal government in charge of interstate commerce - effect that? Also, sadly, no. I will continue to support librarians seeking change while facing reality.
The internet is big and sprawling. It's easy to prune, by accident or malice. Think of how much of the web goes through Cloudflare! Think of how much we rely on the Internet Archive; if that went down, where would we be? Libraries, on the other hand, are decentralised, redundant, curated, indexed, and maintained against both bitrot and link rot.
We could make the internet like this. In fact, there are organisations that do so! But there's a reason so many of those organisations call themselves libraries.
Every single one of us on this site unless in poverty should consider donating to the IA.
I’ve just changed my monthly donation from Wikipedia to IA.
You can find old stuff due to internet archive and that’s about it. Making the internet basically a giant single point of failure in practice.
Now you just have a few pieces at the Wayback Machine and that's it.
Now, tell me the digital wankers how much the digital preservation is compared to the books. Even if they used NNTP, I think not the whole archive would be preserved, just ask Jason Scott.
And I love computers, I use OpenBSD and CWM on a netbook. But current media preservation efforts are ridiculous compared to a simple book from the 70's.
On YouTube there are around 20 different labels claiming to own the copyright to a recording of the Red Army Choir singing the Soviet national anthem more than 50 years ago.
UMG has already decided you're not allowed to embed it on some other sites. Additionally, due to licensing issues, music "owned" by certain labels hasn't been/is not available in the certain countries.
Well you could write a will saying that you want it to be released to the public and then have someone come along and say, "they didn't really mean it."
Maybe they are saying that he forgot he had published that page. Maybe there was something he wrote or told someone that contradicted what he had published. All we have to go off of was his digital will for his hard drives.
I agree, mostly. But humanity is, thankfully, routing around that damage while the librarians and politicians fight that battle.
I thought modern books were made with acid-free paper? I know this is a huge problem for books made in, for instance, the 1970s. Is it only the nicer books that are made with acid-free paper?
I dunno if books use some other, cheaper paper, but it seems unlikely.
I'm picturing someone in the crowd saying this while the Library of Alexandria burns.
Those Alexandrians' should have focused more on their tech game. :)
Sometimes you "only" lose redundancy. But occasionally a lost library (or digital archive) contains unique content, so statistically the survival rate still trends toward zero.
How is knowledge lost? "Slowly at first, then all at once."
Then humanity will have bigger problems, such as survival. Our world isn't made for survival without electricity.
A good trade paperback is better than any mass market paperback but trade paperbacks come in various sizes and designs and many of them have serious defects when manufactured.
As a category I don’t like them though I have plenty of them. My favorite kind of sci-fi book to collect these days are small hardcovers but for nonfiction I take what I can get.
Why don't they try it and find out? Seems like if anyone should have the legal right to do so from purchased books it should be them.
Internet Archive is trying something similar in court right now with their "controlled digital lending" concept. The ReDigi case was a true shame, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be willing to propose other concepts and try to legalize some case here.
In a 100 years if we can't unzip a file and read text files, then we have likely lost many of the physical books also.
Physical books also have a unique issue of storage space and hard to replicate.
Is there a way for a member of the general public to access Cornell's electronic subscriptions, say from computers inside the libraries?
There is a very good service to request books out of the annex and deliver them to a service point but people are more inclined to order books from AMZN rather than pull books from the annex or use a an express service like Borrow Direct that lets Cornellians get books from other Ivys in a few days.
There is still the fine arts library, the music library, the Africana library, Mann library at the ag school, the industrial labor relations library and the vet library. Those last three are in the state schools so any New Yorker can get a free library card for them. They closed down the Nestle library at the hotel school and consolidated that with the library at the b-school when they merged management and hotel.
There are still plenty of books, but people come to use the computers and there is intense demand for study and breakout space on central campus which competes with everything else.
If you have a Cornell netid you can access electronic resources from anywhere but not if you are a general public member. Back when I was involved in digital library stuff I worked on numerous projects that were free to access and my colleagues worked on even more such as the global performing arts database, images of the fantastic and the Ruleaux collection of gear contraptions that is on display at the engineering school but has interactive models of everything. They still do the arXiv preprint server but the funding climate got hostile circa 2005 when the library was in general contraction.
Physically? Maybe.
But another factor is that human languages will naturally evolve to the point where future generations won't be able to read the words we're writing now without some kind of translation service. Even if it hasn't evolved enough to be classified as an entirely new language, it can change enough to be extremely difficult to decipher. This also requires a migration plan or historians to update the book for the modern language.
If you've ever picked up a very old book, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Even if it's still physically readable, you struggle to make sense of vocabulary and style in popular use at the time of publication.
Also, you know, we have dictionaries.
Latin, having become a dead language used principally by the Church and for a time science / natural philosophy, remains highly-readable across centuries so long as you read Latin. Similarly for classical Greek.
I'm given to understand that Arabic, itself significantly preserved in the Quaran as a literal verbatim transmission from the 7th century.
Written Chinese, zhōngwén, or 中文, is logosyllabic, where symbols represent the concepts rather than the phonetic representation of a syllable. It is not only generally readable across millennia, but even across largely mutually-unintelligible dialects of Chinese, or other languages (Korean and Japanese, for example).
Contrast written English which becomes highly idiosyncratic even only a couple of centuries ago (long-S, nonuniform spellings, highly stylised and formalised expressions), and both difficult to read and understand (verbally) from as few as five centuries ago.
Shakespeare, for example: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04>
Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>
Beowulf (c. 700--1000 AD): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>
Numerous of the modern languages of Europe (Spanish, English, French, German) date only to about 900--1,000 CE or so, and the forms spoken then would be difficult or impossible for most moderns to understand. Written forms ... often didn't exist at all (government and business being transacted in Latin, Greek, or Arabic throughout much the region).
You're backup's only good if you can successfully restore it.