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Home Libraries Will Save Civilization

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43 pointsherbertl55 comments

As someone who likes to read things of technical, scientific and practical nature, my only issue is their usefulness to the next generation, a problem which bothers me whenever I attempt to embark on this sort of project. Am I, an avid hardcover first edition signed by author book collector, wasting my time by amassing the texts du jour whose practicality is already on the edge? Never mind the ancient texts I collect, not as a collector per-se, but because I want to read them as they were once read and intended to be read. To posit, I really like the old books on electricity and discovery of phenomena, by the likes of Thomson for example who in turn calls out Maxwell and so on. But absolutely nobody has any use for that shit nowadays as the methods of teaching and distilling information have far surpassed these long dead inventors. I then ask, we’ll what’s the point other than a curiosity? So I find myself at a loss. How to stock up a library that will serve a future generation rather than an old dog like myself. And I keep going around in circles as a result.

The newer books of course compared to the old are by their technical achievements quite a marvel to look at. Even a coffee table book nowadays has an immense value to the curious mind due to the degree that they are able to capture in detail things which previously we hemmed and hawed over with crude drawings.

Physical books are great. I love physical books. But (among other downsides) they take too much space. I've got just over 2,500 books on my Kindle. That's more than 200 linear feet of shelf space if they were physical books.

My ideal library is a hybrid: physical for art books, kid's books, reference books, large format or special edition, signed copies or sentimental treasures, etc., and digital for everything else. An iPad as a digital card catalog for the entire collection and a couple of Kindles for actual reading. (Impossible to browse on a Kindle ...)

I couldn’t find an average thickness of books, so I quickly measured the 2nd from top shelf of my closest bookcase. (The top seemed unfair as it has a collection of “the world’s famous orations” which seem abnormally thin ). Shelf in question: https://ibb.co/CznTZ5m

(Googling I just seemed to get spine thickness and format sizes but not an average of actual printed thickness )

It has 21 books in 28 inches.

1.34 inches per book.

I get 279 linear feet for 2,500 books.

Checking Amazon, Walmart, the book cases they sell seem to be 5-6 tier with 24 inch width. (Though checking my non built in ones, all of the ones I own are around 4 feet).

Using the Amazon average, you’d need 24 book cases to fit all of them… which does seem like a lot. Wonderful but a lot.

I do have a kindle, and I love it. But something about physical books is great.

I have 5 built in book cases of various sizes, and 6, four feet Wide book cases that are 5 or 6 tiers… and yet I still have bins and bins of books in my attic.

Initially I had thought “that’s manageable” but upon some self reflection you make an excellent point.

I appreciate the fact-checking and the self-reflection :) I used 1" as an estimate (I have a lot of paperbacks), but 1.34" is probably a better estimate for hardbacks.

The decline of literacy is unfortunate.

But I would mention that most people were illiterate in most societies known as civilizations (ancient Greece, etc). Mass literacy is a society phenomenon - coming out of industrial societies.

The thing were have now, however, isn't so much illiteracy as pathological scattering of attention. Perhaps that would go away if our society experienced a cataclysm disabling all the smart devices out there.

> Perhaps that would go away if our society experienced a cataclysm disabling all the smart devices out there.

Except this can't happen without other catastrophic consequences, so maybe we should instead learn to deal with it.

There's not much space between having a "Home Library" and hording... it's way too easy to get carried away, and cross it. 8(

It's sad to contemplate, but I think the closing of bookstores leads the eventual disappearance of home libraries. Everything could be digitized and saved, but the copyright cartels aren't about to let that happen, are they? 8(

I don't think that's true. Between my wife and I, our personal library has nearly 1,000 physical books (and I have a few hundred more digital books), but having those print copies means kiddo can pull down many of the same books and learn from them.

We don't keep everything. We won't even buy everything. We're choosy. But we love good books. Biography and history, science, politics, classics, my computer books (the durable ones, not the ephemeral "Java 2" kinds of things), and a large swath of science fiction and fantasy, and some on general fiction, and finally... cooking.

Amazon, or Apple, or Google can't reach into my home and suddenly alter my books. They can't suddenly excise them from my library when their license to "distribute" the digital copy evaporates. Paper books are a good thing, and I'll keep buying them.

I think it can be both. We have quite a lot of books for our space (is that the right word for how much room you have in a house?), but we also curate our books. Once in a while we’ll donate books we don’t actually want to re-read or maybe don’t think are worth keeping anymore.

On the flip-side I do think physical books are good. I think they are decorative, and even though I basically only read audiobooks I buy a physical copy of the books I really like. The reason I read them as audiobooks has to do with my ADHD. I have a tough time reading a physical book because my attention goes away from it. Which has nothing to do with the modern age of distractions because it was also like this before the internet. Audiobooks on the other hand are relatively easy for me to follow. Part of it is because I can do “don’t require mental attention” tasks while I read them, which makes it easier for me to focus on the book.

I guess I didn’t have to buy them, but I think it’s important to have them.

Totally expected this to be about how, after earth’s digital information is wiped out by a solar event, the knowledge of how we do anything will only be preserved in physical books.

I think about this often, as I’m reading or listening to a digital book, and I’ve started going back to buying more physical books.

I find it hard to imagine a solar event that will wipe out info on both sides of the earth evenly :-)

I think all the missing people and countries would be just as big a problem …

I think the reference is more about geomagnetic storms caused by solar flares, like the Carrington Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event), which if it happened today would probably wreck most power grids across the planet.

> Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

As much as I would like this to be more true, it is just very disconnected from reality. Lots of homes have books and other things that are maybe healthier ways to spend time. But that doesn’t stop the occupants from being sucked into the vortex of social media or television or whatever else. Things like TikTok activate all the pleasure pathways that exist, especially in young children that don’t have the self-control needed to withstand their addictive qualities.

I was an avid reader and all that got me was made fun of for being weird.

Or take your kids to the library

Libraries which are constantly under attack, explicit or implicit, by conservative parts of society - whether because they oppose any government projects, because they oppose the existence of certain books, because they oppose the kind of people who rely the most on libraries, or so on. If they're not shutting them down they're slashing their budgets or imposing draconian rules about what they can do.

They're unfortunately not something that can be relied on exclusively for an indefinite future.

This is not an imaginary threat: https://www.al.com/news/2024/08/this-alabama-library-had-to-...

> by conservative parts of society

And likely other parts of society as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng...

I expect many books are on the radar of would-be opponents because they are either a) revered classics that are often part of school reading lists, or b) books that are popular. Though I can understand wanting to restrict books with instructions for harming others or oneself (even if such information is readily available on the internet.) I can also see why many revered but subversive children's books might be opposed (but of course that's what makes them so great!)

My take is that the greatest threat to public (and university) libraries (along with budget and hour reductions, a general decline in reading, etc.) is copyright law, which currently does not permit a first sale doctrine for ebooks or non-physical digital media and generally stands in the way of building practical and sustainable digital library collections. Innovations such as scanning printed collections and making them available remotely as ebooks or audiobooks, or making music or video collections available remotely, are also prohibited.

Every bookstore nowadays, front and center, has a 'banned book' section. It's practically a meme. In the article you linked, no books were removed from the shelves.

It's the definition of an imaginary threat.

The books that are actually banned, the ones that were forced out of print, not available in public libraries and cost hundreds or thousands for a used copy? They are right-leaning politically.

What are some examples of books that have actually been forced out of print?

- Decent Interval - Frank Snepp - About Saigon's fall by a CIA analyst - Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program - Danny Stillman - Operation Dark Heart - Anthony Shaffer - Afghanistan. "The Pentagon" bought and destroyed the whole first printing - The Targeter - Nada Bakos - About fighting ISIS

The last guy's alluding to right wing books though. I remember Axios reported that the Turner Diaries and Camp of the Saints are going for hundreds now, because printing has been ended: https://www.axios.com/2021/01/28/racist-novels-skyrocket-in-... But books are now available on Amazon for cheap and pirating is easy, but here are some which libraries don't seem to have stocked and mostly aren't purchasable.

I imagined Holocaust denial etc. are effectively banned/not stocked by most libraries. Googling, I found discussions about My Revolutionary Life by Leon DeGrelle, Into the Cannibal's Pot by Ilana Mercer etc. But things from other movements too like an Ulster loyalist Ian Paisley's Messages from the Prison Cell or Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews by Rabbi Meir Kahane. Pinochets memoir is also inaccessible.

Then there are books about bombs or e.g. Put em Down, Take em Out by Pentecost about knife fighting ($60/now used). In the UK, a nazi was jailed 13 years for having a pdf the White Resistence Manual: https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2023-08-31/prison-officer-...

I'll stop there. There are long lists, with about half the entries seeming plausibly banned.

Yeah, it is the second and third paragraphs I was wondering about. I guess I’m not really 100% clear on what he meant by “forced,” I don’t see any instances there of the government actually forcing them out of print, right? It looks like the situation where nobody wants to publish or distribute that sort of stuff.

The copyright to Hitler's Mein Kampf passed to the Bavarian government, which after WW2, refused to allow it to be printed until the book fell into public domain.

Browsing the list of in rem cases in the US turns up quite a few cases where the US actually seized several pornographic books such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is perhaps a little more in line with what you were thinking about.

I was once on a tour of St. Albans, a very expensive private school in Washington, and Mein Kampf was the first book I noticed on the shelves. I have to suppose that the school has confidence that any boys who read it will not be indoctrinated.

中国宪政转型, 无敌的铁拳 - you probably know more hehehe ;)

> Every bookstore nowadays

I miss bookstores.

Even back in the late 90s/early 2000s, public libraries had a "banned books week". It was mostly a gimmick to get kids to read through the allure of the forbidden, to the point where sometimes through deals with teachers you could get extra credit in school for having checked them out.

It's not an imaginary threat. It is happening all over in GOP-controlled areas.

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/roughly-300-books-were-r...

And book banners may be driven by any political persuasion. In the 'Left-leaning' (rather more than leaning' of course) Soviet Union, universally acclaimed literary masterpieces (not books objecting to a certain lifestyle) were banned. All publishing houses in the USSR were state-owned, and every text had to get past the censor before appearing in print.

https://www.rbth.com/arts/331150-books-banned-ussr

I agree that any attack on books and literacy is a problem, but let's not pretend it's just the right that's responsible.

It's not the right's fault that I now have to wonder if a given copy of Matilda is as it was written or if it's been 'sanitized'. It's not the right that challenges Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird for their depictions of racism. Harry Potter, once feared by the hyper conservatives for witchcraft, is now under fire because of the political opinions of the author.

We all need to get better at dealing with difficult ideas, and that includes books whose contents and authors we disagree with. This is a systemic problem across the entire US, not one unique to one wing.

Publishers releasing amended copies is not banning books. No one has demanded that original copies of such books be removed from libraries. Meanwhile state legislators in Florida and elsewhere are aggressively regulating libraries and demanding content be removed - and conservative legislatures are overwhelmingly responsible for funding cuts and closures.

> No one has demanded that original copies of such books be removed from libraries.

They don't have to. Publishers caved to cultural pressure from the left and were originally planning on stopping publishing of the original editions. That plan would have phased out Dahl's work without having to force anyone to do anything—as libraries replaced damaged books their shelves would become sanitized.

Left-wing destruction of history and suppression of difficult ideas isn't better for the world just because it finds non-legislative means like silent publisher edits and massive grassroots cancellation campaigns.

Florida is awful, and I'm not condoning their legislature's behavior. But so are those who yank Harry Potter because Rowling is loudly not liberal enough for their tastes. It's just different tools to accomplish the same odious end.

Please point to an example of someone pulling Harry Potter from a public or school library.

People deciding not to support an author is not censorship. Despite malicious right-wing claims trying to muddle it, being "cancelled" is just people exercising their right not to support you. No one's facing jail time for stocking Harry Potter in a library. You can't say that about right-wing crusading.

Don’t both sides this. I am not discounting that there are some folks who are not aligned with the Right. The magnitude of the efforts by the right to censor and limit ideas is a large multiple of what occurs on the left.

It's really not, it's just that the right is loud and obnoxious about it while the left is smart and subtle.

The left isn't better from a moral perspective just because they suppress their taboo ideas by quietly influencing school curricula and sanitizing books at the publisher level rather than hamfistedly legislating the "problematic ideas" away.

Both are reprehensible, but one is less competent. I honestly view the left as more dangerous when it comes to censorship precisely because it's not hamfisted.

Yep. They've shut down 180 in the UK.

> Libraries which are constantly under attack, explicit or implicit, by conservative parts of society

Which library burns books, more precisely 1/3rd of their children’s collection because fairy tales represent toxic masculinity, including The Little Red Hood?

Ah yes, the library of Barcelona. Not what I’d consider “under attack by conservatives”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/18/barcelona-scho...

My childhood library changed from a place for books, to a place for homeless people to get internet.

I don't say that hatefully or anything, it's what happened. It was a tiny library chocked full of shelves. Then some were removed to add six or so computers. The last time I went in, over half of the shelves were gone and replaced with computers.

I don't mean to pearl clutch here, I fully support libraries and always will. I do not support a government subsidized internet cafe.

It's a common misconception that libraries are just stacks of books. Libraries are about connecting people to information and resources. How people access information changes. These days a ton of information is online - more than any one library could hold - and having access to those resources - whether to look something up on Wikipedia or to apply for a job - is a core part of the duty of libraries.

Libraries have books, magazine, journal subscriptions, children's books, music, movies, art. They host clubs, they host discussions or community events, they help people find all sorts of information.

Understood. Generally, I'm a fan of all types of media, basically everything you mentioned -except- computers/internet. Perhaps a couple smart thin clients for wiki and such? But the process of removing books to add computers specifically is what irks me I guess.

Maybe it's just its ephemeral nature. In 1000 years if someone came across an old library they could see and learn so much. Not so much if it's just a pile of computers that don't work anymore.

The corporate neocons and neoliberals are vampirically sacrificing and selling off essential commonwealth public infrastructure and cultural institutions for profit to the detriment of long term investment. The net result is decline and regression.

When private edifices rival public institutions, it should give people pause that there is policy failure or decline teetering on collapse.

This might be generally true, but on the specific topic of libraries it "not even wrong" levels of wrongness.

Anyone, even some little poor kid in the ghetto or a hobo shuffling in, could put in a USB drive to that library computer and walk back our the door a few hours later with his own (superior) library in his pocket. That's not civilizational decline or an impending collapse... it's the miracle of miracles. You went to sleep some night in the past not so long ago, and woke up the next morning in the science fiction future. I don't know the exact day (or even that the idea of a particular date is meaningful here), but it's true.

No one values that library they could have in their pocket. No one reads, because they don't want to. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, I always wanted my own library of movies on VHS, but alas couldn't afford that. I'd get to watch 2 or 3 over the weekend, maybe once in awhile one over a week night (sometime after 1985... prior to that it was hoping ABC or NBC would air a theatrical movie I cared about twice a year, and that I'd be allowed to stay up and watch it). But kids now days don't even want to watch movies/shows. A tiktok video is about all the attention span they have. Is that a policy failure?

Whining that public institutions are sacred, and that libraries need to be worshiped makes it seem like you don't even understand the problem. I would think that you might instead want to celebrate that we live in a world where everyone could have their own library, and might instead spend your effort encouraging them to want one.

> Whining that public institutions are sacred, and that libraries need to be worshiped makes it seem like you don't even understand the problem. I would think that you might instead want to celebrate that we live in a world where everyone could have their own library, and might instead spend your effort encouraging them to want one.

This is a pretty funny comment considering in the previous sentence you complain that 'kids these days' don't do anything but watch TikTok.

What makes you think that both things can't be true simultaneously?

Why is it important to you that the tiktok kids celebrate it with you? If the other little monkeys don't hoot and holler with you, it just feels empty and hollow? Honestly, what they think or feel doesn't even usually enter into my perception.

okay boomer.

I find the idea of a home filled with books and its inhabitants talking about them pretty romantic.

Does anyone else find themselves talking about insipid “headlines” with certain relatives? Like various wars and political events

Because that stuff is saturating our media environment and seems to be what people read

The sad thing here is that it is extremely effective and permeates everything. The mainstream media has their talking points and narratives, then a counter culture arrived not to fix this, but to provide their own talking points and narratives.

Every time a family member calls me it's either something they saw on MSM, or something they saw on Twitter/Facebook. Nobody seems to actually educate themselves and have a discussion, it's just talking points. Half the time they can't expand beyond the headlines.

It feels like we're at peak attention media. At least, I hope so.

Yeah. It's all trying win an argument rather than discover any kind of truth.

I find myself dreading talking to my siblings these days. I call up to ask how they are and get a rant about Hunter Biden or whatever the flavour of the day is.

Thanks YouTube and Twitter.

> Yeah. It's all trying win an argument rather than discover any kind of truth.

I suspect this has been the case for the majority of people for the majority of history, unfortunately.

It is definitely a lot worse among my acquaintances these days. I am in my late 50´s. Many people people I know of my generation are addicted to conspiracy theories and spend a lot of their lives thinking about them, following influencers etc. This was not the case for these people in the past.

The one thing a lot of them have in common is a high degree of isolation, presumably leading to a lot of time on the internet.

We need to carve a few (many actually) books onto stone tablets. That's the only way they will be preserved. We could easily build stone cutting machines to do it.

The tablets could be stored in caves.

No, stone tablets have a history of breaking and going missing, becoming a legend in the process.

We need gold plated tungsten carbide tablets.

15..10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXeTsWGPT0w

I go through phases of mostly reading online vs mostly reading printed books. I strongly suspect that pieces like this, which focus on saving print culture, are driven more by emotion than reason.

Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's worth reading. For example, many printed books are literally fiction. If you read something online, more likely than not it is at least "based on a true story".

Our culture attaches a certain significance to reading printed literature. It's supposed to make you deeper and more cultured. That's very nice, but I don't think reading classic literature as a hobby is meaningfully different from, say, listening to avant-garde jazz or reading old superhero comics as a hobby. I'm skeptical reading fiction makes you a better friend, worker, or citizen. Just makes you more "cultured". (Which is fine!)

What about nonfiction? A lot of nonfiction doesn't respect the reader's time. "This book should've been a blog post; this blog post should've been a tweet." Nonfiction print authors tend to devote many words to irrelevant anecdotes, stating common sense, or repeating a point they already made.

And just because it's in print doesn't mean the information is accurate. I know one blogger who started doing spot-checks and concluded many printed books have inaccurate info:

>I was worried my epistemic spot checking project was doomed before it began. The well regarded Sapiens dismissed a link between cultural and genetic evolution, and Last Ape Standing made two explosively wrong errors in the first chapter. Neither related to human evolution (one was about modern extreme poverty and the other about cetacean evolution), but I just couldn’t let them go. I worried that every book was terrible if you actually fact checked it, or maybe just every book on the emergence of homonids?

https://acesounderglass.com/2017/04/18/epistemic-spot-check-...

Finally -- we forget much of what we read anyways!

So in conclusion, I don't think it's print culture which is good, so much as social media that's bad.

And don't forget audio books. There has been a reading renaissance due to audio books.

One thing about books (online or physical), is that a lot more work has gone into a some of them, so the quality can be higher.

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