On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 07:39:02PM -0800, Godfrey DiGiorgi scripsit: > On Feb 27, 2009, at 6:56 PM, Graydon wrote: >> ... Books only survive well on good paper with stable inks and >> labour-intensive sewn bindings. Those books, irrespective of what's >> printed in them, are expensive. Which drives the volume down. ... > > I don't know about that. I have a bunch of wonderful old paperbacks > still that I paid a buck or two for in 1968-75 ... I still read them, > over and over again ... still enjoy them ... Keeping the often-re-taped > covers and spines together is a labor of love. They're growing old with > me and will likely expire as soon as I'm gone to take care of them.
Other books published around that time have paper -- cheap paper -- so acid it has (or mostly has) consumed itself by now. Get ahold of a librarian with conservation responsibilities or a museum conservator with the right area of activity sometime and get them started on 20th century papers. Budget at least an hour; do not rule out potent potables nor a necessity of sugary comestibles. There are 500 year old paper books where the paper was the really good stuff, pure high grade linen rag, never bleached, fermented to get the readily rotted out of it, and so on, that are fine today. But not cheap then and not cheap now. > I don't care about volume. I care about books and the stories they > carry. They are as much a part of my life as breathing. Which is fine and a side effect of growing up with them. Folks who grow up with other media had the same thoughts about that media. (There was a great big generational kerfluffle over the switch from scrolls to codexes, once upon a time.) The stories do just fine as electrons; it's all just instructions to build yourself a story, after all. I've got a couple cubic meters of books. I've also read millions of words on a computer screen. It's a tossup, right now -- most fiction I'd rather have electronically; I can put a lot of books on an SD card, and the reader device is already going everywhere with me. (Everywhere I'm going to be doing any reading, anyway.) Big colour plates, psalter facsimiles, and authoritative texts still do well on paper, but (to quote someone else from usenet), you can't grep dead goats. It's easy to get used to search and annotation. Not that most of us (any of us?) have a good indexing and search facility for our digital images yet, either, but that too is likely to wander in out of the future before so very long. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
