Reading on paper or screen

[TidiousTed]

 

[AmateisGal]

Hahaha! :eusa_clap

 

[Nathan Dodge]

I was just going to ask if this debate has been settled yet and judging from the comic strip, it has!

 

[ButteMT61]

That's a pretty good argument right there for the preservation of as much as possible. It's a very elightened attitude to say "I like to think I'd have been different, but I probably wouldn't have," and I laud you for saying as much. But how to come by that attitude?...

I am 100% in favor of preservation - it is a big part of my life - just stating the excuses why it's not being done...
As for the attitude - dunno. Raised right? I read? Coast to Coast AM? Ironically, I always thought "I am different" but really, it's easy to think you are when you're not in a situation and proclaiming from afar. When I was younger (now 50 for reference) I DID think I was different and would be different if plopped-down somewhere in time where crappy things went on. I'd love to think I'd stand up for something that was uncomfortable, but when YOUR life is on the line, it might be a tad different...
Looked at from a different angle, maybe it's a government (One-World-Government of the future) plan to get us all stupid. Ripe for the taking. Not sure I don't believe it the way things are going!

 

[Nanny Ogg]

However, it is important a story, not the media. When I read reviews for the "flavor of the paper," I am wondering if our ancestors had similar sentiments when changing media? For example, "No, not paper. Nothing can replace the flavor of the stone." As a true bookworm, I read many books and when I entered the bookstore, I go out with a full bag. As a result, my library is complete and has already started to wonder where to put my new acquisitions. The reader in this case was an appropriate decision. It is important to read. No matter how. My opinion. Regards!

 

[Edward]

Most of my stuff is and remains analog -- I have over 8000 hours of radio material, mostly on cassettes and reels, along with a closet full of radio transcriptions and another closet full of 78rpm records. I digitize some of it for convenience -- I run iTunes on my desktop computer and feed it to a small AM radio transmitter, and that's how I do much of my daily listening. But I've never disposed of the originals, and of those 8000 hours of tape, accumulated over forty years time, I've had exactly two cassettes go bad. Pretty good ratio, I think.

Digitally, I've lost two hard drives in the past five years, each containing several hundred hours of material. If I'd disposed of the original material, I'd be up the creek. But I didn't, so I'm not. I'm convinced digitization is fine as a convenience medium, but I don't consider it archival at all. Dispose of your originals at your own risk.

Bingo! Agreed absolutely.

 

[sheeplady]

My grandmother on my father’s side collected newspapers with important front pages, so I got papers from when Henrik Ibsen died, the first world war started, when it ended and so on. But the problem with these papers are that they have become very brittle over the years and almost fall apart when you try to page through them.

Many books printed between 1850 and 1950 are on acidic paper. I've opened books to have them turn to dust. If you store them in a low humidity, dark, 60 F degree place, they do survive quite well. However, most low circulation older books are stored in large annex-type buildings in crates handled by forklifts- no heat, no cooling. These buildings are often metal, so they really do go to extremes. Really one of the worst places for books, but the alternative is to not store them due to financies.

The problem is that just because a book is old or low circulation now doesn't mean it wasn't important then (or isn't important in some way to then or to the future).

One knock I have on digital archives - and for the record, there are lossless files of high quality - is this: I work in the music industry at the largest company in the world. We had archives placed on DVD of album artwork, photos, etc. from the late 90's/early Y2k days. Some of them are no longer readable - even though they're stored in controlled rooms vertically, in cases, etc. It's not the computers or hardware - something happened to those earlier disks. New archival DVD/CD disks are meant to last over 100 years. But - the fact remains, we don't stay static in our technologies. How many here have turntables, 8-tracks, cassettes, floppy disks, etc? (for the record, no pun intended, I do have turntables and tube amps) and we likely won't have CD/DVD's in 10, 15 years. It's a tough one. I think about it all the time. You look at people that have family photos, awards, etc. on paper, and a flood, fire, earthquake destroys them. At least my digital stuff is backed up elsewhere so I won't lose that, barring nuclear war or Armageddon.

Most digital libraries do some type of an update every 10 years or so to change formats. I have had experience with some file formats in my former work (some digitalized stuff from 15 years before my time was found on early floppy floppies under a desk). It took about 3 weeks for us to get it changed over to the format we were using at the time, which I thought was pretty good. The project I worked with was backed up at three locations worldwide and three separate locations on campus. The original materials were also kept by their intial owners.

Libraries exist in a swamp of murky rules. They include copyright law and format laws. Unfortunately, it is incredibly complex to get books digitalized. Lots of stuff is totally destroyed before (if ever) permission can be gotten. Which I think is incredibly sad.

 

[TidiousTed]

From "Advice to Young Ladies on Their Conduct and Duties in Life" by T.S. Arthur, published in 1849.
I love all things retro and vintage, but I don't think I want to go back to times with oppinions like this one

 

[Nobert]

Not dsagreeing, but worth pointing out that the novel was only just coming into its own in 1849. Previously novels had been thought of mostly as trashy stories read by housewives, the way we might think of romance novels today. Poetry was the realm of the true "man of letters."

 

[ButteMT61]

...Libraries exist in a swamp of murky rules. They include copyright law and format laws. Unfortunately, it is incredibly complex to get books digitalized. Lots of stuff is totally destroyed before (if ever) permission can be gotten. Which I think is incredibly sad.

Yep, that's a problem. Most places - including ours - backup, lockup, and forget. Then when it's not retrievable, Oh Noz!

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

Not that I shouldn't be able to figure this out on my own, but has anyone had experience in converting a book to pdf, and then loading it onto their Nook? Yes, I am anal obsessive enough to scan (my own) books.

 

[Pompidou]

Not that I shouldn't be able to figure this out on my own, but has anyone had experience in converting a book to pdf, and then loading it onto their Nook? Yes, I am anal obsessive enough to scan (my own) books.

On Mac, any program in the iWorks suite (the Mac equivalent to the Office suite) can "export to PDF". If you use MS Office 2007, here's a link to a file from Microsoft's own website that allows you to do the same. Scanning the book is too dependent on your choice of hardware for me to help much here. Odds are, scanning whole books will mean hundreds of separate documents, but I don't do much scanning, so you might be able to do it differently. If you get stuck with 100s of single pages, just copy paste them into a single word file before saving the whole thing as the PDF.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7

In regards to loading it onto your Nook, I had to look it up on Google. iPhone/iTunes is my combo of choice. Here's a movie on YouTube that shows how to do so. It's a 1:44 length movie, of which the first half shows how to save pages from this company's online magazine as PDF files, but the second half shows how to add them to your Nook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYPMfVNlUk

If you don't want to bother watching that - perhaps you need to stay awake - the gist of it is, right click the PDF file you're interested in, click "Copy", then you want to find your Nook in your computer and paste it into its documents folder.

 

[TidiousTed]

Not that I shouldn't be able to figure this out on my own, but has anyone had experience in converting a book to pdf, and then loading it onto their Nook? Yes, I am anal obsessive enough to scan (my own) books.

If you want to scan your books into digital text (text used by word prosessors, in pdf documents and on web pages) you need to use a type of scanning called OCR scanning. This type of scanning reads each letter and the output is digital text.

Search for OCR scanning software on Google and you will find several free ones, and most of them are fairly easy to use. Most modern scanners come with OCR scanning as well.

 

[Nobert]

If you want to scan your books into digital text (text used by word prosessors, in pdf documents and on web pages) you need to use a type of scanning called OCR scanning.

Caveat on that: by the time you get through editing and fixing all the typos caused by your typical O.C.R. scan, you may wonder whether it wouldn't have been worth it just to type the whole thing in manually.

 

[TidiousTed]

Caveat on that: by the time you get through editing and fixing all the typos caused by your typical O.C.R. scan, you may wonder whether it wouldn't have been worth it just to type the whole thing in manually.

Depending on the print in the book and how well you can calibrate the OCR scanning software there is a lot of truth in that. It takes practice to do it well. I've use OCR scanning for the last 15 years and still have problems with certain printed matter.

 

[davidraphael]

I often have to read people's (approx. 120 page) screenplays on screen and I don't like it at all.

I'm a print and paper kinda guy. The first thing I do with a book is smell it. I can't smell a screen.

 

[Pompidou]

I often have to read people's (approx. 120 page) screenplays on screen and I don't like it at all.

I'm a print and paper kinda guy. The first thing I do with a book is smell it. I can't smell a screen.

Despite my preference in general for reading off a screen, I do like big and heavy books. There's a plus to e-reading that hasn't been mentioned yet, but it's mostly regarding newspapers. You don't get black fingertips. I know a few people who think this is a con, not a pro, but I'm not at all sentimental, for the most part.

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it.

I do prefer paper to e-book, but both have their place. I don't always want a heavy book-especially in bed. Nook is wonderful for travel (I am the kind of person who wants to travel with a dozen of my favorite, because I don't know what I might want to curl up with.

Really the best thing about my Nook, is that at 2 in the morning, when I want something new to read NOW, I can have it in a couple of minutes. But I strenuously object to paying for a hard copy and an e-book, That's just silly.

 

[ButteMT61]

@ BlueM: Very good point! I'd like to see a coupon for the e-book when I buy a hardback (or paperback I suppose) That seems fair. But, it the movie biz is any indicator of this, they offer these packages with "digital copies" for iPods, etc., but charge more for the pack. Bunk. Give me a coupon code, let me download it, then I have both!
Fair enough, and I think I'll send an email to Amazon, Apple, and B&N about this idea. You get the credit of course

 

[Bluebird Marsha]

Oh trust me, that "coupon idea" is being floated around. I work at a book distributor, and the topic is being discussed. I'm just guessing, but I think the problem is, as usual, unauthorized use. Namely, how do you make it so the e-version can't be traded around for free. I can think of solutions, but I'm a cataloger/librarian, not a techie. So my ideas are probably deficient in several ways. But dang it, I want both versions. I wouldn't mind paying a dollar or two more both, but it needs to be a rational figure. I will scan my own!

BTW, one thing nice about books as data, is how the POD (print on demand) is making it easier to get some books. You have to be careful, because so many of them are absolute crap. But if it comes courtesy of a reputable publisher (and Amazon is not a publisher), you can get a nice copy at a fair price.

If you want to talk about ideas, here's my bright one

I think that just doing a straight "hard copy to e-book" shortchanges us on the possibilities. If I were queen of the publishing world, I'd like to do this: take a copy of "Clear the Bridge" - a book about the submarine Tang, and reissue it in paper and e-versions. But on the e-book, include other material- copies of her war patrol diaries, any video/audio material available on her, blueprints and stuff from her construction, reports from her surviving crew that was presented during war crimes trials in Japan. etc., etc. You get the picture. A bunch of that stuff can be obtained for free, but it would be a pain to round it up. And some of it needs "cleaning" to make it easy on the eyes.

And price accordingly, possibly in different packages.

Something like that. My two cents worth.