From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 02:21:21 MDT
Amara Graps writes:
> "without destroying the books"
>
> If you succeed in this effort, would you still keep the books?
Sure, as a backup, if I can afford the storage. Moreover, the
originals contain information not yet scannable with current
technology. Scanning won't grab the fonts, nor the little vignettes,
will do a mess to rasterized illustrations, nor get the paper's
texture, nor smell.
> I like books. I like the feel of paper in my hand, and reading
> from a printed page. I like bringing a volume on buses, trains,
> to cafes. I like sitting on my couch with afghan around me with
> my favorite music playing, a small reading light and maybe some
> candles and a glass of wine.
Would this really be all that different, with a digital paper ebook
slate, or a really good headup? Bookmarks will never slide out nor
uglyfy books, annotation (whether ASCII or audio) is painless, you can
ask the book to read you a passage, search with advanced syntax and
cut and paste from it. Plus, you can carry the ton or so of your books
under your arm or on your belt -- always -- and have a couple of
backups stored in a different locations. And you can give a copy of a
rare book to your friend, while still keeping it (yes, I'll be happy
to slip the original author a cyberbuck in the process). And the darn
things will never get dusty, nor mildewed, nor damaged in transport.
> My books reflect some decades of thinking and interests and
> evolving and having them around me is like wearing a comfortable piece
> of clothing. I don't feel at home, until my books are out of the
Absolutely, and some people have absolutely amazing information stored
in theirs. Pooling information from special topics would greatly
increase utility, a few people could cover a field exhaustively. I
would kill to be able to raid Mike Darwin's library.
> boxes and onto the shelves. If I design a virtual reality of my
> home in the future, the virtual reality would have to have shelves
> of my books. For my future version of myself, I would design
> myself still liking books.
>
> I don't like reading long texts electronically. I would be tickled
No mistake, current display technology sucks very badly. I wouldn't
mind a ruggedized 1280x1024 15" TFT slate, though. But we should be
able to do even better than paper, eventually. "A Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer" has certainly gotten some nice features...
> pink to have my books electronically available with which to search,
> so I would like electronic versions too, although I would ideally
> like to be able to search on equations too.
Alas, in three decades of computing we haven't managed to create a
decent document standard -- this is hardly rocket science, is it? It's
either about typography or about searchability or hyperlinks, and
never about all of them, or heavensforbid! openness and long life time
of the standard. This really shakes my faith into digital technology,
and the people behind it. And the librarians fear technology like the
plague, anyway.
> I'm finding that my small library, (average in comparison
> to my Bay Area friends). is unusual among my colleagues here in Germany.
Large personal libraries are always unusual, regardless of
location. People just don't read anymore.
> As my friends and colleagues helped me move a couple of weeks ago,
> it's become a kind of inside joke in my group ('what is in these
> boxes?' 'viele viele bucher ...!'), but I notice that at the
> same time they want to spend hours browsing my books.
>
> I have a sense that many here have similar small libraries; are
> we so unusual to other people?
Hell, yes. I'm surprised you only now notice.
> Eugene says:
>
> >I have the same problem. I even stopped buying dead tree because I
> >can't move with them in style
>
> Please define "in style" ...
Packing, driving the things to the post office shlepping it in and
filling out all the paperwork, receiving (or even picking up),
unpacking, installing shelves and putting the books on them undusting,
and the like. I do certainly have far less trouble with the stuff on
my hard drive. Of course, here I have to worry about long-term
readability of all the .ps.Z, ps.gz and .pdf. I already have 2-3 files
which zcat nor gzip can't read but gv can, a lot of .pdfs which break
gv (and xpdf can't render antialiased fonts, and has a GUI from hell
-- and I don't want to get hooked on proprietary Adobe Acrobat, which
won't run on my current glibcless box, anyway), have to think about
searching .pdf and .ps, about the threat of head crashes, about
migrating the stuff to a new machine, etc.
The human visual system does change far slower than the onslaught of
document pseudostandards, and there is far less mobile context
necessary to read a dead tree vs. bits.
> >And, yeah, lugging less stuff around does really free the mind.
>
> Sure, you don't need to devote as much of your brain to keep track
> of those titles. Yes, useful.
Not only that, imagine an advanced search full text index search
engine as a front end to your library.
> On the other hand, there's something irresistably gemuetlich about
> having one's books around [and they are best replacement for T.V. (IMO)].
I went cold turkey on the idiot box many many years ago. As to books,
you have to have sufficient space and money to move them. I did not
ship my library to the U.S., and now I'm glad I didn't, because I'm
about to go back to academia, and Ph.D. positions are not exactly
lavishly paid.
> And living in a foreign country with no fluency in the foreign language,
> the local libraries are frustratingly useless for me, so my library has
> become my backup reseach support after the professional journals.
> (Even my institute's professional library is weak, especially in comparison
> to large U.S. university libraries. I really miss Stanford's bookstore and
> libraries.)
There are definite advantages in living in a large university town,
and knowing your local bookstore sources. Sure, now you can also order
books online...
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