Comment by sp332
7 years ago
It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.
I've found this website very useful:
https://archive.org/details/texts
My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).
I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.
The question is what will stop working earlier: archive.org or the 18th century book?
TBD.
Books have lots of failure modes too. Wide distribution is one way to protect them.
Shift the balance: https://archive.org/donate/
The one in Washington DC is now an Apple store.
Wow ... that's .. is that irony? I don't even know.
It's straight up dystopian that's what it is.
The yearly ALA (American Library Association) conference was in the conference center across the street from that library last weekend. I wonder how many noticed the metaphor to what is happening to libraries in general?
Ha! Walked by it when I was there, I thought the same thing.
To be fair, it’s not like DC doesn’t have public libraries. Also, the original DC Carnegie building sits on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
What better way to signal the importance of libraries than to have one on that expensive real estate?
Or what better way to signal a change in values than to stop having one on that same real estate.
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Not the one in Mount Pleasant!
Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.
Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.
Nice shout-out. Truly, the world owes railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie a huge debt.
My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.
Andrew Carnegie owed the world a huge debt.
Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too!
IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.
Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.
I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal.
My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.
P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.
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I find retaining information in digital books much more difficult. I think the lack of a tactile third dimension when reading eliminates a search index in my memory and it really effects how I parse the book. I tried reading the most recent GoT book in digital form and I just could not keep track of everyone (admittedly it had been several years since I read the previous installment in dead tree form, so I didn't have a current index of all the characters fresh in my memory). I gave up about 1/4 of the way through and just watched the tv show :)
Honestly, and I dislike admitting it, but paper books instill the same feeling as any other "collection" hobby for me. I take more pride in reading them knowing that my bookshelf is growing.
Fair point. I agree that the incumbent digital avatar is more of a file and less of a book, a classic enterprise solution for a consumer category of products.
And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!
That's just familiarity. You could get used to digital books if you had to.
Have no idea why you're downvoted. Books are quite fragile and very difficult to duplicate in book form.
If you actually want to preserve something, it is valuable to have production of both digital and hard copies.
IDK, 15m of early 20th century dollars for a sound like it could finance buying a lot of books.