Books, Buildings & TrashFollow

That IS old - by my mother's day there were five little Peppers.

Maybe, but then again, there might be something in there which seemed irrelvant at the time, but which will be of great importance to future historians. The chances aren't high, granted, but you never know.

I think there's two different topics in this subject, though. One is about the content of the book, and the other the books themselves. I think the content is extremely important, and should be kept. Especially today, it can all be stored electronically, and would not take any physical space. It can only be beneficial to keep it somewhere for future use.

Once that is done, the book itself, in its physical form, doesn't necessarily matter that much. Objectively, there is nothing special about mass-produced books with paper which will automatically disolve after 50 years or so anyway. I wouldn't feel bad about throwing away some crappy novel I bought at the train station, but I would never even dream of spilling a drop of water on my Pléiade collection.

You could say the same about the sailboat trivia on my sugar packets.

I imagine that, like you say, eventually all this stuff will be amassed in some form other than dead trees and it won't be a concern how redundant the info is because it won't be taking up shelf space in the family room. Well, I can't even say "all this stuff" because who knows what out of print volumes will turn to dust before they can be entered. Still, I imagine that much of what's in the non-fiction section of the local bookstore could be gone tomorrow with no loss to future civilization. That's not even getting into the fiction section.

Sure, but as long as we're relying on the "You never know..." canard.No problem there. My point was that I don't know if we should mourn the passing of the 1966 edition of the New Mexico Tourism Guide or take extraordinary measures to insure its preservation until the Great Electronic Book Archiving.

Yes, but that canard is also called the "precautionary principle". It scales, and it's measurable. And, in this case, the Extraordinary Adventures of the US Army Around the World should be preserved over the Sailing Trivia Sugar Packet.



No, I agree we shouldn't necessarily mourn it until the end of time. Maybe just a minute of silence or so.

Seriously though, the only solution to this problem has got to be the same solution we ought to apply to all similarly subjective problems... case by case?



Edited cos I suck at quoting

Edited, Aug 14th 2007 3:14pm by RedPhoenixxx

Actually, I would think the Gorean Novels more likely targets of anti-free speech book burning than DiCkens, with the BDSM sub themes, and therefore even more worthy of prtection, and I dont just say that becasue I still have about 15 of the books I read in high school. Does Flea know about your secret slavegirl fantasies? 'Cause latin women make collars look good.

You'd need one hell of a big rifle to shoot the president from there.

I keep all my books. Large, heavy boxes of 'em. It's fairly ridiculous but if Mr. Tare can cart around his records, I get to have my books.