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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Libraries are obsolete. Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

Naturally institutions try to justify themselves and find reasons for their own continued existence. The proper response is to dismiss such efforts.

I still enjoy them. When getting into a topic I'm completely ignorant of, I'll just walk down the relevant stacks, grab books that catch my eye and skim a few sections or pages. I often find tangentially related books that I never would have otherwise if I had just searched 'Chinese history,' say, on Amazon. This was particularly valuable when I was a child and ended up with a cornucopia of books on the wild west, the Yukon and California gold rushes, the world wars, etc., none of which I even knew existed at such a young age. I feel much more nostalgic about public libraries than school libraries so this article doesn't evoke much of a reaction, but the thought of losing the former feels like a gut punch.

I also still use them to study or work if I'm not at the lab/between jobs. IMO, nothing beats a quiet, secluded desk buried in the middle of the stacks for focus.

Books aren't prohibitively expensive sure, but space for a home office can be.

I find it much easier to study in a library given the lack of family/housemates making noise and interrupting me, and how few options you have to distract yourself (I could boot up steam in a library but it seems weird enough that I don't get the temptation).

What kind of specs do library computers even have? I doubt you'd get anything more graphically intensive than Minecraft and Terraria running on one.

Oh I bring my own laptop. It's really about having a separate space for focused work.

Depending on the quality of the library just wandering through the bookshelves can be fruitful too, found some good books during university that way.

This is one of the most foolish takes I've seen in the Motte. Libraries are not obsolete - in fact they are more important than ever in my view. The primary goal of a library was never to actually educate the masses, it was to give bright young kids from poor backgrounds and opportunity to learn.

The goal is to let intelligent autodidacts teach themselves and make something of themselves in a way they couldn't without a library. It's also one of the few true community spaces we have left in the Western world. For shame.

The goal is to let intelligent autodidacts teach themselves

Exactly. This policy is precisely the type of thing that people here complain about in every other context: A policy that focuses on troublemakers, to the detriment of a talented elite.

  1. They do if they are immigrants
  2. This is high school. Other than art and PE, the kids we are talking about are mostly in advanced classes in which the troublemakers are not enrolled.

People arguing against libraries in general may be doing that, but I don't see how this policy does.

It is replacing libraries, which OP notes harms the elite minority of intelligent didacts which uses libraries, with detention centers for troublemakers. Hence, it "focuses on troublemakers, to the detriment of a talented elite."

TheDag was responding to AshLael, who was saying that libraries as a whole are obsolete. They were not discussing the policy from the OP, which still keeps the books in schools, and lets the kids borrow them.

The fact that the books are still capable of being borrowed diminishes the harm, but does not completely eliminate it. People after all, regular browse books in libraries without checking them out. I can browse 10 books in an hour in a library. I am not going to take 10 books home on the bus inmy backpack. Not to mention that every book I take home is unavailable for every other kid. Not so a book that I browse and put back on the shelf. No matter how you slice it, the costs of this policy are almost entirely borne by those intellectually curious kids.

I am not going to take 10 books home on the bus inmy backpack.

I've done this plenty of times :)

Not no matter how you slice it - it depends how well the libraries were run, and how big the problems with discipline are.

I'm also not sure I buy the idea that people would complain about "in every other context", chances are you're just misunderstanding their position.

Not everyone can afford books. Poverty is widespread. And telling everyone to pirate all the books online is not something a government can do.

Libraries are a lot more than just a warehouse for books. They provide a lot of services, including research help, internet and computer access, rooms that can be booked (hah!) for various purposes, and often a variety of other programs (tax help, kids programming, etc.). Also, just because some books are cheap doesn't mean that borrowing books as no purpose. Some people are still poor, or just have limited space, so "books are cheap" isn't that strong of an argument.

I mean more relevantly books may not be terribly expensive, but they’re durable goods that most people only use briefly, once. Libraries make sense in that context- borrowing really is the more efficient arrangement even for the non-poor.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I doubt that the particularly rare or niche books that can't be readily found online would be stocked in a school library.

A computer and reliable internet access aren't free (nor a VPN), and many people rely on the library for the internet (ironically enough).

I don't think the internet replaces what libraries currently do, even around getting books. Being able to easily browse, to find books you never even thought of... a physical space like a library is way better than the internet.

My VPN that I use for piracy is entirely free, and I very much doubt that even the poorest of Americans don't have access to cellphones, since even Indian beggars usually have a phone of some kind. Despite what manufacturers would want you to believe, a phone is a computer too.

I'm not claiming that all libraries are useless, I'm just claiming that the ones in schools are no longer anywhere near as essential as they once were.

Books are free if you have internet and know where to look.

I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with stealing them. I mean don't get me wrong, I have pirated thousands of books in my life, but let's call a spade a spade.

I would have an issue with stealing a book, pirating said book I see almost no issue at all. To me piracy is behavior on level of using adblocker or not paying voluntary fee for using toilet. I see it as a much lesser crime than theft.

Eh. Copying data you aren't authorized to copy and non-consensually appropriating physical objects that someone else was using don't seem similar enough to me to merit clustering them closely.

I don't feel like they're both spades. I think-

  • Taking a thing in such a way that it damages their livelihood because they were dependent on it to survive.
  • Copying something that someone might have otherwise have had some % expectation of being able to derive rent from you and similar minded people from that they need a certain threshold of to survive.

Have a substantial cleaving of the ethical reality in between them. In fact... I might even put stealing physical objects from sufficiently wealthy people who will tank it in a third category.

This isn't to make strong claims about the ethics just yet- there's also the consequences of disrupting societal norms around certain property rights via direct action to consider.

So all that said- yeah.

Re: "I would add the pretty major caveat that you have to be okay with [pointer at ethics around non-con copying] them."

I agree. Some issue taken with the word "steal" here and the claim that you're "calling a spade a spade" because it's equivocation in culture war debates elsewhere say- around copy-write or AI art- feel like disingenuous weaponizations.

This isn't true globally. For example, in the UK the Public Lending Right Act 1979 grants authors a small payment each time their book is borrowed from a public library.

Checking Wikipedia for "Public Lending Right" indicates that similar schemes exist in other countries, e.g. Canada, Germany, Israel.

Libraries organize books in a physical space. I can find most books free online if I know exactly which book I'm looking for. I can't, practically speaking, wander through the philosophy section in the Dewey decimal system and notice something.

There's also a significant difference between reading a physical book and a digital one.

It is impossible to browse Amazon the way you browse bookstores or libraries. Amazon is 95% less fun.

Books aren't expensive enough to justify them anymore.

This claim is going to need an in-depth number of citations showcasing that all books that libraries host are still available and purchasable, and their prices, and comparisons with past prices, all adjusted for inflation, as well as the average income of the parents who send their kids to a particular school, also adjusted for inflation.

The justification for tearing down institutions needs to have some measure of scrutiny.

I agree and have personally started hoarding physical books again because I don't trust electronic media to persist. It's happened before. A lot of info was lost when physical periodicals were converted to microfilm and destroyed.

That said, entrusting school librarians to preserve information is like asking the Christians to preserve the pagan scrolls in Alexandria. They have no problem destroying priceless artifacts of human genius (Huck Finn, Dr. Seuss) if it fits their ever-shifting ideological goals.

What do you mean by hoarding books? Do you by as many as you can or do you select certain ones you believe will become hard or impossible to find in the future? Also why don't you trust electronic media? Wouldn't it be better to just buy hard drives and then download everything you can come by via torrents, libgen e.t.c. and figure out some sort of backup plan?

I just mean that I'm buying physical books instead of electronic now. I'm not planning on being an Irish monk keeping the flame through the Dark Ages.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

What I don't trust in electronic media is this:

  • Corporations controlling art. For example, publishers changing the words to old Roald Dahl books and pushing this to people's devices.

  • Flawed digital conversion and storage processes. We know that books can last for hundreds of years with little human effort. In the 20th century, there was a large-scale effort to convert books and periodicals to microfilm with the original media destroyed. This destroyed a lot of knowledge. Even if microfilm readers weren't inferior to books (they are), the process destroyed information because it was done in a low-resolution way. Sometimes the conversion didn't work at all and the text was lost entirely. In other cases, information is made inaccessible because old devices no longer work. Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years? Original media should be preserved.

  • Corporations controlling personal information. We've all heard tales of corporations like Google destroying people's information or locking them out of their accounts. Why would we hold media with companies like this when we can just have physical?

Is there going to be a machine capable of reading my 2020s era hard drive in 100 years?

So far in the history of electronics/computing, I feel like there have been few actual dead ends on the question of transferrability, particularly when the stored data is already digital (and my sense is that probably a majority of analog data resulted in at least one device capable of conversion to digital, even if it wasn't widely used). So, I think I'd be less worried about whether we can get your digital file off of your 2020s hard drive and onto whatever storage medium people will be using in 2120.

File interpretability seems like potentially a more difficult challenge. Look at all the old, like, DOS software that is becoming harder and harder to use. Sure, DOS emulation exists now, built to run in Windows, but if we jump to a new class of OS, who is going to write the new DOS emulator? Or are we going to end up with chains of "new OS emulates Windows, where we have a DOS emulator"? This would seem incredibly brittle and unlikely to be well-maintained enough to not inevitably have some significant number of original files become unsupportable.

That said, when it comes to digital books in particular rather than executables and other files generally, I wonder if I can reel us back a bit. If I fire up Calibre and look to convert a book, I see 18 options. Not all of them are really relevant, but there are a bunch. So I think the numbers game works in a different direction than that of the DOS example. The trend for executables seems to be toward not many different OSs, so if at any point, one backwards chain doesn't get emulated, you lose everything prior that was dependent on that chain. For pure data storage formats, if I can freely and easily replicate the same data in 10 different formats, all I need is one to make it into the new OS, and I've still succeeded. Hopefully, the same numbers game will happen in the new OS, and that one surviving format will become convertible into whatever ten new formats come along with the new OS. That the other nine died is immaterial in this case.

So, perhaps the strategy is that we just need to have people like you continuing to fill their hard drives, but make sure you don't collapse everything down to a single format. Have a script in Calibre or something that automatically converts every book into every format and store all of them simultaneously. Storage is cheap, especially with file sizes for books being so small.

I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

Why mention RAID? I’m honestly curious because this comes up a lot with data hoarding. RAID helps with maintaining uptime and availability for an applications during a disk failure, but it does not provide backups. With RAID your capacity investment is diminished by mirroring or parity storage cost, which could be better allocated to additional backup media. Do you agree?

I disagree. The reason RAID is not a backup is because it does not protect against accidentally deleting data, and compared to an external backup the chance of something breaking both drives is greater because they're next to each other. However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work. In a company you can make it someone's job to verify the backups by periodically restoring them to a test system, but most individuals won't be doing that.

However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

I mean if I have 10 disks and split 5 into a data pool with no mirroring/parity and 5 into a backup set, then I have half the total capacity of all disks. However if I turn 5 into a raid, I’ll have some number of disks capacity -N depending on raid level. I could then turn the backup set into the same raid level (online backup) to match, but in this case raid gives me less than half the total capacity of all disks due to extra parity storage.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work.

True, however my approach would be to have both online and offline backups. Online ZFS backup should help here. To keep costs down, this is just 3 disks for every dataset zpool I’d set up. Then, an additional 3 disks when that runs out. Add another disk or tape in to this for offsite backup if you want.

Also offline guards against ransomware.

What do you think, what is your approach?

For relatively unimportant stuff I just use RAID. If ransomware wants me to pay for my Factorio saves I can start a new game instead. My more important private stuff is all documents, so I keep an extra printed copy (and for the really important stuff I also keep copies with my relatives in case I lose everything in a fire). For important stuff that I don't need to hide, I use immutable storage on the internet (e.g. git, bittorrent, ipfs). That would be my advice to anyone who wants to hoard books electronically: find a like-minded community, make a torrent with everything you want to hoard, and ask them to seed it.

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Do you agree?

Quite possibly. I haven't really given it much thought TBH. I just think digital archival methods don't have a great (or long) track record. Certainly, any one person's efforts wouldn't be likely to survive their death.

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