> The copy once held by the University of Virginia, Poe’s not-quite alma mater, was stolen in 1973 from the McGregor Room vault in Alderman Library. If it is never recovered, an unfortunate possibility, the number of known copies drops to eleven. At least one prominent Poe expert I know speculates it may have been destroyed to hide the evidence.
Isn't it more likely that they were fans of Poe and took the book for themselves or they stole it for someone who was a fan of Poe. Doesn't seem likely anyone else would steal such a rare book only to destroy it.
It's possible they wanted it for themselves, but I know lots of addicts who steal shit because they know it is expensive, only to have trouble selling it later and then dumping it.
OTOH I've been privy to some "don't tell anyone about what I'm about to show you" moments from a group in LA that liberated some treasures from an institution that wasn't properly preserving them. Some places will let you check out even very rare items on a short term if you pay a deposit (sometimes hundreds to low thousands, a tiny fraction of the item's worth) and then you just tell them it got stolen and lose your deposit.
There is always the chance that whoever stole it knew it was "the most valuable book in the vault", and afterwards realised he lacked the necessary connections sell it.
From a few mysteries I have seen, a real thief would have stolen it only after having produced a number of forgeries that they could then sell through blackmarket back-channels when the news of the theft became known.
I love the font-work on the cover. You may not think much of it, but today I was browsing some upcoming books "by-their-cover" and all of them were essentially some bad-ass-wanna-look character close up. Uniform to the bone. When did being original became such a liability?
When something is proven to sell, being original is a risk because it may not sell, and then executives will come to you and go "why didn't you do this thing that's proven to sell?"
A little off-putting when the author is plugging their book (more than once) in the article. It turned my attention away from learning about Poe (which was why I was there reading the article in the first place).
Now when he mentions a line from his book "That is a true unicorn", I immediately want to take issue with the author on whether anyone would have used that phrase in the 1970's when it is supposed to have been said.
Yes people always complain but I personally have no problem with consuming 'content marketing' as long as a) the content is legitimately interesting and not low effort and b) the creator is legit, not some shady company.
It's a set of poems by Poe, written when he was a teenager. They are interesting if you like Poe's poetry, but they aren't as good as his later famous poems like The Raven, The Bells, and Annabelle Lee.
A content of a book is more important than the book itself. If the contents are preserved then what's the need of collecting the rare original copies other than cultural or heritage reasons?
Differences between print editions can be important scholarly material. Did a printing error in the third run end up getting reproduced in later runs? Did an editor change this word at some point after the original publication, which wound up migrating into later editions of the work? Was that in agreement with the author, or done on their own? Was there originally a chapter break here to accomodate an illustration? What was the typeface like? What kind of ink was used - is the green tint on the chapter headings intentional, or did it fade over time?
On a purely aesthetic media-nerd level it's also interesting. Books aren't just their plaintext. There is craftsmanship and artistry involved in how a work is intended to be presented, and without examples of the original prints this context can be lost.
On a similar note, old movies are notoriously eclectic about different cuts and editions with scenes missing or added or lost to time. Having and preserving original reels is invaluable (especially because they're much more fragile in storage than books).
Imagine watching Buster Keaton while a guy is actually playing live music and breaking out slide whistles while the crowd cheers and smokes and waves their hats - it's an experience that's closer to going to a club and seeing a comedy act, than streaming movies on the couch. That particular experience is largely inaccessible to us today because we don't have pristine fully staffed 1920s cinemas that we can walk into. But if you have an original printing of a book, you can in fact just 'walk in' and see what it was supposed to be like. :)
"Cambrian Chronicles" is a great example of this on Youtube - the channel is primarily about Welsh History, but often ends up as an academic exercise of starting with a reference on Youtube, and following through sources, often back to some Victorian scholar who mistranslated or misspelt something (or sometimes just plain made things up), which was then copied by someone else and so on - essentially a game of academic Chinese whispers.
Its 2024, we can trivially preserve 100% of the original form of any book digitally, with all original intentions, bugs in creation etc. The actual physical book itself becomes just a curiosity (or investment), nothing fundamentally necessary.
With such discussions we often move from facts to emotions of specific individuals/groups. Some people feel strong emotions about absolute preservation of such items. Others, not so much, priorities in our lives lie elsewhere.
"Trivially" might be overstating it. If you do the scan at 1000 dpi and get several people to check it was done properly then very probably you will never want to refer to the original again, because a scan is much easier to consult: just turning to a particular page is much faster, and you can zoom in without having to manipulate a physical magnifying glass. But I've worked with book scans done by ordinary people using ordinary equipment and I have on many occasions found that the scan wasn't quite good enough and I've taken the trouble to check with a paper copy whether a certain short word was printed in italics or whether the exact shape of the serif can help me disambiguate a letter which was badly printed in the original (the plate wasn't properly inked or whatever). I've never personally experienced a situation in which I've said to myself, "I wish I had another copy of this same edition to compare against", but I can imagine that might happen sometimes. So I think it is worth keeping multiple copies of the same edition, if it's an "important" book, or you have some reason for suspecting that it might be important: you don't know for sure what people in the future will be interested in.
Even 1000dpi might not cut it. Remember the stories about really old texts on parchment that they discovered had been re-written on reused parchment? At certain specific wavelengths they could "see" the original text. If you just have a plain old RGB scan, that's no longer there.
More for paintings, and less so for books (except very old handwritten ones), is that the ink or paint used has its own characteristics. It might look very different from different angles due to the light reflecting off the pigment in different ways. Doesn't matter how high a resolution scan you have, it's going to be hard to scan that, and even harder to display it on a screen.
Have you looked at old books in the google books archive? You quite frequently find pages where the page-turning robot has screwed up, with results like distortion, lack of focus, weird smearing effects as the page was still moving when the picture was taken, or plain thinks it can't deal with like fold-outs. I recently tried to find a 'plate' (illustration) in an engineering journal from ~1864; it was missing from both the google and archive.org scans; probably due to being a fold-out. If all the archives throw their paper copies away, quite a lot of information will be lost.
Fold-outs are the worst. I'm building a magazine encyclopedia and magazines are chock-full of weird inserts and fold-outs that never appear in any scans. I am trying to build an archive of all the physical magazines so that at some point people can go through and check them against the scans to see what's missing.
Scanning systems are set up generally to only scan "regular" media without any surprises.
In 100 years when you can do even better scans, how will you make them without an original? You'll be stuck with whatever we were capable of in the moment when we decided to not give a shit about the original anymore.
It's not trivial to "preserve 100%" of a physical item at all. You can't hold a digitized copy or take samples. You can't get at anything that's beyond the resolution and nature of your scan.
The notion that digital copies simply contain all relevant information is on its face naive because it's inherently lossy to create a scan of a physical item.
> when we decided to not give a shit about the original anymore.
Poe wrote a Manuscript. That's the original. Do we have the manuscript? No? Then we do not have and have long since decided to "not give a shit about" the original.
At the time, the way to make your Manuscript (one document you wrote) accessible to a large number of potential readers was to publish it, which is why these books exist. But if Poe had instead been alive in 2024 and made a TikTok that would be the same, why don't you focus on preserving each hard disk used by TikTok? Does it feel irrelevant? But these are the vitally important originals, aren't they?
[Edited to fix spelling of TikTok, I'm sorry I'm old]
It depends on the book. In the case of Kafka's "The trial", for example, the manuscript is "the original" because the author never finished the work and all editions were made after his death based on that manuscript. However, with most books what happened is that the author sent the manuscript to the printer/publisher and there was then a bit of back-and-forth during which changes suggested by proofreaders were accepted or rejected by the author, other last-minute changes were made by the author, and so on, so in that case the manuscript is best thought of as "a draft" rather than "the original".
Usually the last edition produced during the author's life and under the author's supervision gives you the most reliable indication of the author's intention, what they call the "copy-text" in textual criticism, I think, but there are some interesting exceptions. For example, many people think the first edition of Mary Shellely's "Frankenstein" is better than a later edition, in which the older author appears to have wanted to make certain passages more respectable, less shocking, and thus arguably spoilt the work she produced in her youth. But that's presumably a matter of opinion. For scientific textual criticism we need all the editions, all the manuscripts, any manually corrected proofs or published copies that the author has written on, ...
The existence of distinct variant works is mildly interesting, and so there's (diminishing with volume) value in preserving variation, Big Wave (神奈川沖浪裏)† is a woodblock print, like many modern low scale printing processes for art it produced definitely different items each time, if you've seen Big Wave in a local city gallery and can see another somewhere they're certainly not just the same thing, the way every student's identical print of a famous band poster is.
But on the other hand, most of the value is in the core thing, not the variation. Modulo special cases like the "Wicked Bible" (which has a misprinting in the Ten Commandments) we care about that and not the variation.
It's easy to say that Blade Runner is an important movie. Hard up for preservation capacity if we're choosing obviously Blade Runner beats Ghostbusters 2. Easy. Ghostbusters 2 wasn't a terrible movie but it's no Blade Runner. OK, how about the "Director's Cut"? Sure OK, two copies of Blade Runner. The "Final Cut"? Ugh. Fine, OK, let's have three versions of Blade Runner rather than kick one out for a sub-par sequel to Ghostbusters. There are four more commercially released versions of the movie. That's too many. At some point we should cut our losses and say no, another Blade Runner is not worth it, we'll have Ghostbusters 2 instead thanks.
† That's deliberately not an accurate translation, but we all know what I'm talking about.
Original printings and original manuscripts are different types of originals, and contain different types of data for scholars. They are not fungible.
Do you presume that nobody is bothering to try to preserve natively digital culture? Because I assure you people do. Do you presume nobody will care in the future? Why would that be the case?
It entirely depends on the book. For most modern paperbacks, I'd agree with you - the book is often just a means of transmission of the text. Even with modern books though, there are plenty of examples where it's intended to be a physical object that affects you in some way, not just as a sequence of words that happens to be on a page. You'll see some books that chose weird sizes or paper finishes or even variations in font size through the book, because that's as much a part of it as the text itself.
In the early days of books, especially before the printing press, they were primarily considered works of art. You'd have ornate flourishes at the start of a chapter because it took so long to copy manually, adding something visually appealing wouldn't have made it take much longer to create in the grand scheme of things. There might be beautiful illustrations with vibrant colours competing for attention as much as the textual content.
Even with much newer books, you can tell the difference. One I remember from my childhood is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh with its illustrations by E. H. Sheppard. To most readers, the illustrations are as much a part of the book as the text, and yet there are cheap versions that contain the text only which are probably interesting if you've never seen the original but just feel incomplete and disappointing if you have.
With Victorian printing, you'd sometimes have outlines of illustrations printed in black and white and then someone would colour them in by hand with watercolour prior to sale. Every book would be slightly unique. I've only seen one such book when I was very young, something my mum had rescued from her grandfather's collection as a child.
Whilst new books are also great (there's nothing quite like opening a new hardbook, having a smell of it and settling down to read), old books are also wonderful, not just for the contents because also the look and feel of them that transports you back to another time. I've got a few (probably not valuable) old books that are over 100 years old, and in those days people would usually add a handwritten note on the first page saying who was buying it for who and what the occasion was, and often in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that itself is art now. This is just a glimpse into the history of the book and the world as it was at the time this book was new, that just add richness to the book itself.
Reading a book isn't just about the contents, as there's so much more to sense when handling something physical, especially old books that aren't perfect in some way and so have their own story that's different to every other copy.
In 1986 "the book is more than just the text" is a sound justification for why a significant proportion of library stock can't "just" be digitised.
But we're long past that, we can digitise the images, paper texture, layout choices, almost everything if we choose. There are a handful of things we might justify keeping anyway, but on the whole the digitisation is just a marked improvement.
As other commentators have pointed out - the fact that we can do something technically, at the highest levels of competence - does not mean we usually do, or can do such a thing at scale. If you look through the enormous majority of publicly available scans, from Google Books to Project Gutenberg, you'll find low resolution scans with alignment issues, colour issues even missing pages. You're also accessing books at the whim of the legal and technical infrastructure you don't control.
Sure you could keep a secret digital archive to pass hand to hand for circumstances when (as has just happened to the internet archive) thousands or millions of books are suddenly banned. But you're relying on access to open computer architectures that don't phone home your reading of those books (like Microsoft's 'Recall'). You're reliant on power. You're reliant on compatibility into the future. With a printed book, you have a physical object, duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and distributed. A physical book can be read by daylight in a refugee camp, a war zone, a desert.
It may seem a silly example, but if the Roman or better yet the Aztec empire had written their manuscripts digitally - we likely wouldn't have a single record from that era. They would have been erased through chaos or deliberate eradication. Don't be so quick to dismiss the physical.
but then you need computers and software, and those things change with time. you don't need anything but sunlight and your eyes to read a physical copy of a book.
what are some other technologies that we still use without any modifications on the original invention, like the physical book?
Sometimes it's a form of research (a rare copy may have unique inscriptions or other details) but often it's a form of art collection.
If you live anywhere near an antiquarian book fair (NY or CA are the ones I know) I'd highly encourage you to check it out. The books on display are absolutely stunning in both their physical beauty and the way they connect us to the past.
You have that book? That's an incredible artifact, but I get nervous about any older paper material that is privately owned. How do you have it stored? I see people buy books and other ephemera and keep them in their homes and they just don't last :(
do you collect anything? if so, why do you collect it?
there is a market for collectible books. i have a signed first edition of book that retails for $1250. people pay that much for this particularly copy. that might seem crazy to you, and that's fine, but that doesn't stop me from trying to sell it to people who care about that.
physical copies of books are a perfect invention that hasn't changed since it was originally invented. you don't need electricity to read them. you just need sunlight. not to mention the physical beauty of some books.
most physical copies of books are near worthless, though.
> The copy once held by the University of Virginia, Poe’s not-quite alma mater, was stolen in 1973 from the McGregor Room vault in Alderman Library. If it is never recovered, an unfortunate possibility, the number of known copies drops to eleven. At least one prominent Poe expert I know speculates it may have been destroyed to hide the evidence.
Isn't it more likely that they were fans of Poe and took the book for themselves or they stole it for someone who was a fan of Poe. Doesn't seem likely anyone else would steal such a rare book only to destroy it.
It's possible they wanted it for themselves, but I know lots of addicts who steal shit because they know it is expensive, only to have trouble selling it later and then dumping it.
OTOH I've been privy to some "don't tell anyone about what I'm about to show you" moments from a group in LA that liberated some treasures from an institution that wasn't properly preserving them. Some places will let you check out even very rare items on a short term if you pay a deposit (sometimes hundreds to low thousands, a tiny fraction of the item's worth) and then you just tell them it got stolen and lose your deposit.
There is always the chance that whoever stole it knew it was "the most valuable book in the vault", and afterwards realised he lacked the necessary connections sell it.
It's also possible they didn't have a clue and just took it on a lark, and only afterwards realized the magnitude of what they had taken.
Yeah, my guess as well.
From a few mysteries I have seen, a real thief would have stolen it only after having produced a number of forgeries that they could then sell through blackmarket back-channels when the news of the theft became known.
You steal it for yourself, then let slip you did at a party. Then destroy it to cover your tracks when you realize you fucked up.
Here’s Sotheby’s listing for the book: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/the-library-of-...
I love the font-work on the cover. You may not think much of it, but today I was browsing some upcoming books "by-their-cover" and all of them were essentially some bad-ass-wanna-look character close up. Uniform to the bone. When did being original became such a liability?
When something is proven to sell, being original is a risk because it may not sell, and then executives will come to you and go "why didn't you do this thing that's proven to sell?"
A little off-putting when the author is plugging their book (more than once) in the article. It turned my attention away from learning about Poe (which was why I was there reading the article in the first place).
Now when he mentions a line from his book "That is a true unicorn", I immediately want to take issue with the author on whether anyone would have used that phrase in the 1970's when it is supposed to have been said.
that's what seems like every single lithub article is. still worth reading some of their articles, though
Yes people always complain but I personally have no problem with consuming 'content marketing' as long as a) the content is legitimately interesting and not low effort and b) the creator is legit, not some shady company.
Oh, come on, give a bit of slack to somebody who puts the effort to write a book.
so if you write a book you are allowed a pass , hmm, interesting
on the other hand, its not good marketing for the book if people dont like your actions or behavior
> you are allowed a pass
A pass to write an article about a topic and mention a book you've written about said topic? (That is what we are talking about right?)
Absolutely!
Is the book any good? Like is the story/poems in it worth reading? Just asking cause I might want to read it if its good.
It's a set of poems by Poe, written when he was a teenager. They are interesting if you like Poe's poetry, but they aren't as good as his later famous poems like The Raven, The Bells, and Annabelle Lee.
A content of a book is more important than the book itself. If the contents are preserved then what's the need of collecting the rare original copies other than cultural or heritage reasons?
Differences between print editions can be important scholarly material. Did a printing error in the third run end up getting reproduced in later runs? Did an editor change this word at some point after the original publication, which wound up migrating into later editions of the work? Was that in agreement with the author, or done on their own? Was there originally a chapter break here to accomodate an illustration? What was the typeface like? What kind of ink was used - is the green tint on the chapter headings intentional, or did it fade over time?
On a purely aesthetic media-nerd level it's also interesting. Books aren't just their plaintext. There is craftsmanship and artistry involved in how a work is intended to be presented, and without examples of the original prints this context can be lost.
On a similar note, old movies are notoriously eclectic about different cuts and editions with scenes missing or added or lost to time. Having and preserving original reels is invaluable (especially because they're much more fragile in storage than books).
Imagine watching Buster Keaton while a guy is actually playing live music and breaking out slide whistles while the crowd cheers and smokes and waves their hats - it's an experience that's closer to going to a club and seeing a comedy act, than streaming movies on the couch. That particular experience is largely inaccessible to us today because we don't have pristine fully staffed 1920s cinemas that we can walk into. But if you have an original printing of a book, you can in fact just 'walk in' and see what it was supposed to be like. :)
"Cambrian Chronicles" is a great example of this on Youtube - the channel is primarily about Welsh History, but often ends up as an academic exercise of starting with a reference on Youtube, and following through sources, often back to some Victorian scholar who mistranslated or misspelt something (or sometimes just plain made things up), which was then copied by someone else and so on - essentially a game of academic Chinese whispers.
Its 2024, we can trivially preserve 100% of the original form of any book digitally, with all original intentions, bugs in creation etc. The actual physical book itself becomes just a curiosity (or investment), nothing fundamentally necessary.
With such discussions we often move from facts to emotions of specific individuals/groups. Some people feel strong emotions about absolute preservation of such items. Others, not so much, priorities in our lives lie elsewhere.
"Trivially" might be overstating it. If you do the scan at 1000 dpi and get several people to check it was done properly then very probably you will never want to refer to the original again, because a scan is much easier to consult: just turning to a particular page is much faster, and you can zoom in without having to manipulate a physical magnifying glass. But I've worked with book scans done by ordinary people using ordinary equipment and I have on many occasions found that the scan wasn't quite good enough and I've taken the trouble to check with a paper copy whether a certain short word was printed in italics or whether the exact shape of the serif can help me disambiguate a letter which was badly printed in the original (the plate wasn't properly inked or whatever). I've never personally experienced a situation in which I've said to myself, "I wish I had another copy of this same edition to compare against", but I can imagine that might happen sometimes. So I think it is worth keeping multiple copies of the same edition, if it's an "important" book, or you have some reason for suspecting that it might be important: you don't know for sure what people in the future will be interested in.
Even 1000dpi might not cut it. Remember the stories about really old texts on parchment that they discovered had been re-written on reused parchment? At certain specific wavelengths they could "see" the original text. If you just have a plain old RGB scan, that's no longer there.
More for paintings, and less so for books (except very old handwritten ones), is that the ink or paint used has its own characteristics. It might look very different from different angles due to the light reflecting off the pigment in different ways. Doesn't matter how high a resolution scan you have, it's going to be hard to scan that, and even harder to display it on a screen.
Have you looked at old books in the google books archive? You quite frequently find pages where the page-turning robot has screwed up, with results like distortion, lack of focus, weird smearing effects as the page was still moving when the picture was taken, or plain thinks it can't deal with like fold-outs. I recently tried to find a 'plate' (illustration) in an engineering journal from ~1864; it was missing from both the google and archive.org scans; probably due to being a fold-out. If all the archives throw their paper copies away, quite a lot of information will be lost.
Fold-outs are the worst. I'm building a magazine encyclopedia and magazines are chock-full of weird inserts and fold-outs that never appear in any scans. I am trying to build an archive of all the physical magazines so that at some point people can go through and check them against the scans to see what's missing.
Scanning systems are set up generally to only scan "regular" media without any surprises.
In 100 years when you can do even better scans, how will you make them without an original? You'll be stuck with whatever we were capable of in the moment when we decided to not give a shit about the original anymore.
It's not trivial to "preserve 100%" of a physical item at all. You can't hold a digitized copy or take samples. You can't get at anything that's beyond the resolution and nature of your scan.
The notion that digital copies simply contain all relevant information is on its face naive because it's inherently lossy to create a scan of a physical item.
> when we decided to not give a shit about the original anymore.
Poe wrote a Manuscript. That's the original. Do we have the manuscript? No? Then we do not have and have long since decided to "not give a shit about" the original.
At the time, the way to make your Manuscript (one document you wrote) accessible to a large number of potential readers was to publish it, which is why these books exist. But if Poe had instead been alive in 2024 and made a TikTok that would be the same, why don't you focus on preserving each hard disk used by TikTok? Does it feel irrelevant? But these are the vitally important originals, aren't they?
[Edited to fix spelling of TikTok, I'm sorry I'm old]
It depends on the book. In the case of Kafka's "The trial", for example, the manuscript is "the original" because the author never finished the work and all editions were made after his death based on that manuscript. However, with most books what happened is that the author sent the manuscript to the printer/publisher and there was then a bit of back-and-forth during which changes suggested by proofreaders were accepted or rejected by the author, other last-minute changes were made by the author, and so on, so in that case the manuscript is best thought of as "a draft" rather than "the original".
Usually the last edition produced during the author's life and under the author's supervision gives you the most reliable indication of the author's intention, what they call the "copy-text" in textual criticism, I think, but there are some interesting exceptions. For example, many people think the first edition of Mary Shellely's "Frankenstein" is better than a later edition, in which the older author appears to have wanted to make certain passages more respectable, less shocking, and thus arguably spoilt the work she produced in her youth. But that's presumably a matter of opinion. For scientific textual criticism we need all the editions, all the manuscripts, any manually corrected proofs or published copies that the author has written on, ...
The existence of distinct variant works is mildly interesting, and so there's (diminishing with volume) value in preserving variation, Big Wave (神奈川沖浪裏)† is a woodblock print, like many modern low scale printing processes for art it produced definitely different items each time, if you've seen Big Wave in a local city gallery and can see another somewhere they're certainly not just the same thing, the way every student's identical print of a famous band poster is.
But on the other hand, most of the value is in the core thing, not the variation. Modulo special cases like the "Wicked Bible" (which has a misprinting in the Ten Commandments) we care about that and not the variation.
It's easy to say that Blade Runner is an important movie. Hard up for preservation capacity if we're choosing obviously Blade Runner beats Ghostbusters 2. Easy. Ghostbusters 2 wasn't a terrible movie but it's no Blade Runner. OK, how about the "Director's Cut"? Sure OK, two copies of Blade Runner. The "Final Cut"? Ugh. Fine, OK, let's have three versions of Blade Runner rather than kick one out for a sub-par sequel to Ghostbusters. There are four more commercially released versions of the movie. That's too many. At some point we should cut our losses and say no, another Blade Runner is not worth it, we'll have Ghostbusters 2 instead thanks.
† That's deliberately not an accurate translation, but we all know what I'm talking about.
Original printings and original manuscripts are different types of originals, and contain different types of data for scholars. They are not fungible.
Do you presume that nobody is bothering to try to preserve natively digital culture? Because I assure you people do. Do you presume nobody will care in the future? Why would that be the case?
What a strange, smugly uninformed angle.
It entirely depends on the book. For most modern paperbacks, I'd agree with you - the book is often just a means of transmission of the text. Even with modern books though, there are plenty of examples where it's intended to be a physical object that affects you in some way, not just as a sequence of words that happens to be on a page. You'll see some books that chose weird sizes or paper finishes or even variations in font size through the book, because that's as much a part of it as the text itself.
In the early days of books, especially before the printing press, they were primarily considered works of art. You'd have ornate flourishes at the start of a chapter because it took so long to copy manually, adding something visually appealing wouldn't have made it take much longer to create in the grand scheme of things. There might be beautiful illustrations with vibrant colours competing for attention as much as the textual content.
Even with much newer books, you can tell the difference. One I remember from my childhood is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh with its illustrations by E. H. Sheppard. To most readers, the illustrations are as much a part of the book as the text, and yet there are cheap versions that contain the text only which are probably interesting if you've never seen the original but just feel incomplete and disappointing if you have.
With Victorian printing, you'd sometimes have outlines of illustrations printed in black and white and then someone would colour them in by hand with watercolour prior to sale. Every book would be slightly unique. I've only seen one such book when I was very young, something my mum had rescued from her grandfather's collection as a child.
Whilst new books are also great (there's nothing quite like opening a new hardbook, having a smell of it and settling down to read), old books are also wonderful, not just for the contents because also the look and feel of them that transports you back to another time. I've got a few (probably not valuable) old books that are over 100 years old, and in those days people would usually add a handwritten note on the first page saying who was buying it for who and what the occasion was, and often in beautiful old-fashioned handwriting that itself is art now. This is just a glimpse into the history of the book and the world as it was at the time this book was new, that just add richness to the book itself.
Reading a book isn't just about the contents, as there's so much more to sense when handling something physical, especially old books that aren't perfect in some way and so have their own story that's different to every other copy.
In 1986 "the book is more than just the text" is a sound justification for why a significant proportion of library stock can't "just" be digitised.
But we're long past that, we can digitise the images, paper texture, layout choices, almost everything if we choose. There are a handful of things we might justify keeping anyway, but on the whole the digitisation is just a marked improvement.
As other commentators have pointed out - the fact that we can do something technically, at the highest levels of competence - does not mean we usually do, or can do such a thing at scale. If you look through the enormous majority of publicly available scans, from Google Books to Project Gutenberg, you'll find low resolution scans with alignment issues, colour issues even missing pages. You're also accessing books at the whim of the legal and technical infrastructure you don't control.
Sure you could keep a secret digital archive to pass hand to hand for circumstances when (as has just happened to the internet archive) thousands or millions of books are suddenly banned. But you're relying on access to open computer architectures that don't phone home your reading of those books (like Microsoft's 'Recall'). You're reliant on power. You're reliant on compatibility into the future. With a printed book, you have a physical object, duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and distributed. A physical book can be read by daylight in a refugee camp, a war zone, a desert.
It may seem a silly example, but if the Roman or better yet the Aztec empire had written their manuscripts digitally - we likely wouldn't have a single record from that era. They would have been erased through chaos or deliberate eradication. Don't be so quick to dismiss the physical.
but then you need computers and software, and those things change with time. you don't need anything but sunlight and your eyes to read a physical copy of a book.
what are some other technologies that we still use without any modifications on the original invention, like the physical book?
Sometimes it's a form of research (a rare copy may have unique inscriptions or other details) but often it's a form of art collection.
If you live anywhere near an antiquarian book fair (NY or CA are the ones I know) I'd highly encourage you to check it out. The books on display are absolutely stunning in both their physical beauty and the way they connect us to the past.
https://www.nyantiquarianbookfair.com/
I traded a domain [0] for a first printing of a book [1]. I did it because it was a neat artifact.
[0]: https://wicker.com
[1]: https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/marcolini
You have that book? That's an incredible artifact, but I get nervous about any older paper material that is privately owned. How do you have it stored? I see people buy books and other ephemera and keep them in their homes and they just don't last :(
You near Seattle? We can meet
Midwest right now. Maybe next time the mothership calls me to Redmond. I love Seattle.
do you collect anything? if so, why do you collect it?
there is a market for collectible books. i have a signed first edition of book that retails for $1250. people pay that much for this particularly copy. that might seem crazy to you, and that's fine, but that doesn't stop me from trying to sell it to people who care about that.
physical copies of books are a perfect invention that hasn't changed since it was originally invented. you don't need electricity to read them. you just need sunlight. not to mention the physical beauty of some books.
most physical copies of books are near worthless, though.
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