This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine
I have a whole set of ebooks I picked up at a less than reputable site in '11. They're all in pristine condition, all perfectly readable. I have books on my Kindle that are older than that (though not by a lot).
My 5 year old copy of "Edge of Tomorrow" (The LN "All You Need Is Kill" movie tie-in release) is yellowed and the binding is coming loose due to re-reading. The ebook manga I got at the same time is also in pristine condition, and will remain so when the book is long gone.
But that's kind of the point of the whole "electronic books last longer" argument. You don't have to worry about either of those things with electronic books.
Chuck a ebook on any storage medium and wait 20 years, and odds are the file is unusable, due to the file being incompatible with new software, the storage medium being unusable, bitrot or a number of other factors. Maintenance is required for both physical and digital. Physical requires a relatively dry space and not bending the spine, which anyone's grandma's dog can do. Digital requires backups + regular recovery testing to be guaranteed.
There's plenty to worry about with maintenance of both formats, but for paper most of the investment is upfront. For digital it is an ongoing investment, with the benefit of a pristine copy being maintained.
Instead you have to worry about new things, like not regularly backing up your files to new media since hard drive failures and bit rot are real. You may also have DRM, logins, and paywalls to overcome which are total non-issues with paperbacks.
Ultimately, it's a trade off. Assuming that you have a DRM free digital copy of something and that you're remarkably careful about keeping back ups and multi-site/format copies a digital file could easily last 100 years, just like a well cared for paperback could last a hundred years. At that point, the difference between them is how easy it will be to read the contents. For the digital copy you will need a certain type hardware and software which may or may not exist or be easy to obtain in 100 years, but you need nothing at all for the paperback.
I like books, so I think the best bet is both the physical copy and multiple digital copies in various formats. It's not as if we have to chose one or the other, so it's okay that both options come with different strengths and weaknesses.
You've never seen a paperback made in the 1960s-1990s? The paper is brittle and the pages are literally falling apart. You can't read paper where pieces of it have fallen off and disintegrated.
I have run across many books where the binding has disintegrated and the paper has degraded, but never to the point where a book could not be read. Assuming the book was handled with care (so that the unbound pages are not lost), every book could be read in its entirety.
I'm not saying that your scenario can't happen. I am saying that I would be surprised if all but the most carefully maintained digital library would outlive the cheapest of print books. Keep in mind that, at a bare minimum, a digital library must be backed up and transferred to new media every few years. You may get away with storing digital for a decade untended, but two decades is a bit of a stretch. Also keep in mind that even the slightest amount of bit rot can make an entire book unreadable. While this isn't really true of books stored as plain text, most modern formats seem to used some sort of compressed container (e.g. ePubs are compressed).
Certainly not true of every paperback from then. I wandered downstairs and found several books on my shelves printed in the '70s, '80s, and '90s in totally fine condition. On the oldest books the paper has started to yellow a touch, but are otherwise fine.
But even a book from the 90s is 20-30 years old at this point. I'm not sure if that fits colloquially with a claim that they fall apart in "months to years". I've never had a paperback book I've purchased fall apart within 5 years (hell, I can't think of a time one fell apart within 10 years with the exception of severe water damage).
I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.
> I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.
I have. I had one fall apart on my first read through it. Pages just dropping out of it.
I also recall, as a teenager some years ago, buying a hardcover book from a store in the airport, and realizing that the last 20 pages were the previous 20 pages pasted in again.
Ultimately, the books I cared about re-reading, I've replaced with ebooks. Because aside from the convenience, I don't have to worry about the book's condition, deterioration, mold, et.al.
I have a few sci-fi novels from the 50's that are in fine shape and many more through the 60's to 90's that are even better. Where are these people buying such poor quality paperbacks?
The oldest hardback in my library is right around 300 years old and beyond a bit of foxing in quite good condition.
They used much higher-quality paper 300 years ago, so those books don't fall apart. Somewhere in the 20th century they used really crappy acidic paper for the mass-market paperbacks. If you're looking at sci-fi novels in hardcover form, this doesn't describe those; they generally used high-quality paper. I have a bunch of those from the 70s-80s that are fine too. Go look at the crappy romance novels from the 80s, and you'll see a very different story.
I have many paperbacks from the 1950s to the present day. Some of the really old ones are a little yellow around the edges, but brittle and falling apart? Never. I have no idea what you are talking about.
How often have you read them? Many of my most beloved cheap paperbacks from the 80s and 90s have been replaced at least once since they've literally fallen apart as I was reading them. Also my books from the 50s and 60s seem to be of higher quality than books from the 80s and 90s (or that could also just be survivor bias).
My shelf is full of scifi/fantasy paperbacks from 80s to late 90s. A lot of these have their binding already broken. This happens especially to small (cheap) format books of more than 500 pages.
No problems with small books of reasonable lengths. At some point the number of pages in the popular books exceeded the durability of the cheap binding tech in use.
I've got a dozen or so paperbacks from the 1930s on my shelf that I read from time to time, and hundreds from later decades. Most (> 90%) are only slightly yellowed and stiff. The remaining 10% vary from crispy around the edges to falling apart. Sure, paper eventually degrades, especially cheap non acid free paper, but we know for sure (because they're in libraries and still quite readable) that the content of quality paper books can last for centuries, and probably, with good care, millennia.
Keep in mind that bindings often last a lot less than that: One of the reasons genuinely old leatherbound books have those horizontal ridges on the spines is that they cover the (often also leather) laces used to re-bind the book and hold the pages together. This gave the classic works a certain look that was later replicated by publishers as just decorative ridges on the spine - but the origin of the feature was that those leather ridges were functional (they also acted as wear bumpers, but this was a secondary bonus) and a key part of the rebound book's structure!
I'll add one more big item to the anti-electronic book column: It is simply impossible to build electronics that last for decades with lead-free solder. Leaded PCBs will still eventually have tin whisker problems, but the new "green/RoHS" lead-free PCBs always stop working much sooner than leaded ones. Worse yet, no one cares because obsolescence design cycles are single-digit years now. Prior to lead-free electronic controls, appliances lasted many decades: Almost all of my major appliances are over 30 years old now, and some have never been repaired at all! They're a little less efficient, but much cheaper over the long haul, as I'm not replacing them every few years - that makes them arguably better for the environment, too, as there's no waste filling the dump, either...
Real books last centuries. E-books can't. We're a long way from Andromeda's "flexies"...
Unless the ebook we are comparing to (from the same time period) was a literal .txt file, it is unlikely you will be able to open it on a modern computer without processing/conversion of some kind.
Most paper contain acid. The acid breaks down the paper. Pages become very fragile after some time(100 to 200 years?). Paperback uses cheap paper that contain acid. Paperback books will not last forever.
More expensive acid free paper is often used by artists. Acid free paper is made plant fibers, but often not wood. It could be cotton. This will have a much longer life span. This paper is too expensive for most books
The problems with paperbacks, and even a fair number of hardcover books, is acidic paper (archival quality is acid-free cotton-rag), and for paperbacks, binding glue, which often fails with time.
If the pages don't literally crumble to dust, they fall from the binding, especially when actually read.
There are some formats which survive better, but many books will in fact deteriorate beyond readability within 50 years or so.
You might care to temper it with a balance of rigour in verifying your own beliefs and anecdotal experiences, your haste to dismiss that of others, and as in assessing your own methodology and its potential weaknesses.
I could perhaps have been more clear to indicate that use of acidic, pulp-based paper is more common in paperback publications, rather than universal. The point remains that as a cheaper publication mode, that cheaper publication processes and materials are more prevalent. I have encountered issues with pulp-based decay in both paperback and hardcopy books.
I'd linked an 1898 reference to issues with high-pulp, acidic paper degradation in an earlier comment (also submitted as an HN item). It begins:
The Library of Congress is indebted to the American ambassador at Berlin, the Hon Andrew D. White, for the following copy of the regulations adopted by the Prussian Government for the security of the national archives, and teh special danger involved in printing or writing records on paper made of wood pulp.
Wood pulp is extensively used in the manufacture of modern paper.
Paper made from compositions containing wood pulp decays more or less rapidly in proportion to the amount of wood pulp used.
Such paper is unfit for official use where permanency of records is essential or important.
The specific issue is somewhat less the wood pulp than acidic materials used in its preparation and their interaction with the pulp. Wikipedia has a good article on the matter:
Paper degradation is a slow process, but it is significantly accelerated in an acidic environment. In the mid-nineteenth century, the method of paper production became popular, in which resin-alum glue was added to the paper pulp.[3] The aluminum sulphate remaining in the paper form, in reaction with water, acids that catalyze the decomposition of cellulose (acidic hydrolysis). In this process, the cellulose chains are shortened, which reduces the tear resistance of the paper, and at the same time increases the cross-linking of their structure that causes the paper to stiffen and become brittle.[4] Parallel to the degradation under the influence of water, the cellulose chains react with oxygen, in result of oxidation the chains are also shortened.[5] Not only cellulose, but also the lignin contained in the paper is oxidized, which leads to the yellowing of the paper.
... The process of self-degradation of paper causes exceptional difficulties in safeguarding the collections of archives and libraries. For example, an analysis of the book collections of the Jagiellonian Library, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Książnica Cieszyńska, the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Cracow University of Technology proved that as much as 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s (to be precise in 1996 in Poland) have all the features of acidic paper.[7] It turned out that these institutions, established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission.[8]
As to books published in the 1970s and 1980s, I have, or have had, numerous instances of these in my own personal library, purchased new, which are in the process of or have entirely degraded beyond usability, the latter having been discarded.
Those Spanish examples you've encountered might be a useful foil on which to consider a further concept (and common methodological / sampling error): survivorship bias:
No, he's right. Your comment was bullshit. Even really poor quality books will last at least many decades longer than any ebook reader and format. Good books last centuries to millennia. (And the ones with really good content tend to get re-bound, as well, lasting nearly forever...)
No ebooks can last more than a decade or two, and even if the files are perfectly readable, you often need a LOT of supporting hardware and software to use them.
Take even a very simple example like a Kindle in 15-20 years time: The LiPoly battery will fail, it may not be able to phone home to validate your DRM anymore, for many reasons: Amazon my have updated the APIs to a form unusable by your old device, your account may no longer exist, the wireless network standards may no longer be compatible or in use (original Kindles already suffer from this!), the charger may be long-gone (or you can no longer find a type-A USB port to plug the charging cable into), the lead-free solder will have developed tin whiskers and shorted out PCB connections, the grid may have collapsed due to the instability of renewable energy or a Carrington event, and in my experience, the microUSB charging connector on the Kindle itself will most certainly have broken, anyway, as they always do (and I'm NOT hard on my devices...) Exactly NONE of those issues will ever prevent a book from providing you access to the information it had from the day of its printing.
Thanks, I'll take paper. *ALL* digital data/info storage is ephemeral. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.
(And BTW, history shows that the fall of civilizations (and their support structures, of course) does happen with alarming frequency. For the last few thousand years, books( (or close cousins like scrolls, etc.) have proven to be as resistant to that sort of thing as possible.)
I have at least a couple of thousand paperbacks that are at least fifty years old. Not one of them is unreadable. A few of the cheaper ones (mostly very cheap US editions) are falling apart but that doesn't have much effect on readability.
go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load.
I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme.
Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.
> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years
>> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store
Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.
(also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)
It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud".
Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.
This. My wife runs a podcast about trashy novels and some of the books she gets her hands on... or not, as it were in some cases, because the digital version is a must.
This entire thread is essentially "I have an anecdote about an old book falling apart, so therefore old books are bad". Reminds me of people at work who push back against changing business processes because "what about this one edge case that might happen?" where the edge case is minor, rare and can be easily identified and handled manually where the new process would also save literal hours of time per week.
The paper of mass-market paperbacks has a high acid content and over time the paper will crumble. Take a look at mmp from the 1950's if you don't believe this. That is why librarians wash books, to get the acid out. Rag paper with no or little acid content will last 300, 400 years or more. Books from the incunabula, properly tended, have not crumbled into dust.
