I don’t get the reverence for copies of mass produced objects. I love music too but i don’t care if someone uses a marker to write their name on a vinyl jacket. (As long as it’s not a rare copy)
The idea that Books Are Sacred Objects is an old middle-class belief, one cherished by those to whom the availability of books was still new and potentially precarious. Anyone with any connection with the book trade, meanwhile, knows that mass-produced books are one step above toilet paper, if that: they’re created and destroyed in vast quantities, and every work of cherishable literature is dwarfed by tones of ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, airport thrillers, executive self-help books, partisan political tracts whose physical form exists only to fraudulently goose the charts (the number of partisans who’d exhibit it unread as a totem of allegiance is orders of magnitude smaller than the print run), cash-ins on the latest fad, and merely mediocre writing that fits into a marketable genre. And with LLMs, this is probably worse, with guides to cooking/crafts/software consisting of machine-regurgitated pulp of Reddit posts ascribed to a Plausible White Lady Name complete with plausible bio and headshot. So, no, books as physical objects are not intrinsically sacred.
Exactly. A mass produced book is just an inexpensive mass produced object just like any other. If a particular copy of a book means something special to you then for sure you should take joy in holding onto it and treating it as a unique token that represents the wonderful ideas it imparted into your mind! But that doesn’t mean all physical books are special objects.
Absolutely. These books go to the Goodwill outlets where they are sold at 25 cents a book, and whatever doesn’t sell goes to a landfill or a recycling plant. Even a bunch of rarer books end up there, which is obviously not great, but it happens.
No need for reverence. This goes way beyond basic defacement.
Individual pages are bound separately or in small bunches, whereas the cover is a single piece of tougher material. Cutting it directly exposes the pages to far worse wear and tear, and pages will definitely fall out sooner rather than later.
The closer equivalent would be storing the vinyl loose and stacked on each other: far worse wear and tear on the actual product.
But the person obviously has no interest in keeping the book long term, it just needs to stick together for a couple of days, which it will do in this condition. The objections people have to this aren’t based on it looking poorly functional, they’re emotional.
No, keeping a product that is not trivial to produce in good condition is responsible behavior. Pretending it’s totally ok to treat all products as disposable is not only bad for the planet, but jouvenile and rather pathetic.
Again though, the knowledge itself is the important part, the individual copy out of millions of identical copies is not. Anything that makes it easier for someone to read and learn is infinitely more important than the individual copy that they read it from. You have to ask yourself, do you care more about the physical book than you do about someone actually reading it?
I don’t get the reverence for copies of mass produced objects. I love music too but i don’t care if someone uses a marker to write their name on a vinyl jacket. (As long as it’s not a rare copy)
The idea that Books Are Sacred Objects is an old middle-class belief, one cherished by those to whom the availability of books was still new and potentially precarious. Anyone with any connection with the book trade, meanwhile, knows that mass-produced books are one step above toilet paper, if that: they’re created and destroyed in vast quantities, and every work of cherishable literature is dwarfed by tones of ghostwritten celebrity memoirs, airport thrillers, executive self-help books, partisan political tracts whose physical form exists only to fraudulently goose the charts (the number of partisans who’d exhibit it unread as a totem of allegiance is orders of magnitude smaller than the print run), cash-ins on the latest fad, and merely mediocre writing that fits into a marketable genre. And with LLMs, this is probably worse, with guides to cooking/crafts/software consisting of machine-regurgitated pulp of Reddit posts ascribed to a Plausible White Lady Name complete with plausible bio and headshot. So, no, books as physical objects are not intrinsically sacred.
Exactly. A mass produced book is just an inexpensive mass produced object just like any other. If a particular copy of a book means something special to you then for sure you should take joy in holding onto it and treating it as a unique token that represents the wonderful ideas it imparted into your mind! But that doesn’t mean all physical books are special objects.
Absolutely. These books go to the Goodwill outlets where they are sold at 25 cents a book, and whatever doesn’t sell goes to a landfill or a recycling plant. Even a bunch of rarer books end up there, which is obviously not great, but it happens.
No need for reverence. This goes way beyond basic defacement.
Individual pages are bound separately or in small bunches, whereas the cover is a single piece of tougher material. Cutting it directly exposes the pages to far worse wear and tear, and pages will definitely fall out sooner rather than later.
The closer equivalent would be storing the vinyl loose and stacked on each other: far worse wear and tear on the actual product.
But the person obviously has no interest in keeping the book long term, it just needs to stick together for a couple of days, which it will do in this condition. The objections people have to this aren’t based on it looking poorly functional, they’re emotional.
No, keeping a product that is not trivial to produce in good condition is responsible behavior. Pretending it’s totally ok to treat all products as disposable is not only bad for the planet, but jouvenile and rather pathetic.
But you proved the exact opposite point. Books are insanely trivial to produce, therefore treating them however you want us entirely appropriate.
There is some form of unspoken decency around how we treat books and knowledge that transcends mere utilitarian arguments. I think.
Again though, the knowledge itself is the important part, the individual copy out of millions of identical copies is not. Anything that makes it easier for someone to read and learn is infinitely more important than the individual copy that they read it from. You have to ask yourself, do you care more about the physical book than you do about someone actually reading it?
I proved nothing except your disrespect for the achievement of all humanity that came before you.
You’re being preposterous and reproving my point again.
lol no. Your disrespect for the written word will not go down in history as the cheeky joke you wish.
… and if you’re not joking, reality will not be kind to your ilk.
You’ve shown yourself to be a fool who thinks they’re smart. I’m done wasting effort on you