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Old Books

Entry 1289, on 2011-04-22 at 21:09:31 (Rating 1, Activities)

Over the years I have bought a lot of computer books. I've bought books about programming and other practical technical subjects, textbooks I used when I was a computer science student, and lots of magazines and other material about general computer subjects. They have been sitting on a bookshelf in our spare room and I haven't used any of them for years.

Today we needed to clear some space and I went through the books and realised that they were almost all useless. The hardware, the programming languages, the application programs, and most of the techniques have changed so much that practically none of the books were relevant any more.

Not only that but I don't use traditional books any more. All of my technical documentation, my reference material, and my user manuals are stored on my computer as PDFs and other formats. And my fiction books and magazines are on my iPad in electronic formats like EPUB. I really do seem to have made significant progress towards achieving a paperless life.

Some simple calculations show just how efficient computer storage really is. A 1 terabyte drive (not huge by modern standards) can store 1 million average size books. Sure, I agree that is just text (based on 2K per page and 500 pages per book) and graphics would require significantly more storage, but the basic principle is clear: one drive can store a lot more than the total knowledge of the ancient world found at the Great Library of Alexandria - and I currently have 10 drives!

When I was looking through the old material I realised that things have progressed greatly in most ways but I also realised there was a lot of older stuff which was actually really good and is either no longer available or has become unfashionable in some way.

One example is Hypercard, Apple's program which was extremely popular for making "stacks" which performed many varied tasks. Hypercard was a great fast development environment with a scripting language which was both easy to use and powerful. And while I'm on the subject of programming languages, I still think Pascal is better than C! But I never liked some of the other older languages much so the three programming manuals for COBOL I had never got much use!

I'm not sure whether electronic books are better than paper books from an environmental or sustainability perspective. I'm not sure whether ebooks are more natural or pleasant to use than paper books. But I am certain that ebooks are a lot easier to search and a lot easier to keep up to date. And they are certainly a lot easier to store!

Comment 1 (2879) by Anonymous on 2011-04-25 at 09:53:11:

When you said that paper books might not be more environmentally sustainable what do you mean? Electronic books don't take any resources to make so they must be better than using trees to make paper don't you think.

Comment 2 (2880) by OJB on 2011-04-25 at 13:46:00:

The eBook itself has a very low environmental impact (storage and distribution have some impact but, as I said, one hard disk is the equivalent of a million books) but then there's the eBook reader, batteries to power it, etc, so when you look at the total picture it isn't clear which is the most environmentally friendly.

Comment 3 (2883) by Anonymous on 2011-04-29 at 19:35:32:

Another important advantage of electronic books is that they are often free. Documentation in paper book form can be expensive but PDF versions of the same book usually cost nothing.

Comment 4 (2884) by OJB on 2011-04-30 at 09:37:09:

Yes, that is also true although I also buy books in electronic formats: both eBooks (from Amazon, etc) and audio books (mainly from Audible).

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