I think this is a sad evolution which will ultimately result in fewer people reading the journals & transactions (which are often quite interesting). I specifically joined the ACM for the print versions of Communications and Transactions, and have a bookshelf dedicated to both. I haven't seen any other compelling reasons for an ACM membership, so this will mean farewell from me.
Reading, especially technical material, on screen is still an inferior experience to paper. Even with my Remarkable. Flipping pages is slow, browsing is slow, it's impossible to have multiple documents open side by side.
Maybe I'm just an old grouch. But I'm not happy about this.
It certainly adds insult to injury that the ACM Digital Library redesign from a couple years back has been a huge downgrade in usability across the board.
Yeah, it is quite annoying. A very typical flow is to find the papers that cite a given paper, and that is now hidden beyond a 3-click flow that involves an icon and a weird popover sidebar. Just show the citing papers as a list already, like it used to. It's clear that whoever designed the site doesn't actually use it. Don't get me started on all the completely unnecessary stuff that floats around in response to scrolling. Just stop with that crap already.
> it's impossible to have multiple documents open side by side.
if that was the main problem, the problem could solved with some investment be equipping oneself with multiple e-readers.
The speed of flipping pages is annoying but improving year after year and IMO it's borderline acceptable nowadays if all you need is to go on the next page.
But I totally agree on the utter unbrowsability of e-books; and for technical content that matters a lot
> it's borderline acceptable nowadays if all you need is to go on the next page.
Technical documents are exactly the sort of thing with which you need to repeatedly flip back and forth to random pages of the document, checking figures, tables, definitions etc. That experience is intrinsically difficult to manage on an e-reader.
Digital bookmarks, as well as search features are better in in electronic documents though. And the interesting emerging category of "chatting with documents" offers some interesting capabilities. The UX isn't there yet in the form-factor of an e-reader - but it already there for desktop based access of technical documents for may use cases.
all those features you listed are immensely useful and enrich the way we access technical documentation, to the point of often outweigh the losses. That said, I do dream of a future when one could have a searchable book you can talk to but also use your hands in a natural way to flip trough the pages, hold your place with fingers etc. Our current touch screen gestures only scratch at the surface of what our hands can do, by focusing only on what you can do with the tips of the fingers.
I think tablets are a decent secondary substitute for print-form only for publications like this with figures and images, and where the activity is more browsing rather than linear.
For general reading (eg fiction) I think print is optimal, followed by e-ink with normal tablets considerably down the list.
The ease of access to a library bumps up the utility of the ereader and tablet considerably.
> I think tablets are a decent secondary substitute for print-form [...] where the activity is more browsing rather than linear.
Interesting that my impression is more or less the opposite: I can read on a tablet all right, but leafing through is annoying and switching back and forth between three or four places in a big (thousand-page) reference book is so annoying as to be nearly impossible. The first, because rendering PDF pages (understandably) takes time, and the second, because I’ve seen no bookmarks interface as seamless and convenient as leaving a loose sheet of paper or even just your finger in the necessary place—they’re all much too fiddly.
I'd be interested to know both of your ages; I'm assuming, mananaysiempre, that you're probably under 30, and that mellosouls, like myself, is over 40. With some exceptions it seems like there is a generation gap between those of us who prefer the written word on paper, and those who prefer it on a screen of some sort, with the latter group tending to be those who've essentially grown up with digital gadgets of all sorts.
Perhaps the issues is with the software rather than the format. I use KOReader and it offers a number of tools for browsing through a book. Which is fantastic. Yet most of the software out there is incredibly linear (with the only exceptions being keyword search, table of contents, and maybe an index provided by the publisher).
For normal fiction, the Kindle is ideal for me. Much more comfortable to hold than even a small paperback, can increase the font size (getting old) and can illuminate the screen. Plus, I can carry a full library with me.
I haven't found anything better than paper for technical docs, but getting a PDF and printing the few pages I need is amazing.
In my experience, Remarkable is mediocre at best ... Battery life is not spectacular, page turning is slow, reading experience is subpar (worse than my 10+ year old Kobo). I mean the screen is great and I enjoy writing on it, but it's not a book/magazine replacement by a long shot.
The Remarkable 2 is very underpowered as an e-reader and the manufacturer is doing themselves a disservice by mentioning it as an option in their marketing. It's a digital notepad, no more.
You gotta check your eyes out then first. Since the introduction of retina displays there’s no reason healthy adjusted eyes will have to feel tired or strained looking at them..
I find when I have digital documents, things are easier to find when I'm looking for them. But physical documents are ones I'll just pick up and idly read. Which is the value I'd (personally) take in a shelf of, in this case, ACM journals in my house. Admittedly this isn't a key consideration for the ACM.
I am not a physist, but I have a hunch that the light hitting your eye from a direct light source is higher energy than that from a relected light source?
E-ink is mechanical [1] so also relies on reflected light rather than being a light source.
More energy would mean more stimulation?
The eye was designed to look mainly at reflected light?
There is potential damage from consistant over stimulation?
Maybe its not a great idea to constantly shine light directly into your eyes?
> but I have a hunch that the light hitting your eye from a direct light source is higher energy than that from a reflected light source?
Incorrect!
There's no concept of photons that have or have not been bounced, or are "direct" or "indirect". Also, you probably want to talk about intensity, not energy. Energy has to do with frequency (the color of light), intensity has to do with the amount of total light.
> More energy would mean more stimulation?
As it stands this says that blue light is more stimulating than red. Amusingly, this is true! But not in the sense that you meant it. It has to do with how our rods and cones work and how your circadian rhythm is calibrated. People use red light not to screw up their night vision so much.
Perhaps you mean more intensity? That's actually false!
Sunlight is incredibly strong. Far stronger than any artificial light you have normally.
> Maybe its not a great idea to constantly shine light directly into your eyes?
I'm sorry to say this would require the removal of your eyes.
But seriously. What matters is not "direct" or "indirect" light, which is a meaningless concept. What matters is relative contrast. E-ink feels better because the contrast in intensity between it and the background you're on is lower.
> Sunlight is incredibly strong. Far stronger than any artificial light you have normally.
A few years ago, I wanted a photo near a window with one half on sunlight and the other half in shadows. I tried to adjust the camera, the distance, direct or indirect sunlight, the illumination inside the room to illuminate the "shadow". It was impossible, the sun is too bright compared with usual light sources. I finally gave up and faked it with gimp :) .
A normal camera does not have as great a dynamic range as human vision. However, you can take multiple photographs at different exposure settings and combine the images in software afterwards to achieve the same result as a single photo with a larger dynamic range — that is to say, a high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I’m in my twenties and strongly prefer to read on paper over any screen. Partly because it’s easier on my eyes and partly because I like to markup the paper. I have yet to use something as seamless as a pen and paper for that.
Well, this is still in realm of using your own printer for the intended purpose.
How many times researchers go find article PDF on notnamed site, then print it for reading and annotating, just as one would do with a copy from a printed journal.
+1 for reading on iPad. Especially the 12.9”. Not sure it’ll replace my eInk reader for pulp fiction, but for technical materials, it’s usually more convenient than going to my shelf to grab a physical book.
With fewer and fewer printed works, I wonder how future archeologists will discover human knowledge from our era. Especially after a world-wide catastrophe. Human language written in the physical world seems more durable long-term than the electrons in a flash drive.
I feel like it's the exact opposite. We're drowning in data.
Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S. The Internet Archive has archived much of the public internet. There are other resources like arXiv, Zenodo, etc. Many of these organizations are very conscientious about data retention and longevity.
Is there even more data that could be saved in principle? Of course. But the amount of data we're talking about is already so much dramatically larger than what we have about, say, the antiquities, that it seems like an absurd comparison. The problem in the future (excluding extinction-level events) will be wading through that data, which even in the handful of resources I've mentioned above will be so far beyond any single human's ability to understand that it's just unfathomable.
We're drowning in data in the present. But I predict that five hundred years from now these will be known as 'the lost years of history' because there wasn't enough long term durable storage dedicated to preserving events that we do not think worth preserving today.
But you'll have a million AI generated recipes for Apple Pie from spam websites of the era to console you.
I'm generally pessimistic but I don't think this is true. We're still generating print information at an astounding rate. Plenty of organizations work on archiving information in various forms.
Historians will have plenty of information to sift through from this era in 500 years. Will they have a complete collection of ACM Journals? Perhaps not. Will they have ample information to get a clear picture of society from this era, and clear timelines of events, etc.? I would say yes, better than any other time so far.
I think people conflate "a lot of information won't survive in 500 years" with "we're going to lose everything."
I have literally thousands of pictures on my phone / in cloud storage. Odds are none of them will survive 500 years. That's OK, from a historical perspective -- 95% of them are cat pictures or memes anyway. 5% might document something interesting if it was all a historian had to puzzle together a picture of what life was like in the 2020s.
But it won't be, because we're literally producing trillions of digital artifacts. If even 1% (or probably even .1% or .01%) of those survive they'll have a richer visual representation of the 2020s than we have of other times in history.
(Whether we'll have any historians or humans in 500 years time, that's the real question.)
I'm not saying that we are not generating print information. I'm saying that we have a very low signal to noise ratio to the point that even if we do have a lot of information the chances that the 'good stuff' will be preserved are getting smaller by the day to the point that it will be essentially drowned out by junk unless we take special measures in the present.
This is exactly the problem; information isn't necessarily being lost, but silted over and sometimes intentionally buried. Part of it is due to its natural loss of relevance, part of it is due to loss of popularity and attention, and part of it is deliberate commercial motive.
Information is being lost constantly on the internet. Whether it is CNET deleting old articles as an SEO tactic[0], domain names expiring, formerly popular sites like Geocities being erased altogether, Google mismanaging its Usenet archive or once popular blogs getting deleted for TOS or account inactivity issues, the internet is certainly not forever. Archive.org isn't really a solution either because it is not uncommon for domain squatters to use a robots.txt setting to get them to remove the domain from the Wayback Machine. You can't even rely on large social media platforms because people delete their accounts, some people auto-delete their old social media posts and platforms decide to login-wall themselves like what happened with Twitter.
Link rot is a major problem that people don't recognize, especially for information that was only ever online. Most of the obscure web sites I used to read and hang out on are gone and many of the things I remember are now completely unverifiable because I didn't save a copy of every web site that ever influenced me.
My own unfinished game project from my teenage years vanished from the internet without a trace after I lost interest and I lost all of the code along with all of my other data from my teen years in a hard drive crash around the time I finished high school. My mods I made for games and never distributed are sitting on old laptops in my closet I haven't even turned on in years that may or may not even work anymore. I imagine everybody else who's been heavily online in the past has similar stories of just how ephemeral digital information is.
> Archive.org isn't really a solution either because it is not uncommon for domain squatters to use a robots.txt setting to get them to remove the domain from the Wayback Machine.
Do they delete it? My understanding is that they simply unpublish it— Lost from the Internet, then, but not necessarily forever.
> and I lost all of the code along with all of my other data from my teen years in a hard drive crash around the time I finished high school.
Technically that data wasn't lost for good either with the hard drive crash. Provided there's an academic, personal, economic, cultural, etc. incentive to read it, I'm sure any old inflation-adjusted $50 magnetic microscope from the year 2080 would have been able to get it all back in a matter of moments.
Overall, I agree with your point. LOCKSS (the principle, not the project) and KISS, and checksum and ECC, etc. HD-Rosetta/NanoRosetta's cool but doesn't seem super scalable or readable, MDisc was exciting but was also a market flop, and Memory of Mankind's ceramic tablets and the Arch Mission Foundation's glass hologram thingies have even bigger practicality problems— For now, so long as digital storage availability increases exponentially, you can probably just spin up Borg or something and keep accumulating backups of old files indefinitely.
But overall, anything that you don't actively invest the overhead to save can be assumed to be lost.
> information isn't necessarily being lost, but silted over and sometimes intentionally buried.
And that kind of touches disinformation campaigns. There is a lot of noise being deliberately and maliciously added so that it out represents any information someone wants to suppress. An AI model trained on this corpus will have all the wrong ideas.
>> With fewer and fewer printed works, I wonder how future archeologists will discover human knowledge from our era. Especially after a world-wide catastrophe. Human language written in the physical world seems more durable long-term than the electrons in a flash drive.
> Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S. The Internet Archive has archived much of the public internet.
Those are both very centralized.
The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that.
> Is there even more data that could be saved in principle? Of course. But the amount of data we're talking about is already so much dramatically larger than what we have about, say, the antiquities, that it seems like an absurd comparison.
That sheer amount of data may work against preservation in another way: too much noise distracting from identifying and preserving the valuable stuff.
> The problem in the future (excluding extinction-level events) will be wading through that data, which even in the handful of resources I've mentioned above will be so far beyond any single human's ability to understand that it's just unfathomable.
Not necessarily: all that data is very fragile. Besides format conversion and migration issues (about that flash-based website...), you have site/platform longevity, and the time-bomb of cloud hosting costs (someone stops paying a bill? Poof, it's gone). Then you have the spectre of a dark age: a few decades of a teetering industrial base after a major world war that destroys a couple of high-tech manufacturing centers, and that data is pretty much all gone.
> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that.
MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too?
Hard disks and normal optical disks probably could too, as long as you have a sufficiently large redundant array of them with error-detection on your bookshelf— If it can't last that long, just keep doubling the number of starting drives until it can.
If you want to get fancy, you can try to pay for something around HD-Rosetta, or Microsoft/Hitachi/Soton's printed glass tech.
And then of course if you wanna get simple, you could always stick your digital data into a mountable book/scroll of printed QR codes (or equivalent).
Of course, none of these options are actually deployed at any significant scale.
But I'm not sure you can realistically expect any arbitrary book to last for centuries either. IIRC Modern print media uses acidic paper as a cost-cutting measure, causing it to become brittle and crumble over time…
"[…] causes huge losses in library and archives collection […] 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s […] have all the features of acidic paper. […] established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission […] it is not possible to save all the documents from the 19th and 20th centuries […] In recent years, most books have been printed on acid-free paper […]".
>> The benefit of print media is its forced-decentralization and stand-alone nature. It can survive for 100+ years on a shelf, and I don't think any digital data format could match that.
> MDisc definitely can, if its claims are to be believed. Maybe you can find some specialized tape too?
1) I don't think they actually make real M-Discs anymore (the DVDs). There are some M-Disc branded BD-Rs, but I don't think those use any different technology than standard BD-Rs.
2) They're not stand-alone, and by that I mean they need a player or they're unreadable. IMHO, it's unlikely there will be many working DVD/Blu-ray players in 100 years, and very unlikely there will be any players for "some specialized tape."
I've been working a bit with VHS recently, and it's eye opening to see a once ubiquitous format start to drift into unreadability (it's not there yet, but a lot of the specialized equipment needed to do a good job is becoming expensive, hard-to-find, and breaking down).
> Consider: the Library of Congress has (literally) a copy of every work that has ever been in print in the U.S.
This is not true. The Library of Congress has a copy of works that have been registered for copyright with them. I am sure millions of works are created in the US every year that never get registered with the Library of Congress.
While a registration with the LOC isn't a bad idea, in the USA at least authors of written works automatically have copyright of their work, regardless of whether they have registered it for copyright with the LOC.
A single EMP event, like the Carrington Event, or just a single launch of something like Starfish Prime, could wipe all of that out in the blink of an eye.
Something like this occurring seems inevitable given a long enough timeline, and 500 years doesn't seem that far away.
On the other hand electronic versions can be copied over and over. If you think about it, we have preserved many ancient text that have been copied again and again, like biblical texts, greek philosophers, etc. Even though the originals are long gone. And those were copied by hand.
I think that copying over on new media will be much safer, particularly as the cost of storage is ever cheaper, and a cheap consumer drive today can store many times all the books that have been written in the world to date in text format.
Yeah. It's probably a data management and cultural problem, not so much a technological one.
It would be comparatively easy to maintain historical continuity of old data over time, as long as storage costs keep decreasing. Could also have a system like Git or Fossil, that automatically retains history, or just move stuff to an `archive.subdomain` when you're done hosting it. The Internet Archive's budget was only $36 million in 2019; it seems like it'd also add barely a rounding error for any government or large corporation to sponsor it as a safe place to park data long-term.
The problem is that people don't always copy old data to new media, or make redundant copies of current data, and do the other things you need to do to keep digital data safe. Instead we leave it sitting on old hard drives that are slowly rotting away, or simply remove/unpublish/delete it when it's no longer getting enough views. And this is exacerbated by the fact that the systems we use don't provide easy and scalable ways to preserve data by default, so it incurs extra effort and cost to do so.
Society-level information retention and integrity doesn't directly help push out new monetizable products, so there's little economic incentive for anybody to care about it.
The culturally important stuff will probably survive, because people will copy that, just as has always been the case. But as was also the case through history, much more will also be lost, which kinda sucks, especially given the sheer amount of information produced and at risk these days, and the thought that we probably could save all or most of it given modern technology.
> The problem is that people don't always copy old data to new media, or make redundant copies of current data, and do the other things you need to do to keep digital data safe
but how many selfies from medieval era do you want to preserve? Instagram is receiving 10s of millions new photos a day.
I'm more worried about preserving information for today rather than tomorrow. E-books you own on subscription services are altered without your consent and can easily recalled if deemed inappropriate.
Large size dvd drives also work today. But again, still need power and a computer/interface etc. Mesh network + reader device partially solves some of those issues, but it doesn't remove the need for fancy setups just to be able to read something.
Even if we lose the ability to build readers, the understanding that these digital mediums contain valuable information will never be lost. It isn’t rocket science to build a room sized dvd reader if needed
> It isn’t rocket science to build a room sized dvd reader
It is. We have built rockets for 700+ years, a V2 reached space in 1944 and we went to the moon over half a century ago, over a decade before even the compact disc (1982).
If society collapses completely, I think it will be decades, possibly centuries before we even consider trying to read these. At that time, many DVDs might not be readable by DVD players anymore.
In such a catastrophe it is unlikely that preserving printed works would be a priority and would bring into question the very existence of 'future archeologists'. Archeology is a consequence of an age of abundance that would be gone in such a scenario.
An A4 e-reader is one of the best things I purchased despite being insanely expensive for what it was and having slightly dubious firmware.
I used to print stuff out to read as I find backlit screens and notifications on my tablet annoying when you are trying to grok a paper or read a textbook.
Mine is a Boox Max 3, though Sony had an offering aimed at lawyers etc and I think some people like ones by remarkable too, though I have never tried them as my one hasn't broken yet and they are rather expensive.
What I don’t get from e-readers is a good sense of location. With a book or magazine I get a feeling of moving through a 3D object. As I move through and the right side gets thinner and the left thicker it gives each place a different feel.
Later if I want to find something in the book my memory of it includes that feel, which helps get to the right general area easily. I’ll also often remember if it was on a left or right page, and if it was near any particular graphics.
True - I miss looking at bookshelves of myself and friends / colleagues / libraries to discover new stuff spontaneously too.
Still, I can take what would have been a big stack of paper with me to the coffee shop / park / forest and like the ability to search for text strings.
Maybe I should see if there is a 'give me a random page' button in my software or if a spotify / netflix style recommendation engine would work well for books and papers.
Have never seen a remarkable in the flesh, though that would annoy me.
If you could build a physical book that had e-reader pages (and took no power to read), that would solve some of the issue(s) both have.
Its nice that you have a stack of books, but I also don't really want a stack of books even in tiny form factor. I want, maybe one or two books at a time, and I don't want to worry about them getting stolen/dropped/spilled on/not being charged/need an account to login to. I also don't want to search on a tiny bad UI for which book it is I actually want to read.
So for me e-readers remain a non-starter. Give me a real book any day. IFF I want to search it I have a tablet if I'm doing work or taking a note on it. And other than leaving it behind, I'm not afraid of someone swiping it when I order another coffee.
Sometimes I’ve thought of creating physical cards or a binder or something like that which would act as a physical representation of my digital ebook library so that I and others could quickly peruse it.
And then try to read an Archive.org PDF. Every page is compressed with JPEG2000, and the tiny application processor in an ereader can take 10 seconds or more per page to render. Files archived over 10 years ago use DjVu which is near-instant, but they don't generate those any more.
Sadly you can't even make the hyper-efficient IA-style DjVus yourself because the MRC (mixed raster content) compressor they use is proprietary to LizardTech and there's no open source equivalent. So even if you wanted to re-render the file to put into an ereader with the same readability, it'll be huge (like 500MB vs 10MB).
The best thing you can do is just delete the JPX layer because it's probably just the background of the page. It'll destroy non-bitonal images, but the book will render literally about 1000 times faster.
Keeping that compressor locked away probably killed the format because PDF can package up a straight image compression just as well, but the JPX decompression is a dog.
I also have a Boox, but do you have good suggestions on how to get articles or books on the device and sync? I end up not really using them because there are so many options: e-book apps from different stores (e.g. Amazon Kindle) or that read from local storage (e.g. PocketBook), syncing of PDFs (e.g. Dropbox) which are difficult to read, syncing epubs but then you have to find them back...
What is your process for getting stuff on the device, and for keeping it organized (or at least finding back what you're currently reading)?
My process has been creating a separate Google Account for the device and putting everything on the Google drive account associated with that account. I can then upload books to the cloud. I could probably also set up an upload email address with something like ifttt if that way inclined.
I then download things from Google Drive and open them in the Boox Neo Reader app (the reader that ships with the device) which seems to organize things OK and track which page you were on (though I only tend to be using 2 or 3 textbooks actively at a time)
Maybe there is a better workflow, but that seemed to work at the time when I bought the device and have served my needs. I have never met another Boox owner in my life to compare workflows with and it isn't something I have thought about looking for. Perhaps someone could write an app or SaaS to simplify it...
A magazine moving to the cloud dissolves in thin air. Reading the articles with a low entry barrier is something for the beach, the cafe and the train. That will not happen eletronically. Also "casual reading", where I read a 2nd or 3rd article, besides the one that drew my attention, won't happen anymore.
I know there’ll be folks who will still want things in print. I wonder why there isn’t a print-on-demand service for those folks.
It also sucks for folks who want the content, but don’t want to have to pay a subscription in perpetuity.
Maybe getting rid of the print option also obviates the need to do page layout, but if the publications are still made available in PDF or ePub formats, there will still be a need.
I've done this for some PDF books I've bought online using local (online) print shops. It's *insanely* expensive. IIRC the last ~400 page tome I had printed set me back 50eur in printing/binding/shipping costs.
A copy shop where they grab whatever bleached-to-death paper they have at hand, print it using consumer-grade powder toner with questionable quality and longevity, and if you’re lucky you will only pay slightly more than you would’ve for the industrially produced book? (And not significantly more.)
You have it the other way round: copy shops for books exist – they are called print-on-demand book services. Amazon is doing a whole lot for example.
These are production lines with huge digital presses, running almost completely automated, spitting out individual books each tied to a specific order (starting from one copy).
The average copy shop and its glorified office printers will never match it in quality, and especially not in quality per dollar.
"Not sure if I can just take a pdf(epub..etc) file to a copy shop and just ask them to print the book for me. Wouldn't they be concerned about copyrights?"
and their comment got voted down and killed. It's a good question, though. Can you take a random book to a copy shop and have it printed? I've never tried it and I don't know, but I'm curious.
Before scanners were common and affordable, I had one heck of a time duplicating a professional photo of my parents. The photographer had died, and none of the local copy shops would dupe it for me without a release (which I eventually just forged, because it was getting ridiculous). It seems at least plausible that the same shops might say "nah, that's clearly not your own work, and we won't print it".
Not sure if I can just take a pdf(epub..etc) file to a copy shop and just ask them to print the book for me. Wouldn't they be concerned about copyrights?
Which can be cheaper than it used to be, depending on what membership options you need. It used to come with the digital library which is an additional $99.
Oh nice, thanks [0] didn't know about it, just received communication they're abandoning it completely, I'm learning about "skills bundle" from you. This is really good.
It's a shame, my SO (completely not in IT related work) does enjoy reading my ACM magazines, and despite being in very different industries, we do see and share quite similar experiences.
Perhaps it's time I obtain one of those A4 e-ink readers!
Communications of the ACM will still be printed. The journals and transactions are a compendium of research papers that are too numerous for anyone to read in their entirety. Moreover, you can still print the ones that you’re interested in. This change is strictly better.
I'm and old grouch, but my old grouch eyes can't do the magazine(s), so I am glad they're leaving. I have to read them with one eye closed and a magnifying glass and so I stopped. And don't get me started on PDFs and horizontal scrolling!
It's so embarrassing that the C.S. cobbler has no accessible shoes. I lean on ArXiv and HTML output but I am losing out on some research and conversations which saddens me.
It's kind of a sad trend for academic publications. I still remember those interesting things of those journals I read from journals shared on coffee tables in our building
ACM doesn't charge you for publishing papers in their journals, conferences, and to end online in their digital library.
Though papers accepted through a conference, mostly require one of the authors registering for such conference; which seems fair to me as the effort to organize them is non-trivial.
This thing we're doing where we centrally host everything as opposed to creating a bunch of physical copies, it's going to come back to bite us and relying on the internet archive as the global backup isn't a great solution
It's for this reason I am creating my own private engineering and scientific library that I hope to open to the public someday. If only I had a place to host it that wasn't in the middle of hundreds of acres of farmland surrounded by gopher tortoises where no one ever goes.
Check out californias physical archive catalog: https://oac.cdlib.org/ - you may find a benefactor there. The arid dryness of California, Nevada and Arizona are great for long term storage.
Warehousing things out in the middle of nowhere like death valley or the mojave sounds just tops. It's the stuff that's plentiful now that we don't think about that will eventually become scarce.
Think the pile of junk mail you get in your mailbox that you toss in the garbage. Things like cereal boxes from the 1970s go for, well this one recently went for $1,225: https://www.ebay.com/itm/364459062533 ... 12 pack of tab for $225: https://www.ebay.com/itm/374743094689 ... it's the stuff we all think is trash that becomes scarce. Look at 90s CRTs...they're worth thousands
It's not about what we value today inasmuch as what we will value tomorrow.
We're doing a good job at digitizing the past. The next thing we have to do is analog the future. Books can be forgotten for 750 years and still work. I'm not so sure about hard drives.
Libraries are archiving physical stuff. Digital stuff is pretty hit-or-miss.
Worse, digital stuff is owned by a monopoly that's actively making it harder to find or get anything online, when it is made available to libraries at all.
Add on top the problem with DRM - if there are no physical libraries (bad idea) suddenly, how many libraries should there be? Who gets to make that decision? DRM is predicated on not letting everyone get a copy, but this flies directly in the face of the point of libraries, where everyone may share a copy. You either can have infinite libraries in which case DRM is redundant and should be removed, or you can only have very few, in which case DRM is literally nothing other than a tool of oppression, and should be removed (by executing by firing squad the cranks hoisting their vision of a only-rich-people-get-stuff world).
There are ways in this post-physical copy world of making sure creators get paid still, but lets just say, the incentives are just not there.
Incorrect: libraries are indeed archiving scholarly journals like the ACM ones, even when they are online-only. For instance, CLOCKSS: https://clockss.org/
Essentially, CLOCKSS member libraries operate scrapers to download and archive copies of all covered journals. If a journal publisher disappears or deletes its back issues, the CLOCKSS members have agreements allowing them to republish the contents.
So there are a bunch of academic libraries holding copies of the content of academic journals for long-term preservatino.
Hopefully they are at least archiving it. I know the library of congress takes their role in doing this seriously. A lot of the DRM protected stuff is not made generally available, but it is archived for future use.
Now the print publication has ceased I hope they remove the archaic submission format requirements for the journals which were justified mainly due to the print edition
Maybe they will also stop sending snail mail and use electronic email as well. Sending a letter across the world to remind me to renew my subscription seems quiet pointless in 2023.
> ACM wants to be as environmentally friendly as possible
Distribution is declining, so total environmental cost per issue is declining naturally. Even then, it's a sunk cost. No matter how many readers use the printed journal or how often they read it, the cost is the same. But, every time a reader uses a computer, e-reader, whatever there's now an additional cost. If you want to cease printing for financial reasons, just say that and don't use the fig leaf of environmental friendliness.
Yep. A printed journal issue can sit on a shelf for years and years consuming zero energy and requiring zero raw materials. Yet the entire time it is accessible and usable.
To keep a PDF of that issue online and accessible(assuming you have an account, remember your password, charged your tablet) requires constant energy usage to power the servers in the datacenter. It also require periodic hardware replacement in the data center.
I suspect that over the lifetime of the paper journal it's PDF copy will require the consumption of far more energy and materials than the paper one did.
Electronic documents are great. I've got nothing against them. But let's not fool ourselves(or let ourselves be fooled) by all the greenwash pumped out by people trying to please investors.
New publications aren't a sunk cost, they involve fresh lumber and pulp (even using recycled paper rarely involves 100% recycled material), new printing, new shipping. A present or future cost, which cannot be a sunk cost since sunk costs are things spent in the past.
It's a downloadable PDF, they send out the link via email every month to subscribers (I can probably unsubscribe from that, but it's a helpful reminder).
Reading, especially technical material, on screen is still an inferior experience to paper. Even with my Remarkable. Flipping pages is slow, browsing is slow, it's impossible to have multiple documents open side by side.
Maybe I'm just an old grouch. But I'm not happy about this.