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How come the interior page I can see is blank?
Probably added some cardboard for a cover to protect the exposed pages.
Just get a freaking backpack.
Ngl this inspires me. I was just looking up pocket versions of books I could stuff in my tool bag. It never occured to me I could just butcher a book.
I have a compact paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that this would be helpful but the end pages will just fall off for most bindings so it’s not a good idea.
Feels like a quite awful thing to do 😅
That psychopath needs reporting to the police.
deleted by creator
Are we there yet?
We’ve been here for a while buddy.
Well, only halfway there at first
Unless it’s Warren Peace, no one should be doing this!?
Warren peace
Guessing you’re dictating this to your less-cultured secretary?
She’s streets ahead in other subjects though…
No it’s a humorous adaption on the classic, that takes place in the woods and the characters are anthromorphised rabbits.
They’re gonna be damaged by simply reading them anyways. If they didn’t want the books damaged, they should come in smaller parts.
There’s no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me
Infinite Jest has extensive footnotes, which are at the back of the book. Some of them are 12 pages long and contain multiple subplots and plot points and gives history and context to how and why the Infinite Jest of the book is so deadly.
Holy shit I totally forgot about that. I’ve been meaning to reread for years now but haven’t felt ready lol. I loved it but got to the end and was like, wait, what? I thought this was going to wrap back around to the beginning. Am I too dumb for this book?
There was so many parts of that book that pop into my head randomly. I can hardly brush my teeth without thinking of Pemulis(sp?) passing out, and directly proper use of, floss after dinner at the Incandenzas (sp?). Tennis always had me thinking about it. Punts in football too. Selfie filters (the masks everyone starting having in their house for video calls.
E: oh, and nevermind infinite scroll and the basis of the plot
I think a lot about the guy who is scared aliens are trying to steal your thoughts with magnets and so they give him an MRI
The whole missile warfare game the tennis kids play was wild.
And for some reason, Hal laying on the floor imagining the amount of food he eats in a year filling the room and just being nauseous about it (I think he was also dealing with quitting the Bob Hope), really got into my head.
Man, I came across DFW when I was sitting in a very boring seminar at University of Illinois with my first smartphone in hand, enjoying the new ability to find something else to learn about while stuck there. No idea how exactly I came across it, but I read how cruise ship article and loved it. Started reading about him and was like, oh, this guy group up right here. And his parents are still here. It really caught my attention (again, boring seminar) and I was excited to read his stuff. I must have read some interviews of him or something.
Hit me hard when I learned of his suicide. Such a chilling feeling when a good communicator, like one that is able to capture parts of your inner monologue so well, through writing, speaking, of music, takes their own life.
Doesn’t it fuck up the binding? Sure, a softback is still going to stay together in the immediate term, but the covers are almost always a single stronger piece, whereas the pages will now be free to work loose from the cut side.
So… I’d say it is objectively worse.
It doesn’t need to stay together for a lifetime, the person only cares about it staying together for a few days till they’re done reading the section, after which it gets disposed of. This makes it much easier for them to actually read it, which means it’s objectively way better.
Actively making things worse because you have a shitty consumerist disposable product fetish actively makes the world worse.
You…buy a book and then throw it away after you read it? Anyone does that?
In the movie My Blue Heaven, Steve Martin had a trunk full of the same (stolen) book and his excuse was “in case I want to read it more than once.”
I’ve heard there are PACs or whatever that buy thousands of copies of politicians books so they become best sellers. Does anyone know where the physical copies actually end up?
I don’t, but plenty of people do, and it’s entirely fine if that’s how they want to read
Well no it’s not entirely fine, it’s actually incredibly wasteful. Get a fucking library card if you don’t want to own, gift, or resell the books you read. That’s the Generic You of course.
I buy books to throw at anyone who can read. You literate fucks.
Correct.
That’s just wrong. If you’re worried about portability get an e-reader, don’t butcher up works of art.
Works of art? I mean, the words in the book, of course, but surely not the medium itself, these look like those budget $15 editions that are mass printed on toilet paper…
I mean, if you had like a hand bound copy or rare out of print book or something like that this sentiment makes sense, but if it’s just some abundant mass produced edition, I’m not so sure. Surely the artistry there is in the words, which aren’t damaged and exist in other copies anyway, rather than the cheap machine made physical medium.
It would absolutely ruin their durability, so I’d say it’s definitely objectively a bad idea.
To me it’s just disrespectful to damage a book, regardless of which physical form it has. Paperbacks falling apart when they’re worn out are OK, that’s basically showing how much they were loved. But taking scissors to them is still almost as bad as taking scissors to a first edition hardback.
I mean, I think we print enough books that there’s no great loss if a couple get cut in half.
No works of art were hurt for this. Mass printed paperback spines being damaged doesn’t hurt the words inside or the hundreds of thousands of other copies. Everyone should feel free to write on, highlight, and cut apart mass printed books, because the actual object itself was never the point.
Yeah, rare, old, and otherwise inaccessible books should be protected from random destruction, but there’s a huge difference between destroying a copy of infinite jest and a copy of something that’s at risk of not being accessible to someone by that copy being destroyed. And destroying either for art is wildly different from destroying them to keep someone from accessing it.
I collect books in a category that are stigmatized and rare, specifically related to queer and kink topics. These are topics that have been mass burned before. But even better than getting into fetishizing the object made of paper is to help get books at risk of inaccessibility to be archived and spread.
I think most e-readers will stop working if you cut them in half to be more portable. Books still have the upper hand on this
Such an intellectual.
Plus you can start a fire with them when you’re done, try to start a fire with an e-reader you gonna get one hell of a surprise
And as Conan in the Discworld said so eloquently, if the paper is soft it’s the best toilet paper.
Sit down by the fire grandad and have some shoup
Chank you
They also can start a fire, but only once. While every chapter of a book can light a fire.
Another victory for booksPretty sure all ereaders work with lithium ion batteries these days. They’re quite flammable.
Even better, try making fire with a wet book. My ereadwr catches on fire when it gets wet though! Suck it dead trees
I’m trying to burn so many books but it’s too fucking damp right now!
Fahrenheit 420-69 360 noscope
i mean yes this is insane. but also it would be much much worse if it was actual books instead of paper-bound ones. these are made to be mass-produced.
Ah yes, paperback… Fake books. Unlike… Actual books.
???
actual books as in codices, bound with string in actual rigid paperboard covers. yes.
Damn, that’s crazy. Didn’t know all these books I owned weren’t real.
Mind = Blown
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)
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.
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.
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?
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’s doesn’t mean all physical books are special objects.
this is so wrong.
you’re supposed to cut them in half so you can fit each side in the pockets of your cargo shorts.
That’s why I cut mine in half through the middle of the cover; top and bottom halves. Sure, makes it a little harder to read, but worth it when I can fit each half in my pockets perfectly.
‘The Idiot’ was originally intended to be a two-part film with a running time of 265 minutes. After a single, poorly received, screening of the full-length version, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio. This was against Kurosawa’s wishes. When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead.
According to Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, there are no existing prints of the original 265-minute version.
Fuck that. Damn I would have watched that. Was it based on Dostoevsky or something else entirely? Imagine a master putting that much effort into a work of art, and then have it cut and chipped away at until there’s nothing left…
Based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, yes, and apparently the film was close to it. I’ve watched the existing version — it’s tolerable, although the physical quality of the film makes it a somewhat challenging experience. The gist of the story is pretty clear. To my shame, I haven’t read the novel, so idk what is lost compared to it.
You should cut them into four pieces like me so you can rearrange them to get multiple different stories for the price of one book!
if you cut them long ways, you can hide them up your sleeve like a hotdog
