Books May Not Be With Us For Very Long

No, nothing to do with technology but that the paper books, newspapers, letters etc used is starting to crumble away, and there's nothing we can do about it.

The Little-Known ‘Slow Fire’ That’s Destroying All Our Books by Chloe Vassot on the Relentless, Inevitable Process of Decay is an eye opening read, unfortunately.

It’s called a “slow fire,” this continuous acidification and subsequent embrittlement of paper that was created with the seeds of its own ruin in its very fibers.

Seems it's all about the mass produced paper from the 1850's on that has a problem - highly acidic, weak paper.

From the mid-19th century until now, we’ve never had more paper, more print materials floating around our world. And there’s about to be a physical hole in the historical record that coincides precisely with the largest creation of printed materials in human history.

Of course we may not be able to save the medium (the books, the newspapers, the letters) but we can, and should, save the message - copy it. Copy it by hand, copy it digitally. Yes, it's a LOT and will take ages, so let's crack into it.

The books and documents that history has deemed valuable, the ones made hundreds of years ago and kept in temperature-controlled vaults, will survive. Partly because of their importance, and partly because so many of them were made in the time before wood-pulp; many 500-year-old books are stronger and in better condition than texts created just a few decades ago.

See also: Back In Front Of An Audience With Smelly Books