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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I mean, I think we print enough books that there’s no great loss if a couple get cut in half.

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 feel like there is a lack of understanding how or what about e-ink. My partner only grasped the concept that it's not an emmisive display after the 5th time explaining. And some friends still don't seem to understand the difference between an e-reader and tablet. (they are extremely tech-illiterate)

If I extrapolate this, there have to be a lot of people who don't want an e-reader because 'they don't want to look at a screen'.

To answer your question, I think that it's about value.

A book can be read by multiple people over time, so it can have a bigger lifespan and usage than a single lifetime. By destroying it, you cut that potential. For example, with what OP did, you might loose a part of these books, which make them worthless.

Beyond that, you have made a destructive modification on an object. Usually, there is only two outcome possible after this. Either you made it better in some way (like people who mod they cars or, to stay on topic, people who draw on the paper edge of a book) or you decreased the value of the object (if you were to resell it, this book has now very little value, except if it gain some notoriety for some reason).

I don't think we should strive and encourage the destruction of value or voluntary spoilage. This mostly struck a nerve as most of what we do is fight entropy (and that requires energy).

We are surrounded by products and we may sometimes loose the context of how something is made and what it took, especially when we are living in a consumerist society. Also many "made thing" are close to worthless and sometimes absurd ("who would need that?"). This and trends like fast fashion accelerate this feeling of spoiling on a mass scale, making this voluntary acts of destruction even more irritating.

One last point, book burning and destruction is usually done to erase culture and people, so it's related to very bad events and it feels deeply wrongs.

But, of course, if OP is honest about doing that to be able to read something that he would not read without (99% sure it's for the même), and the books modified in questions are not prescious or rare then I agree that it is not a big deal. In the end this is done for the laughs, it will not trigger a big trend and cause the destruction of precious books. But I just wanted to explain the triggered side and try to answer your question hoping it was honest.

PS: I not a native English speaker and you are an author so please forgive me for my spelling mistakes, I hope you and other still get my point across. Thanks

My kids both prefer paper books to e-readers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FINALLY I'VE SEEN SOMEONE ELSE SAYING THIS!

The reverence some folks have for stacks of thin pieces of tree is crazy. Still remember running into this TAing in grad school, where people's feelings about novels were more about codex fetishism than the actual work.

I'm not here to kink shame, if that's your deal then whatever, but at the end of the day a mass produced, physical book is just an object. If you paid for it, you own it and can do whatever you want to it. Want to cut out all of the pages and frame them so you can read a story standing up looking at your wall? Go for it. Want to chop it in half like the image here? Sure, go nuts. Want to make a model house with paper mache using pages from House of Leaves? That sounds dope, I'm in. Model church (or better/more subversive) with pages of the King James bible? Fuck it, we ball.

I personally make an exception for small print runs and hard to find books, but if you can buy it from a Coles/Chapters/Barnes and Noble/whatever it's fair game imo.

E-ink readers are too hard to cut.

I do wonder why this person wouldn't just use a e-ink reader

The batteries would explode, duh /s

As a regular visitor to the library and a low-key home archivist, I care.

Doing something like this to a book, even if done masterfully, drastically reduces its lifespan and makes it possible to lose parts. And one book can be read way more than once.

It is simply irresponsible to treat something, anything, that can serve you for decades, in a way that makes it practically single-use.

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.

infinite jest is half footnotes, which are at the back of the book, which is part of the "joke" of the book, being based around extreme academia.

I can sense Booktokers rushing this way to tell you you broke one of the book rules

Are we there yet?

Well, only halfway there at first

Easy to spot, they're the only firing squad with silencers

It's destructive but it's also constructive. That conversation with the material gives future owners new perspectives. At least in my opinion as someone who collects old subcultural texts. Notes in the margins adds to the experience of an old book

Since I turned 30 I write in the margins of books I read. The better the book is the more notes. Its much more engaging.

I like the idea of this. It would make a re-read or even just flipping through the book years later a lot of fun.

Almost all of my books are thrifted, which gives me the luxury of no guilt. And I get to argue with previous marginalia, which is fun because they can’t respond.

This is kinda how books worked throughout most of medieval history. Paper was expensive and anyway, the margins often become teaching tools in and of themselves. It becomes a centuries long comment section, so ideas get passed down and develop through the centuries. Like one of the most important books of medieval philosophy that probably no one without a doctoral in theology gives a shit about is Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is just a collection of common comments people in about books that he thought were good for teaching. (I have been working on implementing a HTML cross reference version of it using Twine, and have been trying to parse [pun intended] a theological discussion about what it means to enjoy not use god. Larger project is to recreate an accessible “medieval curriculum” through Twine)

As much as I’d fantasize about all my books preserved as a library, they’ll probably be separated from each other someday. The least I can do is put my soul in them - tuck a pamphlet or bookmark, a movie ticket. I’ve never been unhappy seeing a comment in a book - I was reading a 60 year old middle school text recently, and discovered a kid had wrote “[clearly female name] is a MAGGOT F_GGOT!!!!!!” which was just so fucking hilarious.

When you get right down to it, that's true for everything. Everything self-destructs eventually. So, that seems like a strange reason to destroy it prematurely.

Of course, if it's your book, you can do whatever you want with it. It just seems needlessly wasteful.

had this occur with my first copy of ninjas and superspies and ended up punching holes in it and putting it in a 3 ring binder. the binding - and slimness of the book so it had a thin spine - wasn't meant to lay open.

Warren peace

Guessing you're dictating this to your less-cultured secretary?

Seeing how Paul McCartney is on Lemmy news today, I just learned that he also used to do cut-up at times.

Possibilities...

hip 90s youth pastor energy

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.

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.

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.

Infinite Jest is best read with all the pages torn out and arranged something like this, CMV:

Wait, there is a NEW testament?!

Part 1 and Part 2 of the first entry in the first four parts of an 18 part series.

You could just go to IRCHighway, though.

He could have cut the child in two and have them both read the whole book at once.

Rick’s gotta save room for more weed.

They do? That's gotta be upsetting in a similar way as becoming a veterinarian and having to put down animals a lot.

What do you mean?

Ah yes, paperback... Fake books. Unlike... Actual books.

???

Probably added some cardboard for a cover to protect the exposed pages.

I once tried that with my copy of the necronomicon, I ended up blacking out for a few months. When my consciousness came back, everyone was talking about a lockdown and surving a plague... Not sure if that's related. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯