@hannah I typically use Glasses to decrypt most paper texts.

@hannah I used to read HG Wells and the Bronte sisters in middle school... they needed a txt to pdb converter to get the files from Project Gutenberg viewable on my Palm IIIe but the process was minimal and well-understood. 😌

@hannah if it’s from really long ago you do start to need a conversion process but it’s much more forgiving than old data

@hannah I like that you don't have to turn off a book when your plane is getting ready to land. You can just keep reading, no problem.

@hannah beautiful

@hannah They'll get more valuable too

@hannah Handwritten stuff from before the 20th century is kind of difficult.

@hannah @YakyuNightOwl I prefer to pick up a book that has been reprinted, so I don’t accidentally tear the 100-yr old paper and binding, but yes it’s totally cool 😎

@hannah @KayJanes
Well, maybe a dictionary

@hannah Also you can loan it to a friend, and maybe even get it back after they've read it.

@hannah
Recipes from 175 years ago take some compiling

@hannah The US National Archives would violently agree with you. They have to deal with everything from punched cards with round holes (really!) to 7 track magnetic tapes to Zip drives and punched paper tapes (lots of formats.)

It is amazing how unstable a lot of modern media is - like DVDs. I tend to put my longest term stuff onto spinning disk drives with SATA interfaces. I haven't had problems with those (at least not since the old problem with head-to-platter "sticktion" was resolved.)

@hannah and they're usually out of copyright, so you don't need to pay some shell corp in the Bahamas for the right to read the work of an artist that's been dead since the 1960s

@hannah I have one printed in 1502 that doesn't even require a login and password!

@hannah Bonus features. Never crashes. Infinite battery life isn't deleted once you stop paying Jeff Bezos. Smells wonderful.

@hannah@posts.rat.pictures Publishers hate this one simple trick

@hannah Well unless you count language I guess, but that 'software' changes very slowly.

@hannah this post made a tech bro snap awake in a cold sweat

@hannah I like how if I enjoy it, I can hand it to a friend to read without being branded a pirate 🏴‍☠️.

@hannah @gl33p Though if one is blind they still need to OCR scan it.

@hannah If only you could do that with books written nowadays. :( Now, all the books are locked down with DRM and it's extremely difficult to own anything, get it unprotected, or read it in a reading environment that you want to use. @jaybird110127

@hannah@posts.rat.pictures at 500 years it starts to be a bit of a problem. 😄

@hannah High Tech is failing us - Big Time.

@hannah

George McDonald's various romances are amazingly challenging, with dialogues in the many contemporaneous dialects of Scots English/Gaelic, often multiple in a single conversation.

Which is not unlike real life today, at times.

@hannah

Unfortunately 100 years old books might be subject to the acid paper issue so you can still have a permanent data retrieval error. 1800s or older though and it is probably safe.

@hannah funny all that grad school training in theology, that years of squinting at old german script and fifteen years of academic history -- all that, and i still cant "just pick up an old book"

@hannah I just realized 100 years ago isn’t the Victorians but the Roaring Twenties. I feel old.

@hannah
Not true if it's a language I can't read. But that apples to new books too.

@hannah were monks the original media converters?

@hannah (unless it crumbles in your hands as you turn the pages ;-))

@hannah
Yupp, and not only you don't need to charge it, it also locks up some captured carbon. So it's "cool" indeed X-D

@hannah This book for children is 99 years old.

@hannah Amazing how at least half the replies are BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS WEIRD CORNER CASE.

Ah yes, my tribe. 😆

@hannah they likely turned yellow and got partly eaten tho

@hannah Just 100? I got a look at an 1000-year-old book once, and it still worked. They wouldn't let me pick it up though!

@hannah unless it's in Turkish!

@hannah This seems like a good time to re-watch "Medieval helpdesk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

@hannah Or copies from books from over 500 years ago, although then the most difficult thing is to understand the language.

@hannah You need to know the language if you don't know it though 🤷🏽‍♂️

@hannah Though 500 years gets a lot trickier!

@hannah Well, kind of. 100 year old German books are mostly written in Fraktur typeface that is quite hard to read if you're not used to it.

@hannah I felt this when I was reading Three Men in a Boat

@hannah i was at the getty villa and with a causual engineers science education picked up enough latin to read a military diploma, and was shocked realizing i could read it from so long ago.

@hannah
They're a time machine.

@hannah there's a kind of minimum system requirement... try giving said book to a non book person..

@hannah but surely it might need a firmware upgrade like re-glueing the spine or repairing the covers. It’s possible there is some dataloss due to pages coming loose. I won’t even talk about the software upgrades (editions) you might be missing out on.

@hannah yes but a person in the developing world can open a new ebook without spending $90 for a book published on expensive paper and printed in Belgium, $60 for shipping from Europe, and then try to find space for it in a small apartment. Ebooks have tremendous value and not offering them is unethical.

@hannah anybody got the Frankenstein Fan Patch?

@hannah I dated a historiographer who could easily read books and manuscripts going back to 800 years old, if they were in Latin, Spanish, or (less fluently) another Romance language

@hannah@posts.rat.pictures
Wellllllll
Hehe
Linguists are a special kind of human with that conversion software installed, right?

Cus early versions of english or german, or dead languages like latin
Tey are sooo deprecated

@hannah 100 years ago? You're thinking small. I've read letters written 600 years ago.
And if I could read cuneiform I'd certainly enjoy perusing some clay tablets from 2000 BC.😁​

@hannah
You might have to go, "wtf is with this jank font?" But yeah. I get ya.

@hannah wait till you hear about cuneiform!

@hannah so true. And so nice to sit in a cosy corner and forget about everything. Just read. 🥰

@hannah we must actively show and give support to libraries.

@hannah Just like that: https://archive.org/details/wonderfulwizardo00baumiala/mode/2up
😀