this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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That's just wrong. If you're worried about portability get an e-reader, don't butcher up works of art.
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
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
Pretty 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
They also can start a fire, but only once. While every chapter of a book can light a fire.
Another victory for books
Such an intellectual.
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.
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.
Also new, unsold books are frequently and in large amounts returned to the printer and recycled.
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 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...