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I love destroying the books I read. I buy ancient paperbacks used and choose not to care about their well-being, storing them in my pocket until the wheels fall off. When I read Dracula my book had no front or back cover and I kept the last 15 or so pages tucked in loose in the middle of the book because they would fall off every time I cracked it open.
I shred the binding side with a saw, so I can scan the book with my Fujitsu scanner. Easy way to digitalize a entire book.
You could just go to IRCHighway, though.
This is the book version of ed gein
They do this for you in Korea. A lot of long novels are released chopped up into ~200 page chunks.
Just get a freaking backpack.
I've done this for coloring books before, but only to make the sheets more accessible. I have never once complained about the transportation issues of a book. Git gud scrub
Oh shit, I left the half with the end notes at home!
I shred my books to save time reading
Insanity. Also doesn't work with IJ unless you ignore the end notes.
I don't even like it when they destroy books to scan them by cutting off their spines. I prefer when they use scanning methods that preserve the books as well as possible. This feels just straight up evil.
Just read books on your phone, or a tablet. You can carry an entire library with you.
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
I stopped getting upset about this sort of thing when I learned libraries destroy books as part of their normal operations.
They do? That's gotta be upsetting in a similar way as becoming a veterinarian and having to put down animals a lot.
I had the same reaction, but having had time to sit with it for a few years I've taken a more pragmatic view. It's not like they're memory holing the books or trying to wipe them out.
They just have too many books and not enough space.
I cut mine cross-wise to save space. There is a lot of authors who make no sense.
"yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off."
Skip jail. Straight to a firing squad of librarians.
Easy to spot, they're the only firing squad with silencers
Author here, I don't give a fuck, as long as the book was bought/is read. Stop fetishizing books or start fucking them.
I do wonder why this person wouldn't just use a e-ink reader, though.
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
I am not a native english speaker too, it's okay. I understand how it can be triggering for people who make a living out of it (book stores, librarians), but when that same interest becomes a gatekeeping fetish or a reason to take a shit on other medias (which rely on writers too! And a fucking lot of other art forms!) or other ways to come to reading, then I loose my shit. Especially when the focus is the medium and not the content. So many books are just printed shit. So many books are just outrageous propaganda, or a manifesto of their author's utter mediocrity. It's outrageous to put books on a pedestal just for the sake of it.
And english speakers are lucky, because they have a somewhat sane approach to reading. In France, it's a clusterfuck. Books are only a fetish that is seized and gatekept by the collaborationist bourgoisie, and now the biggest publishers have been bought by a fascist billionaire, who's using that very same bourgeois book fetishism to push his nazi agenda to the mass, by giving much more visibility to little nazi fucks. And because books are respected just for the sake of it, then the nazi propaganda is accepted as is! What a fucking scandal!
Pas de soucis, je pense que j'avais en grande partie compris ton point de vue, c'est pour ça que j'ai fait mon possible pour être mesuré dans mes propos. Je suis d'accord qu'il n'y a rien de sacrés dans un livre à proprement parlé et je pense que je partage aussi ton point de vue et pétage de plomb 😁
Ça va paraître très ironique ou malhonnête vu la position que j'ai défendu mais je ne lis presque pas de livre aujourd'hui (papier ou autre). Du coup, je ne suis pas vraiment au courant des dérives dont tu parles, mais merci de les mettre en lumière. Tu aurais des liens pour que j'en apprenne plus ? Je sais qu'il y a beaucoup de soucis avec l'audiovisuel ou le journalisme en France sur ces sujets là, mais je pensais naïvement que la littérature était justement exonéré de ce genre de problème.
J'ai une dernière question, peut tu me parler de tes livres ou au minimum me donner un lien pour en découvrir plus ? Un peu de promotion ne fait jamais de mal ☺️ (et tu peux répondre en anglais pour toucher un public plus large).
Merci de ta réponse, je te souhaite du succès dans tes projets et une bonne journée !
Mon travail actuel est destiné à un public gay ou féminin, donc même s'il a été nominé au prix du roman gay 2025 (Capax Infinity, Belgique), je ne vais en faire ouvertement la promotion en raison de sa nature explicite (et je ne vais pas te demander de me prouver que tu es majeur•e en partageant des données sensibles sur internet).
Actuellement, Bolloré contrôle Hachette édition, le plus gros distributeur de livres FR (y compris de manuels scolaires!!!) et les éditions Delcourt (bandes dessinées). Bolloré contrôle aussi les points Relay, lui permettant de faire la promo et distribuer ses petits fachos dans toutes les gares du pays. C'est comme ça qu'ils ont réussi à nous faire bouffer la merde de Bardella comme étant un best-seller, par exemple, avec la complicité des plateaux télé (évidemment). Bref, ils nous font de l'astroturfing à échelle industrielle.
En effet, l'auto-édition et l'indépendance sont maintenant les seuls moyens d'exister sans tomber sous la coupe d'éditeurs collabos ou impotents.
That sounds maddening as hell. That seems like self publishing would be the primary viable option. I'm so tired of Nazis ruining everything.
It's crazy that this ideology is still so alluring when you have the weight of (relatively recent) history to show where it leads. We don't really have the excuse of elevated levels of lead in the air to justify this hatred and violence...
Great response to them. But I want to tell you as a native speaker of English. You don't get to preface with "I'm not a native speaker" anymore. It appears your license to say such things expired a long time ago. 😁 I wouldn't have known any different had you said nothing. Any spelling mistakes you have above can be considered normal mistakes for a native speaker. 🙂
Thanks a lot for your kind words! I felt a little bit of pressure as I assumed that as an author, he might know a lot more than I do and see broken sentences that I can't 😅
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'.
Just it's a slow screen that's better for reading in the sun.
Don't have to convince me. I probably said something similar but it just doesn't connect. They probably just think there is only one kind of display. I never really pushed it further to be honest. .