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Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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This is a well used strategy on trips that last a month or more with limited space or weight for gear, think backpacking or sailing. Rip book in half, take first half of book to start trip, mail the second half to the resupply spot for pickup. Also used when stormbound and just one book among multiple people.
As someone who would never, ever do this to one of my beloved collection: Go for it. Watever keeps you enjoying them. As others have said, we're not talking hundred year old first edition hardcovers here. You can still tape them up and pass them on, unlike those philistines who take one on a hike and rip out the pages they've read to use for campfire tinder.
You should cut diagonally. If it makes a sandwich better, imagine what it can do for a novel.
Release the hounds!
Clearly this is someone who actually reads their books. Given that they are mass market paperbacks... I have no problem with this. If I were an author I would much rather someone does this to my work and actually reads it and enjoys it to someone keeping a pristine copy unopened on their shelf forever.
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 know a woman that cut her textbooks in college to make them less heavy to carry. She is unique.
The LitBros will hunt this man for sport because of what he did to Infinite Jest.
Infinite Jest is best read with all the pages torn out and arranged something like this, CMV:
Get the pitchforks!
Feels like a quite awful thing to do 😅
I don't know, I'm a priest and I once sliced up a Bible for personal use.
Tthere was once a particular version of the Bible that I wanted, but the publisher only made a hard-backed version. I hate hard-back books (especially Bibles). So I bought it and immediately sliced the cover off and made a new one out of old church bulletins and duct tape.
hip 90s youth pastor energy
There's no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me
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.
It's a mass-produced book, and a paperback at that. You can certainly keep any such book in good condition to archive or re-read on your own terms. But that stack of acid-paper and cheap glue is going to eventually self-destruct. Unless it's a limited production run, in danger of getting burned, autographed, is an actual collectable, or something else that makes it distinct or valuable, I say: go for it.
Source: I own a stack of these from back in the day. Despite my best efforts to store them appropriately, they're all slowly rotting away. Some things just aren't meant to last.
The vast majority of books made in something like the last 50+ years are all very low quality and degrade rapidly anyway.
I have never been so offended by something so harmless in the greater scheme of things.
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
That psychopath needs reporting to the police.
Looking at this awakened the memories of back pain from lugging all those fucking textbooks around when I was in school. God, why were they not split into a dozen parts like this? Do kids still carry them these days?