I don't get the reverence for copies of mass produced objects. I love music too but i don't care if someone uses a marker to write their name on a vinyl jacket. (As long as it's not a rare copy)
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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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.
Exactly. A mass produced book is just an inexpensive mass produced object just like any other. If a particular copy of a book means something special to you then for sure you should take joy in holding onto it and treating it as a unique token that represents the wonderful ideas it imparted into your mind! But that doesn't mean all physical books are special objects.
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.
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wtf
Like some psycho hobo
you know, I used to do this for my textbooks for a period of time, because they were huge, and I had to carry the relevant textbooks to school every day.
So that my back doesn't break, and they I don't ruin my bag and the books themselves, I used to split the books according to my semesters, glue some used cardboard as a cover, and cover it whole thing in book wrapping paper.
The vast majority of books made in something like the last 50+ years are all very low quality and degrade rapidly anyway.
I shred my books to save time reading
The LitBros will hunt this man for sport because of what he did to Infinite Jest.
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This is practically feasible, as books are made of a number of booklets called signatures, which are stitched or glued together at the spine. Until books became a mass-market item for middle-class consumption, they weren’t pre-bound: you (and by you, I mean a member of the gentry or aristocracy or an educational institution) would buy them as a set of signatures and employ a bookbinder to bind them together. If the book was thick, you could get it bound into several volumes for convenience.
Having said that, if you were doing this for practical reasons, rather than to troll, you’d rebind the books into new bindings (at least using a manila folder or something) so they’d survive until you’ve finished reading them.
Feels like a quite awful thing to do 😅
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.
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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?
I was an only child, but i can see this being invented when a parent or teacher figured out a way for 2 kids to read the same book at the same time, given one has a half book head start.
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If you cut Infinite Jest in half, and half of infinity is infinity, is it now two Infinite Jests? Should every page in Infinite Jest be page ∞ since they're all a division of infinity?
I don't know smart math things so I'm just bs'ing here, please don't tell me how wrong I am.
They do this for you in Korea. A lot of long novels are released chopped up into ~200 page chunks.
Get the pitchforks!
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
Insanity. Also doesn't work with IJ unless you ignore the end notes.
Just read books on your phone, or a tablet. You can carry an entire library with you.
Time to learn DIY book binding...
Nahhhh, get an ebook or borrow from a library. And perhaps find some lighter reading for on the go. You do you, though.
I'd never do this, but paperbacks are pretty much disposable. If you keep any for more than a decade they will do this to themselves.
Oh shit, I left the half with the end notes at home!
They are a magician. They make two books out of a single book. (At least they didn't cut it hamburger style 🫠)
My grandfather used to do this but for every chapter because his wrists were too weak to hold on to a full sized book for too long.
As a book lover I am aghast. But in terms of pure utility, I love it.
I know a woman that cut her textbooks in college to make them less heavy to carry. She is unique.