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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.
Ngl this inspires me. I was just looking up pocket versions of books I could stuff in my tool bag. It never occured to me I could just butcher a book.
Rick Steves says to do this with his travel guides. Pull out just the cities you'll use so you save weight travelling.
Rick’s gotta save room for more weed.
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.
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)
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.
But the person obviously has no interest in keeping the book long term, it just needs to stick together for a couple of days, which it will do in this condition. The objections people have to this aren't based on it looking poorly functional, they're emotional.
No, keeping a product that is not trivial to produce in good condition is responsible behavior. Pretending it's totally ok to treat all products as disposable is not only bad for the planet, but jouvenile and rather pathetic.
But you proved the exact opposite point. Books are insanely trivial to produce, therefore treating them however you want us entirely appropriate.
There is some form of unspoken decency around how we treat books and knowledge that transcends mere utilitarian arguments. I think.
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.
As a book lover I am aghast. But in terms of pure utility, I love it.
i mean yes this is insane. but also it would be much much worse if it was actual books instead of paper-bound ones. these are made to be mass-produced.
Ah yes, paperback... Fake books. Unlike... Actual books.
???
actual books as in codices, bound with string in actual rigid paperboard covers. yes.
Damn, that's crazy. Didn't know all these books I owned weren't real.
Mind = Blown
yeah you got scammed by the real fake books guy
How come the interior page I can see is blank?
Probably added some cardboard for a cover to protect the exposed pages.
Certainly a reasonable idea. But that's not what I see.