Straight to jail.
2mon 19d ago by lemmy.world/u/The_Picard_Maneuver in microblogmemes
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.
Correct.
It doesn't need to stay together for a lifetime, the person only cares about it staying together for a few days till they're done reading the section, after which it gets disposed of. This makes it much easier for them to actually read it, which means it's objectively way better.
You....buy a book and then throw it away after you read it? Anyone does that?
In the movie My Blue Heaven, Steve Martin had a trunk full of the same (stolen) book and his excuse was “in case I want to read it more than once.”
I’ve heard there are PACs or whatever that buy thousands of copies of politicians books so they become best sellers. Does anyone know where the physical copies actually end up?
I buy books to throw at anyone who can read. You literate fucks.
I don't, but plenty of people do, and it's entirely fine if that's how they want to read
Well no it's not entirely fine, it's actually incredibly wasteful. Get a fucking library card if you don't want to own, gift, or resell the books you read. That's the Generic You of course.
Actively making things worse because you have a shitty consumerist disposable product fetish actively makes the world worse.
Infinite Jest has extensive footnotes, which are at the back of the book. Some of them are 12 pages long and contain multiple subplots and plot points and gives history and context to how and why the Infinite Jest of the book is so deadly.
Holy shit I totally forgot about that. I've been meaning to reread for years now but haven't felt ready lol. I loved it but got to the end and was like, wait, what? I thought this was going to wrap back around to the beginning. Am I too dumb for this book?
There was so many parts of that book that pop into my head randomly. I can hardly brush my teeth without thinking of Pemulis(sp?) passing out, and directly proper use of, floss after dinner at the Incandenzas (sp?). Tennis always had me thinking about it. Punts in football too. Selfie filters (the masks everyone starting having in their house for video calls.
E: oh, and nevermind infinite scroll and the basis of the plot
I think a lot about the guy who is scared aliens are trying to steal your thoughts with magnets and so they give him an MRI
The whole missile warfare game the tennis kids play was wild.
And for some reason, Hal laying on the floor imagining the amount of food he eats in a year filling the room and just being nauseous about it (I think he was also dealing with quitting the Bob Hope), really got into my head.
Man, I came across DFW when I was sitting in a very boring seminar at University of Illinois with my first smartphone in hand, enjoying the new ability to find something else to learn about while stuck there. No idea how exactly I came across it, but I read how cruise ship article and loved it. Started reading about him and was like, oh, this guy group up right here. And his parents are still here. It really caught my attention (again, boring seminar) and I was excited to read his stuff. I must have read some interviews of him or something.
Hit me hard when I learned of his suicide. Such a chilling feeling when a good communicator, like one that is able to capture parts of your inner monologue so well, through writing, speaking, of music, takes their own life.
I am completely fine with cutting Infinite Jest in half, or in thirds, or just throw the fucking thing in a wood chipper.
That psychopath needs reporting to the police.
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
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
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
Chank you
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.
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.
Also new, unsold books are frequently and in large amounts returned to the printer and recycled.
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...
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.
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. .
just popping in to say that, as somebody who is very affected by looking at a screen before going to sleep, my Kindle is one of the best value items that I've ever had.
Well, let them read on paper, then.
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!
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...
Agreed. It baffles me that anyone can look at history and think that what's happening now can be anything close to good. It's sheer malice from any reasonable perspective.
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.
Je souhaite à Bolloré de manger une salade de racine de pissenlit si tu vois ce que je veux dire... Félicitations pour la nomination, je ne suis pas du tout le public ciblé en effet 😅
Merci! Je reviendrai à de la fantasy tout public après avoir fini la trilogie actuelle.
If it's a book you appreciate reading the idea is you can give it to someone else after you're done. Yes in the modern days who cares you can print another copy cheaply or use an ebook, but life is about habits and it's a good habit to keep things that you appreciate in good condition so you can pass it off to someone else when you don't need it anymore.
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 😅
No worries, you are just fine. 🙂
My kids both prefer paper books to e-readers.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't care about your children but good for them, I guess. It's never about the medium, it's about the content, so if you like to read on screens, paper, cut books or toilet paper, it doesn't matter. Only the content matters. Audiobooks are okay too.
New research suggests it is slightly about the medium (for the kids, idk about adults it wasn't discussed). Physical books are better for attention span, apparently because they have "friction", i.e., you have to turn the page yourself so you "work" for the information, which makes information "valuable" so you hold onto it.
I guess we can have crank-powered e-readers where you have to work to turn the page?
Your brain works differently listening to audiobooks than reading. So it's not necessarily a substitute, in that you may not get the same out of the text.
Having said that, my wife is a bit ADHD and struggles to read books, but is addicted to audiobooks. 😅
Man, people like you are why others hate reading. You hurt my business by thinking that the medium choice grants you some form of moral/intellectual superiority, and you hurt other's enjoyment by boasting about it. Stop looking at the finger and start looking at the moon.
People, read books on the medium that you are more confortable with, be it screen or paper. Treat your books however the fuck you want. Listen to books if you don't have the time/focus to read. Be a sleazy fuck and watch the movie/series about the book if you're not really into it. What? There's a video game about it? Play it.
It's never about the cup, it's about the wine inside it. Confront yourselves to new ideas and stories, because that's what it is all about, not "carving mental holes in your books to put your mental wee-wee inside, because paper is sacred".
Wanna imagine things with your brain but can't be bothered to read boring stuff? Play tabletop roleplaying games, it's even more effective because you're actively engaging in it.
Got aphantasia, you were born without the capacity to imagine what you read as you read it? Watch the movie.
Got dyslexia? Bored at the gym? Stuck in traffic?Audiobook.
Etc etc.
If you have one fucking thing to take away from this rant, it's : it's not about the cup, it's about the wine. If you can't get that, you're not a reader, you're a fetishist and you're hurting the one thing you care about (and probably would read the most toxic shit and swallow it just because it's printed on paper).
Just so you're aware, your posts in this thread come across as very belligerent to me. I'm trying to ignore the tone that I perceive, and to clarify.
My understanding had been that the brain worked differently based on how it was getting text. I did a bit of DuckDuckGo and it turns out that further research shows that these differences are not that big:
My take is that this person being an author probably had this very same discussion thousands of times.
There's also a nice screen rant by John Green (author, but I have yet to reada any of his books) somewhere on YouTube on the exact same topic.
I am extremely belligerent against people who gatekeep joy and self-cultivation by confining it to text on paper only, because by doing so they spit on a lot more of artists and engineers' faces.
Books are valid, audiobooks are valid, comics are valid, movies are valid, TV shows are valid, TTRPGs are valid, video games are valid, etc etc.
Especially video games, since they are at the crossroad of all art and engineering forms (drawing, 3d modelling, music, programming, writing, acting, voice acting, animation, etc etc).
I have no idea who you are, aside from what you've stated in these comments, but you clearly have a great passion for the core concept of what stories are capable of.
Just wanted to make it known I respect that passion, and am uplifted by knowing it exists out there somewhere. Cheers for that. 💛
You hurt my business by thinking that the medium choice grants you some form of moral/intellectual superiority
Bro nobody here cares about your business
Yes you do, you're even answering to a thread dedicated to my business.
Buddy I have no idea who you even are nor what your business is
Then why TF are you talking to me?
They are an author, obviously.
I do wonder why this person wouldn't just use a e-ink reader
The batteries would explode, duh /s
FINALLY I'VE SEEN SOMEONE ELSE SAYING THIS!
The reverence some folks have for stacks of thin pieces of tree is crazy. Still remember running into this TAing in grad school, where people's feelings about novels were more about codex fetishism than the actual work.
I'm not here to kink shame, if that's your deal then whatever, but at the end of the day a mass produced, physical book is just an object. If you paid for it, you own it and can do whatever you want to it. Want to cut out all of the pages and frame them so you can read a story standing up looking at your wall? Go for it. Want to chop it in half like the image here? Sure, go nuts. Want to make a model house with paper mache using pages from House of Leaves? That sounds dope, I'm in. Model church (or better/more subversive) with pages of the King James bible? Fuck it, we ball.
I personally make an exception for small print runs and hard to find books, but if you can buy it from a Coles/Chapters/Barnes and Noble/whatever it's fair game imo.
I mean might be related to writing and the printing press being two of the most important inventions in history, if I had to hazard a guess. Transfer of knowledge through books was a complete gamechanger for humanity.
I understand the history and impact of printed media. But let's be honest - a book you're buying in 2026 is generally not a rare tome with limited copies, with an artisan's attention paid to its crafting as an object. It's just another mass produced item, following a path that generally looks like 'purchase -> use -> discard (whether that's to another reader, a used book store, or a shredder)'. They can cycle for quite a while, sure, but eventually most books end up in a bin.
Given this, I personally feel a book is subject to the whim of its current owner, and that's ok. Want to keep it in pristine condition with an eye to maximum amount of cycles before bin time? Can't fault you for that. Want to take advantage of its physicality to make it more convenient for your use, like in this image? Fair play. Want to use that physical material for something more creative? Fuck yeah dude, go for it.
Where I pause a bit is just tossing it into a shredder once you don't want it anymore. Does that logically follow from my approach here? Yeah, but it does seem like a waste compared to the other things you can do with it.
Edit: a question, actually. With all of this in mind, how do folks here feel about collage, blackout poetry, cut-up technique, etc.?
E-ink readers are too hard to cut.
As a regular visitor to the library and a low-key home archivist, I care.
Doing something like this to a book, even if done masterfully, drastically reduces its lifespan and makes it possible to lose parts. And one book can be read way more than once.
It is simply irresponsible to treat something, anything, that can serve you for decades, in a way that makes it practically single-use.
this is so wrong.
you're supposed to cut them in half so you can fit each side in the pockets of your cargo shorts.
That's why I cut mine in half through the middle of the cover; top and bottom halves. Sure, makes it a little harder to read, but worth it when I can fit each half in my pockets perfectly.
if you cut them long ways, you can hide them up your sleeve like a hotdog
‘The Idiot’ was originally intended to be a two-part film with a running time of 265 minutes. After a single, poorly received, screening of the full-length version, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio. This was against Kurosawa's wishes. When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead.
According to Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, there are no existing prints of the original 265-minute version.
Fuck that. Damn I would have watched that. Was it based on Dostoevsky or something else entirely? Imagine a master putting that much effort into a work of art, and then have it cut and chipped away at until there's nothing left...
Based on Dostoyevsky's novel, yes, and apparently the film was close to it. I've watched the existing version — it's tolerable, although the physical quality of the film makes it a somewhat challenging experience. The gist of the story is pretty clear. To my shame, I haven't read the novel, so idk what is lost compared to it.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
You should cut them into four pieces like me so you can rearrange them to get multiple different stories for the price of one book!
I think someone did that to my copy of Ulysses.
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.
Yeah, sure. The inane pretentiousness was just a "joke"!
Fuck that book.
I mean I know nothing about this book besides what I've read about it in these two comments, but it is called infinite jest, why is it so hard to believe that it's a joke?
It's a reference to Shakespeare, when Hamlet finds the skull of the old court jester who looked after him as a child. "Alas! poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio. A man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times..."
In the book, it's the name of a film made by the protagonist's late Dad, one which combines a myriad of new and experimental film techniques and technical application of lenses with some incredibly beautiful people - and is so compelling that if you watch it you can't stop watching it until you starve to death.
The book juxtaposes the obviously bad addiction of drugs and shows us the journey of an addict trying to gain a control of their life, with a bunch of "good" addictions amongst a group of adolescent boys trying to become tennis pros at an ivy-league-type college.
With a bunch of criticism of American life: Years no longer have numbers like 1997 or 2008, they are sponsored by brands so there's Year of the Whopper, Year of Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptical Products, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment... Canada, Mexico and the USA have formed into one giant country after the mid-west became uninhabitable due to pollution...
honestly I love the book but you have to be a certain type of person to love it.
Hmm that does sound like an interesting book, not gonna lie. But I see how the name of the book doesn't necessarily mean that it's an elaborate meta-joke
Maybe go to a bookstore, pick up a copy, and leaf through it. I think you'll understand exactly what I mean pretty quickly. The book is pretentious drivel.
Which apparently is the whole joke about this book. Maybe I should pick it up and see what this whole discussion is about lol
Other dude is tripping, it literally is a joke about pretentiousness
I wouldn't know (yet) lol
have you tried Finnegan's Wake instead?
I can sense Booktokers rushing this way to tell you you broke one of the book rules
Are we there yet?
We've been here for a while buddy.
Well, only halfway there at first
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
Skip jail. Straight to a firing squad of librarians.
Easy to spot, they're the only firing squad with silencers
Nice
"yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off."
You should cut diagonally. If it makes a sandwich better, imagine what it can do for a novel.
I have never been so offended by something so harmless in the greater scheme of things.
last year I've allowed myself to do marginalia, to allow me to write notes and whatever I want on the books I read while I read. it's inherently destructive, but it changes the whole experience. reading is no longer a passive activity but a conversation with the material. and I love it.
but felt guilty about doing irreversible changes to the book. then this shit shows up.
It's destructive but it's also constructive. That conversation with the material gives future owners new perspectives. At least in my opinion as someone who collects old subcultural texts. Notes in the margins adds to the experience of an old book
it's transformative, if I'm expected to change when reading a book so is the book
I love margin notes. My friends and I have a book exchange where we read a book, write in the margins, and pass it on to the next friend. It's nice.
Since I turned 30 I write in the margins of books I read. The better the book is the more notes. Its much more engaging.
100%
maybe it's my ADHD, but now I cannot read without a pen
Ok, but what is there to take notes about? Assuming it's a novel, and not some reference book.
If you have really complex books with lots of story threads, I can imagine doing this. For example in Tolstoy's War and Peace or GRRM A song of ice and fire books.
It would be more useful to take notes besides the book rather than inside it in that case. Maybe it's just me, though.
I like the idea of this. It would make a re-read or even just flipping through the book years later a lot of fun.
and if another person reads it, they are engaging in that conversation as well and will know what you thought of the book and add to it.
Almost all of my books are thrifted, which gives me the luxury of no guilt. And I get to argue with previous marginalia, which is fun because they can’t respond.
This is kinda how books worked throughout most of medieval history. Paper was expensive and anyway, the margins often become teaching tools in and of themselves. It becomes a centuries long comment section, so ideas get passed down and develop through the centuries. Like one of the most important books of medieval philosophy that probably no one without a doctoral in theology gives a shit about is Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is just a collection of common comments people in about books that he thought were good for teaching. (I have been working on implementing a HTML cross reference version of it using Twine, and have been trying to parse [pun intended] a theological discussion about what it means to enjoy not use god. Larger project is to recreate an accessible “medieval curriculum” through Twine)
As much as I’d fantasize about all my books preserved as a library, they’ll probably be separated from each other someday. The least I can do is put my soul in them - tuck a pamphlet or bookmark, a movie ticket. I’ve never been unhappy seeing a comment in a book - I was reading a 60 year old middle school text recently, and discovered a kid had wrote “[clearly female name] is a MAGGOT F_GGOT!!!!!!” which was just so fucking hilarious.
Did you know that the Talmud is basically marginalia? it looks so weird because marginalia was turn into text then got another generation of marginalia
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.
When you get right down to it, that's true for everything. Everything self-destructs eventually. So, that seems like a strange reason to destroy it prematurely.
Of course, if it's your book, you can do whatever you want with it. It just seems needlessly wasteful.
Well... Because it's not wasteful at all. The point is to make it easier to read. As long as you're not rough with it, all the pages should stay in, and then you can put both halves back on the shelf when you're done (or just recycle it, since paper is one of the few things that's actually recyclable). Nothing is being destroyed.
had this occur with my first copy of ninjas and superspies and ended up punching holes in it and putting it in a 3 ring binder. the binding - and slimness of the book so it had a thin spine - wasn't meant to lay open.
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.
Unless it's Warren Peace, no one should be doing this!?
Warren peace
Guessing you're dictating this to your less-cultured secretary?
No it's a humorous adaption on the classic, that takes place in the woods and the characters are anthromorphised rabbits.
She's streets ahead in other subjects though...
I heard he was the David Foster Wallace of his time.
Seeing how Paul McCartney is on Lemmy news today, I just learned that he also used to do cut-up at times.
I cut mine cross-wise to save space. There is a lot of authors who make no sense.
Possibilities... 
Before seeing this i thought i was anti death penalty.
The reason I only find half of a story when exploring in video games
This doesn't actually save much space, which is why I cut mine in half horizontally across the pages
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
I used to be a school chaplain (a few years back when I was in my 30s) and one of the things I'd do to entertain myself sometimes was channel corny 90s youth pastor energy in my chapel talks. Like use just-no-longer-current slang, but also just slightly wrong. It was all warm-up for fatherhood, really.
in more ways than one!
I have a compact paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that this would be helpful but the end pages will just fall off for most bindings so it’s not a good idea.
They're gonna be damaged by simply reading them anyways. If they didn't want the books damaged, they should come in smaller parts.
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.
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.
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.
I shred my books to save time reading
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:
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.
wtf
Like some psycho hobo
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)
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.
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.
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.
I proved nothing except your disrespect for the achievement of all humanity that came before you.
You're being preposterous and reproving my point again.
lol no. Your disrespect for the written word will not go down in history as the cheeky joke you wish.
... and if you're not joking, reality will not be kind to your ilk.
You've shown yourself to be a fool who thinks they're smart. I'm done wasting effort on you
lol Your disrespect seems to go much further than books... Genuinely, pathetic.
There is some form of unspoken decency around how we treat books and knowledge that transcends mere utilitarian arguments. I think.
Again though, the knowledge itself is the important part, the individual copy out of millions of identical copies is not. Anything that makes it easier for someone to read and learn is infinitely more important than the individual copy that they read it from. You have to ask yourself, do you care more about the physical book than you do about someone actually reading it?
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 😅
It's the dlc
Wait, there is a NEW testament?!
Yeah, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The way it gives the big guy a chatacter 180 when a huge part of his presentation has been his perpetuity... idk, not buying it.
The protag does have some fire lines though.
I think I'll wait until it comes out on DVD.
Part 1 and Part 2 of the first entry in the first four parts of an 18 part series.
Parts is parts
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.
I only digitalize manga and share it with friends. It is expensive in Germany. It is legal here btw it is called private copy ownership.
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
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.
He could have cut the child in two and have them both read the whole book at once.
Get the pitchforks!
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?
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.
Just read books on your phone, or a tablet. You can carry an entire library with you.
YOU AWFUL PSYCHO, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, THEY WERE SO YOUNG !!!?
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.
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.
Time to learn DIY book binding...
Insanity. Also doesn't work with IJ unless you ignore the end notes.
They are a magician. They make two books out of a single book. (At least they didn't cut it hamburger style 🫠)
Oh shit, I left the half with the end notes at home!
Nahhhh, get an ebook or borrow from a library. And perhaps find some lighter reading for on the go. You do you, though.
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.
What do you mean?
I mean libraries destroy books because they only have so much inventory space.
I just assumed most that weren't already destroyed were donated, IDK, I would think they could be but completely understand that they aren't
Yeah... I don't know what I thought, but it wasn't that they actually pulp them. It's a bit shocking.
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.
As a book lover I am aghast. But in terms of pure utility, I love it.
Imean paperbacks are cheap and would also probably do this on their own in due time anyway. If he was doing this to hardcovers I'd see it as a bit of an issue.
I know a woman that cut her textbooks in college to make them less heavy to carry. She is unique.
*thick books
Release the hounds!
Just get a freaking backpack.
This is the book version of ed gein
Soft cover, cheap books that'll probably never be significantly useful for collectors, I guess. You start tearing apart tomes and older works though and that's a line.
I once tried that with my copy of the necronomicon, I ended up blacking out for a few months. When my consciousness came back, everyone was talking about a lockdown and surving a plague... Not sure if that's related. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
YOU!
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.
Rick Steves actually recommends people to do this with his travel guides
Read on your phone or buy an e-reader
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.