That psychopath needs reporting to the police.

Unless it's Warren Peace, no one should be doing this!?

They're gonna be damaged by simply reading them anyways. If they didn't want the books damaged, they should come in smaller parts.

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.

That's just wrong. If you're worried about portability get an e-reader, don't butcher up works of art.

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.

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.

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.

There's no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me

Warren peace

Guessing you're dictating this to your less-cultured secretary?

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 is so wrong.

you're supposed to cut them in half so you can fit each side in the pockets of your cargo shorts.

No it's a humorous adaption on the classic, that takes place in the woods and the characters are anthromorphised rabbits.

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

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 would absolutely ruin their durability, so I'd say it's definitely objectively a bad idea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I heard he was the David Foster Wallace of his time.

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

Before seeing this i thought i was anti death penalty.

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.

She's streets ahead in other subjects though...

How come the interior page I can see is blank?

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.

This doesn't actually save much space, which is why I cut mine in half horizontally across the pages

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

if you cut them long ways, you can hide them up your sleeve like a hotdog

I mean, I think we print enough books that there’s no great loss if a couple get cut in half.

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.

Probably added some cardboard for a cover to protect the exposed pages.

They also can start a fire, but only once. While every chapter of a book can light a fire.
Another victory for books

Are we there yet?

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.

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.

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.

Certainly a reasonable idea. But that's not what I see.

Correct.

Such an intellectual.

Well, only halfway there at first

Seeing how Paul McCartney is on Lemmy news today, I just learned that he also used to do cut-up at times.

Ah yes, paperback... Fake books. Unlike... Actual books.

???

As a book lover I am aghast. But in terms of pure utility, I love it.

wtf

Like some psycho hobo

I'm trying to burn so many books but it's too fucking damp right now!

We've been here for a while buddy.