Author Topic: NASA photographic record of Manned Moonlanding:Is there evidence of fabrication?  (Read 254386 times)

Offline Dr_Orpheus

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My main disappointment with Kindle is that the pictures are often much lower resolution that what is available in the original book.  They don't always include all of the pictures from the printed version, either.  I purchased the Art of Star Trek a few years ago, and the Kindle edition contained fewer than half the pictures found in the printed version.  Kindle works quite well for books with few or no illustrations/pictures.

Offline Zakalwe

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For some reason I can't seem to get "involved" with books that are presented on e-readers. I have about a dozen books art-way through on the Kindle that I just can't seem to finish. There's something about an e-reader that just stops me from continuing with it. I think that it might be the size of the screen...compared to even a small book there is just less words on the screen and that gets in the way of the "flow" of reading, IMHO.
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' " - Isaac Asimov

Offline JayUtah

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I am a huge fan of real books.  That said, I do love my Kindle.  (I facetiously refer to books now as "single-use Kindles.")  In my teenage years I worked in several university libraries, including in the cataloging department of the University of Michigan library.  For a year I was the assistant librarian at an academic architecture and engineering library (30,000 volumes) -- a very good job for an engineering student to have.  One of my guilty pleasures was putting on the white cotton gloves and leafing through Palladio's I qvattro libri di architettura printed in Venice in 1588.  We also had large folio books (20-40 inches wide, 30-50 inches tall, 4-6 inches thick) from the early 1900s containing large, detailed engineering drawings of bascule bridges and structural systems for things that often didn't exist anymore.

My own rare books collection includes:  Thuvia, Maid of Mars (first edition), The White House Cook Book (1893), The White House Music Book (1898), Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (first edition), and Told by Uncle Remus (1905).  The latter, of course, is one of a few books upon which the Disney film Song of the South was based.  And yes, it appears to be written in an early form of Ebonics -- as blatantly racist disrespectful as it could possibly be.  I also have the Dec. 1969 issue of National Geographic.

This is the joy of reading.  I agree with the synesthetic gestalt of a physical book.  The leather and board of Palladio's cover had a distinct smell.  The paper bore the subtle striations of the drying racks used back then, and the rough-cut edges.  Toward the end there was a series of margin notes made in iron-gall ink, dated by calligraphy to the early 1800s.  At that point the book was already an antique, and still treated by its owner as a valuable textbook -- now the notes themselves are also antiques.

I also have a coffee-table book on space.  And by that I mean it's roughly the size of a coffee table.  Yes, I can get the content anywhere, including on the web and in Kindle form.  But I cannot get the experience of huge photographic reproductions, and turning pages with both hands.  I agree with the Kindle as a very useful way to carry text-only books -- and a lot of them.  I like having my Kindle library widely available on several e-reading forms.  But I also agree with the complaints about illustrations being missing or uselessly degraded.  I deal in information that is most often and most effectively presented in graphical form.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline gillianren

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If I traveled a lot, I'd probably get a Kindle; it's easier than packing the number of books I can go through on a trip, even a relatively short one.  But my paper books, I own, and I don't have to worry about obsolescence, and I love the feel and smell and so forth.  Also, if Simon drops one in the toilet, I'm out one, and my few valuable books stay on the other side of the baby gate, where he can't destroy something expensive to replace.  I wouldn't do that with a Kindle.

Actually, I had to read Uncle Remus for a class in college.  Our professors advised us to read the bits of dialect (which is allegedly quite accurate, though I wouldn't know) out loud if we couldn't understand it, because hearing it would probably make it click.  So my roommate came in when I was reading some passage aloud for probably the third or fourth time, still unable to get it, and she didn't understand it, either.  For the rest of the school year, she'd babble at me in faux-dialect to amuse herself.
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Offline ka9q

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Hey, I like books too. (I suspect we all do). Some of my earliest childhood memories have to do with books. I stayed with an aunt when my younger sisters were born, sleeping in my cousin's room. He had a lot of books on physics and chemistry, and I still remember telling my aunt that I wanted to read them all. She was amused.

I've spent countless hours in school and company libraries, and not just to study or do assigned work.

But times change. We already have bookcases almost everywhere we can fit them, and it's just too much.  Books are heavy; I remember a Civil Defense pamphlet from the Duck and Cover days that suggested them as makeshift radiation shielding!

Books are a potential fire hazard. Many of mine are specialty technical editions that are long out of print, so they'd be difficult or impossible to replace, and many were quite expensive in the first place. I can never seem to find the one I'm looking for when I'm in a hurry, and of course they're completely inaccessible to me when I'm traveling.

So for all these reasons, I try to go electronic as much as I possibly can. Unfortunately, it's still difficult.


« Last Edit: February 15, 2015, 05:13:35 PM by ka9q »

Offline DD Brock

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I love real books, but I love the availability of e-books that can be hard to find in hardcopy.

This has, unfortunately, led to quite a backlog of e-books on my reader I won't get to for weeks and months  :D

Offline AtomicDog

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When my son was in elementary school,  he was running to catch the bus laden with a backpack full of textbooks. He was horribly unbalanced, so he fell forward and broke both his front teeth. If all of his books were files on a tablet, I firmly believe that his accident would never have happened.

I have a basement full of paperbacks in boxes that I have collected over the years. If I want to read one, I don't even know where to start looking for it, so I just give up and download the E - version.
"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death." - Isaac Asimov

Offline Chief

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I use ebooks as a sampler, I will borrow a book of someone else and if I like it I will buy the hardcopy. If I like it a lot I will by the hardback. I have a dream of leather binding all my hardbacks. I also use them for self published amateur authors, who's work is not in print.

At the moment though I have found the convenience of audio books, I have a round trip to work and back of anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours so listening to a book is a great way to make the journey easier and putting the dead time to use. My wife and children are Harry Potter fans and, although I struggled to read even the first book, I found listening to them narrated by Stephen Fry made them very enjoyable for some light entertainment.

Offline Obviousman

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I love being able to download books onto a Kindle or tablet or whatever; being able to take 20-30 books in a small device with me on trips is a godsend.

That being said, I love my hardcopy books even more. I rarely get rid of a book (thus why my better half constantly complains about all the books in my man-cave). Some things about a book are just wonderful: the smell of the pages and ink, the cover art, the crinkled spine which says you have read the book far too many times, etc.

Offline Echnaton

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My wife and children are Harry Potter fans and, although I struggled to read even the first book, I found listening to them narrated by Stephen Fry made them very enjoyable for some light entertainment.

I refused to install a DVD play in our car to entertain the kids on long driving trips. Harry Potter audio books were among the best things to have.  We could listen for a while then have the kids talk about the images they developed in their minds from the descriptions.  Really wonderful writing suitable that will entertain for several days of driving and the kids would listen to book over and over again.   
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett

Offline onebigmonkey

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I cycle to work and find audiobooks a very good way of passing the journey!

Offline JayUtah

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When my son was in elementary school, he was running to catch the bus laden with a backpack full of textbooks. He was horribly unbalanced, so he fell forward and broke both his front teeth. If all of his books were files on a tablet, I firmly believe that his accident would never have happened.

I was a nerd as a kid, and I remember not too fondly my own heavy-laden backpack.  So that's a hazard I can sympathize with.  And I've nearly committed the opposite error, reading one of the several professional books I have on my Kindle while walking to work and stumbling over some obstacle or another.

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I have a basement full of paperbacks in boxes that I have collected over the years. If I want to read one, I don't even know where to start looking for it, so I just give up and download the E - version.

Having been a librarian in the past, it's now habit for me to keep books organized so I can find them.  Even if they're in boxes in storage.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline Glom

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I like the tactile sensation of books too. But I also appreciate the advantages of e-books in many situations.

The big problem with digital storage is longevity. Will archaeologists in 2000 years be able to decipher our culture?

Offline Echnaton

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The big problem with digital storage is longevity. Will archaeologists in 2000 years be able to decipher our culture?

My audio books are stored on three hard drives.  One in the computer, one in my cloud server and one for eternal backup. As long as one of those survives, there will be a record of my collection.  I think there is good reason to believe that a hard drive can survive that long.  What will be missing are the important parts, margin notes, other markings, wear from handling or pages ripped out to indicate what they meant to the user.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett

Offline Chief

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We, my wife and I, instilled the joy of books in our children as soon as they could understand the stories. I give credit to my mother who would put me and my younger brother to bed and read Jack London's White Fang and Call of the Wild to us for an hour or so before sleep. She also read Charles Dickens to us and bought us the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings each. We would spend hours reading and discussing the stories.
One Monday a month we would be taken down to the Albion Book shop and pick a book. It is one of my happiest memories. To this day I can't resist walking into a book shop if I pass and enjoying the aroma.

I did the same with my kids and all of them have read my original copies of Tolkien. I bought Raymond Feist's Magician series and the first book has fallen apart from the use. I found it funny that at a time when children were spending more and more time in front of the television and also video games, I had to tell my lot to get their faces out of the books to come and eat or have a bath.

My wife is part of a book club, although it's more like a women's club who occasionally discuss books after a few glasses of wine. They are all very interesting people and I do crash the party if we are hosting.

I do worry about digital storage, I try to print those which have not been put on paper if they are PDF. The list not printed grows each day though.