Ray Bradbury Loves Libraries, Hates the Internet 600
Hugh Pickens was one of several readers to let us know that, according to a NY Times story, the 89-year-old Ray Bradbury hates the Internet. But he loves libraries, and is helping raise $280,000 to keep libraries in Ventura County open. "Among Mr. Bradbury's passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. ... 'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.' ... The Internet? Don't get him started. 'The Internet is a big distraction,' Mr. Bradbury barked... 'Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,' he said, voice rising. 'They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." It's distracting. It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.'"
Re:Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Interesting)
There's more useful information on the Internet? I think not.
While there is plenty useful information on the Internet, a lot of the useful stuff you find there comes from primary sources (printed or digital) not easily found on the public Internet.
Re:Why does he like libraries? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ray Bradbury, while one of the greatest living SF writers, is actually something of a technophobe. Not a luddite, as far as I know, just someone who doesn't care for technology outside the scope of fiction. He doesn't know how to drive a car (while living in LA!), and he was ... oh, I don't remember, but old when he first travelled by airplane. So most likely, he doesn't understand the internet much. Or he understands it differently.
I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.
Hmmm, no, I would not be so quick to dispute that statement at all.
There is so much crap on the internet that it undermines all the information that is out there. Conversely, if you go to the 500 and 600 sections of the library, you can be somewhat assured that you are getting at least -something- that is accurate.
Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line. Seriously, how much will you google around before you spend a few bucks and go out and buy Steven's books before doing some sockets works. Would you monkey around with Perl and a bunch of fanboi sites with terrible examples, or why not just go out and buy the Camel book. Or, if you were doing Windows SDK work, would you wade through MSDN and all the Microsoft fanboi sites, or would you just go and get the Petzold bible.
If there's any problem with libraries, its more a lack of funding and a lack of societies attention to pay librarians seriously and to respect the field. A good librarian is a skilled position, somebody who can reach into all the various fields and find what's good, and gather it up into one spot.
Libraries are public, websites are (usually) not (Score:2, Interesting)
The same cannot be said for a given website. Google (or any other commercial website) might be big today, but once the ad revenue (business model) collapses, they're toast and their huge volume of books, videos, etc. will go offline. If their board of directors can demonstrate that Google (or whatever corporation that sells shares) would make serious bank in another industry (say, breakfast cereal or carpeting or concrete or maid services - whatever) the shareholders would vote for that product to get a better return on investment, and those jillions of books and videos would be reduced to essentially what they are: unwanted webservers that would be zeroed out and sold.
Bradbury's a bit of a cranky right wing dipshit, but even a stopped clock is right once a day.
RS
Re:"In the air?" Come on! (Score:2, Interesting)
People talk about reading books online or on a computer and I just don't get it, probably a lot like Mr. Bradbury. I'm not slamming the alternatives and most people would know that just from reading what I have taken the time to write here, but on Slashdot there are some really dim people, so I'm stating this for them
I am curious as to why Mr. Bradbury is being ridiculed for his opinion though. Some of the opinions that I see on
So what's the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ray Bradbury hates the internet - or, I'm guessing, "hates the world wide web" would be the more accurate statement. And, apparently, he's also a Republican according to some posts here.
So what? Isn't he entitled to his opinions? Why do some people here think they can only enjoy the work of someone with whom they're in agreement on everything? Take this to the logical extreme: A lot of people really liked ReiserFS - does that mean they must think it's okay to murder someone?
Bradbury is even helping raise a bunch of money for a library. How much of your time and money do you put into causes you believe in?
C'mon, give the guy a break. Reading his comments, I'll admit I was half-expecting "and you kids get off my lawn!" included in there somewhere. But man, it never even occurred to me that I should change my mind about his stories because some of his opinions are different than mine.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
The whole point of the library is that the noise tends to be filtered for you. Thus, the internet is a dump, not a library.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:3, Interesting)
To truly appreciate the writings of Bradbury and others, one must remember that his education preceded World War 2. No man had yet "walked" in space. No man had yet exceeded the speed of sound. No atomic weapons. No lasers, except in a few fantasy stories. Fairies and elves were as likely to be proven real, as a man walking on the moon.
Some of the greatest stories written as late as 1960 were based on hypothesis and premises that have since been proven wrong.
And, of course, Bradbury isn't strictly a "sci-fi" author, either. He weaves a story more like Stephen King, than Asimov or Clarke. I don't think (though I could be wrong) that Bradbury really based his stories on real scientific research, theories, and hypothesis.
Whatever - Bradbury will remain one of my near-favorites. Those who don't appreciate him need not read him.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention how sad it is for a science fiction writer to not understand the importance of the Internet.
Bradbury isn't an SF writer the way Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov were. His work always had the thinnest possible skin of technology surrounding a story about people. We was one of the more humanist writers of the day and the technology in his stories often made little sense.
I remember him ranting after the 2001 movie came out that it was 90% due to Clarke and 10% to Kubrick. His friend Clarke politely told him to shut up.
I think this is just Ray being Ray. His contemparories wouldn't have acted the same way. In fact, Clarke was a strong advocate of communications technology to the end.
Wikipedia is good, but not there yet. (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way, I'm a computer professional and not some idiot that barely knows how to use the internet. I've written webservers and email servers and basically done more technical crap than 99 percent of the people on this forum.
So, feel free to have whatever opinions that you want about this subject and my post, but also be conscience that I'm not speaking from a mal-informed perspective.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you know our civilization's ability to produce personal computers isn't going to vanish. At least a book is good for three centuries on proper paper, is our ability to produce hard drives so robust?
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just a case of saying you'll get better information if you pay for it. There is no reason why those same books couldn't be available in a digital format on the internet (except lack of reliable DRM), but you'd still have to pay for them. Even libraries don't generally have enough material to cover any particular narrow subject area in enough detail, so in the end you will have to go to a book store and pay for a book (paper or digital). Not to mention the fact that unlike the Internet, the more popular libraries become, the less useful they are because the book you really need will more likely be checked out.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:5, Interesting)
"I'm not convinced a bubblejet or toner laser printer onto paper will produce a product with the robustness of a good printing press, ink, and acid free paper "
You'd be wrong then. Epson's pigment based inks are archival grade, are projected not to fade for over 100 years; I have a $99 printer that uses them (never mind it's $160 for new ink).
Brian Reid did a test where he printed two indentical pages onto (forget name of fancy acid free archival grade paper) and put one through the dishwasher. After a full cycle it looked the same as the original. He tore down darkroom after seeing this.
There are more books than you can imagine. The google books poeple say even if we ramp up increadably we won't even scratch the surface and there's zero chance all books will be digitized in our lifetime, or several lifetimes - there's that many.
Having said that I still think, and always have, that Bradbury is a moron. But am glad he's supporting libraries. They are, very very important.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Interesting)
Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.
Have to agree on this. Yes, information is much easier to find on the internet, and there is a lot more information on the internet than you can ever find in a single library (I've looked through all the libraries in my area for a physics GRE prep book and came up dry, but found information easily through Google). Yet nevertheless, reading a book is just much easier - having something physical, tangible, can be taken anywhere somehow just makes reading much much easier. I suppose that this is only true in some respects (there's no easy Find function in a book), but as a whole, I find reading books far more pleasurable than reading off a screen.
Re:I wouldn't be so quick to that. (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked at the library.
They had a bunch of romance novels. Yeah, they're smut, but they're also donated in droves and worth about 50 cents. We didn't even bother to catalog them - they just got the 'romance' sticker. If I remember correctly they didn't even get security tags put on them.
When people checked them out, we just tallied the amount on a piece of paper, they didn't even go onto that person's record in any way, shape, or form. Ultimately, we didn't even care if the books came back, although we didn't tell patrons this. If they got damaged beyond 'taping the cover back together' they just got thrown out.
However having them there DID get people into the library, which increased the gate count, which increased money to the library. They only took up a small area of less than 5'x5' (They were on those spinning book holders). And a lot of times people coming to get them would see a new book and check that out.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:4, Interesting)
most of the last five centuries of heavy western civilizations publishings ain't there, nor would it be short of a few decades of very intense labor. Don't like books, fine, show me the plans for a 800 ton double action stamping press from the mid 60s on the internet, or a six axis milling machine with 120 foot bed. That's USEFUL knowledge for keeping our civilization together. but it ain't on the web.
Re:God Bless Him (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's entirely possible to retain digital data over long periods of time. It's not impossible. It's just substantially more difficult than retaining printed media, for many reasons. Let me count the ways:
1) Hardware changes. This past spring I was involved in a project to archive source code and executable files for a late '90s "smart toy" game called Redbeard's Pirate Quest, in which the player controlled the game by moving figurines equipped with RFID tags around the deck of a plastic pirate ship. Hooking it up required a computer with a serial port, which are still easily found but increasingly eliminated in order to free up space on the motherboard for more modern, more useful hookups like extra USB ports, DVI output, etc. The game cannot be played without the pirate ship controller. In another few years -- 10? 15? 25? -- it will probably be unusable.
Another group working in parallel to mine had to recover files from 1983 saved on 5.25" floppies using a Kaypro IV machine. It took them months just to get access to the data -- they had to find a working Kaypro IV, hook it up to a linux machine via a null modem cable, and copy the files over via kermit, then find emulators for the versions of early word processors that had been used to write the files. They were only partially successful; five of the eighteen disks they were given proved to be completely unrecoverable.
2) Data formats change, even very basic ones like text encodings. Just look at NASA data -- some of the early stuff (like, say, the Viking mission data) has been stored in cryptic formats interpretable by computer programs for which we no longer have the source code, running on computers that don't exist any more. Recovering data can take months or years, as discussed in this article from the New York Times [nytimes.com].
3) A huge amount of data is stored in proprietary formats. In high school, I wrote a whole bunch of papers in a word processor called Sprint running on MS-DOS 5. I've still got a few of the files hanging around, but Sprint died the death years ago. Getting access to the data now would be a non-trivial undertaking, particularly if I wanted to preserve the original formatting.
4) Computerized storage media tend to be particularly sensitive to environmental conditions. It's entirely possible to preserve them over the long term, but doing so requires a good bit of planning. Often, the easiest way to preserve the data is to regularly migrate it from one storage medium to a new one -- which means that you have to have someone doing that. You cannot just throw a disk/CD/thumb drive into a closet and expect it to work reliably 25 years later.
Compared to all that, books are a piece of cake to preserve. Use pH neutral paper and ink, and keep them in a cool environment with low humidity. They can easily survive for centuries.
I have personally handled and used books penned in Latin on parchment 700 years ago. But I don't think I've ever seen functioning computer files which are older than I am. I know that such things exist -- I'm only thirty -- but I've never seen one, and probably never will. All you old-timers out there, who worked on exciting hot new tech in the '60s and '70s? Your early work is, basically, gone. I'll never see it in action. At best, I'll read about it -- in a history book.
P.S. Slashdot is being annoying and not putting paragraph breaks in properly when I preview. Apologies if there's no whitespace in the above.