Our books are being destroyed and there’s nothing we can do about it

In what’s called a “slow fire,” our books are literally being destroyed. Sometimes in as little as 30 years, a book can become embrittled. This is due to the quality of paper books have been printed on and how that paper quickly acidifies until it becomes so brittle the book disintegrates.

Our answer has been to digitize everything, but that does nothing to save the physical book. And at the current pace of scanning books, it would still take 300 years to catalogue everything with our current technology. That means countless numbers of books will be lost and forgotten.

Yeah, this is a problem. Read more about it on Lithub.

CRY

Our books are being destroyed and there’s nothing we can do about it was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.