Rick Steves actually recommends people to do this with his travel guides
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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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!
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.
Read on your phone or buy an e-reader
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 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.
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
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 do wonder why this person wouldn't just use a e-ink reader
The batteries would explode, duh /s
E-ink readers are too hard to cut.
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'.
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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!
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.
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"yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off."
Skip jail. Straight to a firing squad of librarians.
Easy to spot, they're the only firing squad with silencers
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I cut mine cross-wise to save space. There is a lot of authors who make no sense.
Possibilities... 
I shred my books to save time reading
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.
This guy works at Anthropic
You could just go to IRCHighway, though.
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.
They do this for you in Korea. A lot of long novels are released chopped up into ~200 page chunks.
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
Oh shit, I left the half with the end notes at home!
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.
Insanity. Also doesn't work with IJ unless you ignore the end notes.
Just read books on your phone, or a tablet. You can carry an entire library with you.
There's no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me
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