What do you do with Star Trek novels?

[JD]

I don't know if they will go extinct, but they probably will become more of a niche collectors item.
As for whether or not I sell books, as far as I can remember I have never sold or donated any of my Trek books, and I have no plans to get ride of any of them in the near future. I have donated other books to the library and traded some in to a used media store. Generally they're either old books I won't read again, or stuff I bought and never read that I have no interest in anymore. But whenever I get ride of a book, I make sure it goes to a place where someone or multiple people will be able to read it. I refuse to destroy a book as long as it is still readable.

I just remembered at least one Trek book I did get ride of, the first DS9 Dominion War book. This was many years ago, before any of the relaunches had started and at the time I didn't have any interest in a novelization of those episode. I kinda wish I still had it now though, because those have grown to become some of my favorite episodes of any Trek series. I might have gotten ride of one or two other pre-Relaunch books now that I've been thinking about it more, but I can't remember for sure.

 

[Cybersnark]

I'll soon be winnowing down my collection (mom's thinking of moving and my apartment isn't that big).

I'll be keeping the "pocketverse" relaunch continuity, but a lot of the old stand-alone books will be donated either to the library, Goodwill, or to my hometown's literacy council (which is basically its own small library that approaches schools and ESL programs and anywhere else people need literacy help).

 

[Patrick O'Brien]

I gave all mine to friends, when I was done with them. I hate throwing out books, it does not feel right. The kindle now spares me from that problem.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

With the ones I own, and don't want (after having a differing opinion, after being read again) they are usually donated....

(This is the same with even non-Trek books).

 

[Therin of Andor]

I have all the Star Trek titles. In the Star Trek Shrine. Seven bookcases of varying heights. A few years ago I had to admit defeat and shelve a second row in front of older novels. Quickly running out of rooooom!

 

[Sky]

I keep all my Trek books. Like all my other books. Except the Paolo Coelho novels gifted to me by a relative. Those I gave to charity, since they were that bad.

 

[James Wright]

Just to let those of you who use electronic devices to read and keep books know I have nothing against such devices, in fact I believe I asked if books as I know of them are eventually only going to available on electronic devices?

James

 

[Jarrod]

I will admit that I am placing more and more of my books onto electronic devices. My shelf space is thanking me for it.

 

[DimesDan]

Because I am a callous, heartless bastard I have no qualms about purging my book collection from time to time - and what I mean by purge is just removing the ones I didn't like and have no intention of reading again. Normally I'll either sell them or just hand them over to the local Charity shop for the local Cancer Hospice.

As for space, We have a large bookcase with all my Trek and Wars novels on, plus a few non fiction books and magazines (which are all mine). We also have a small bookcase with non-Trek novels, some non fiction books and the other half's foreign language dictionaries. - most of her books are still at her Parents over in Ireland.

Luckily she is a Trek fan as well, but I've not gotten her into the novel-verse yet.

 

[Therin of Andor]

in fact I believe I asked if books as I know of them are eventually only going to available on electronic devices?

Some futurists warn that electronic media usually becomes incompatible with modern devices every few years, while paper books' only enemies are fire and water. It's probably easier to protect against fire and water than advances in tech. Paper has lasted hundreds of years so far.

 

[Sho]

The incompatibility issue wouldn't really be a problem for ebooks in particular if it wasn't for DRM.

The problem some futurists warn about mostly applies to very complicated data formats that are almost impossible to reverse-engineer without a format specification, even when the general principle by which they operate is known. Let's pick the H.264 video codec, currently the standard for HD content, as an example: Making sense of some of the general properties of the bitstream and recognizing it as a DCT-based codec is probably possible in a far-future clean room situation, but writing a decoder that actually yields usable images would be very, very hard.

Ebooks, otoh, are just text, and the way computers store text is relatively straight-forward: Characters (or possibly syllables, or pictograms, depending on how the language works) are mapped to sequences of ones and zeroes. Some encodings do also have more complicated rules (the mapping may not be direct, but the context or grouping of a character with other characters can govern the makeup of the bitstream, etc.), but generally speaking, digital text encoding can largely be treated as a simple substitution cipher, which means it is prone to basic cryptographic attacks like frequency analysis. Language archeologists have successfully accomplished far more complicated feats of decoding ancient scripts (I heartily recommend the book The Decipherment of Linear B, it's one of my favorite geeky heroic tales of applied human ingenuity).

That leaves the other information in an ebook beyond the raw text payload, i.e. things like chapter structure and formatting. Depending on the format those might take some educated guesswork to deduce, but the surface area of the problem seems small enough (at least with a regular novel; with some of the more multimedia-ladden children's books popping up in digital bookstores now the problem becomes a superset of the H.264 one) to be trodden successfully (in particular, most ebook formats right now use English keywords to notate such things, so once you have the text encoding figured out you pretty much have the structure and formatting).

That said, I'm fairly optimistic that the info to work with something like H.264 will survive thanks largely due to the open source movement. This is a big reason why open source is of grand importance to humanity in the long run: Beyond just yielding useful software (the open and free x264 H.264 encoder is the best in the industry), source code is also a serialization of knowledge and can serve as working documentation of a system. A spec is better, but reverse-engineering a video format from the codebase of a working encoder is possible (and reverse-engineering the programming language it's written in easier than reverse-engineering the codec otherwise).

So that leaves DRM as the real danger. Fortunately, DRM seems to be on the way out again. It's not working to prevent piracy and just has so many downsides like this one.

 

[Christopher]

...but generally speaking, digital text encoding can largely be treated as a simple substitution cipher, which means it is prone to basic cryptographic attacks like frequency analysis. Language archeologists have successfully accomplished far more complicated feats of decoding ancient scripts (I heartily recommend the book The Decipherment of Linear B, it's one of my favorite geeky heroic tales of applied human ingenuity).

It is so cool that you mention that book, because my Uncle Emmett is one of its protagonists. He was the cryptographer who worked up the frequency tables that gave Michael Ventris the key to cracking the problem. Just three weeks ago I attended a memorial service for Emmett in Madison, where he taught for most of his career, and I got to page through a copy of the the very dissertation that provided the crucial insights. It was an amazingly detailed and meticulous analysis with extensive tables and charts that must've taken ages to assemble. Which is a very Bennett-y kind of accomplishment, but Emmett in particular was a master of it.

There's also the more recent The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The STory of Michael Ventris by Andrew Robinson (no, not that Andrew Robinson). That one has even more cool stuff about my uncle.

 

[Sho]

^ Wow, that's an amazing connection - the world truly is small sometimes. And you hail from some great folks .

Decipherment was one of the first books I read in English outside of school, as an adolescent, and I found it deeply inspiring for a variety of reasons. There's the obvious take-away of a complex problem being solved by sheer ingenuity, but there are also so many lessons in that book: Ingenuity notwithstanding, thinking through a problem of that magnitude nevertheless takes time and tenacity. It's work, not a singular heureka moment. Additionally Ventris serves as a great example of the value of being broadly educated and interested, and of cross-disciplinary involvement: He's trained as an architect, not a linguist or archeologist, and yet makes a profound contribution to those fields. However, while Ventris is the focal point where many threads ultimately run together, it also takes the humble collaboration of many fine minds to achieve success.

Perhaps most profoundly, though, it's a great lesson of the need to follow the data and being willing to abandon initial assumptions when the data proves them wrong: Starting out, nobody believed Linear B could be a script for the Greek language - not even Ventris, who ultimately proved it was. But while he was certainly concerned and reluctant at first when his deductions pointed that way, ultimately he had the integrity and bravery to run with it.

It's a great story.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Ebooks, otoh, are just text, and the way computers store text is relatively straight-forward

Sure, but when I switched from Amiga to PowerMac, a friend converted my WordPerfect files for me. The conversion stripped out all formatting, leaving me with disks of raw data.

My next Mac didn't take disks, only CDs. A borrowed external hard drive took some of my disks but not others. It doesn't fit my iMac or MacBook Pro.

The great ST Apple IIe game ("The Kobayashi Alternative") I bought to use on a work computer sits useless on my bookshelf. Luckily, I can still read the manual that came with it.

 

[Sho]

Sure, but when I switched from Amiga to PowerMac, a friend converted my WordPerfect files for me. The conversion stripped out all formatting, leaving me with disks of raw data.

Word processor documents are actually much more complex than ebook formats, though. Most ebook formats offer authors far less options for and control over formatting and layout, since they need to leave the reading software the freedom to adapt the rendition of the content to different devices. And the formats that do offer word processor-like functionality are HTML-based and thus use plain text markup rather than binary, making them easier to deduce once you can read the text encoding.

That said, the open source movement has become quite good at reverse-engineering formats like WordPerfect's and writing import filters for its own word processors, e.g. LibreOffice Writer, Calligra Words or AbiWord (one of the authors of the libwpd implementation shared between them is actually an acquaintance of mine; this thread seems to be full of fun coincidental connections). If you still have the original files it wouldn't surprise me if you could do better now.

 

[AdmiralSteven]

I don't have nearly as many Trek books as some people on this board, but I keep mine on the book case. if at some point they become a problem, then I'll have to pack them up on a plastic bin and store them until the library is completed.

 

[Sho]

I forgot to mention: There are of course also Apple IIe emulators that will run that game on modern computers.

To get back to topic, how do you organize your Trek shelves? By series, author, chronologically, publishing order?

 

[Daddy Todd]

To get back to topic, how do you organize your Trek shelves? By series, author, chronologically, publishing order?

I used to sort them by series: Star Trek, TNG, DS9, VGR, etc. However, in this era of crossovers and mix'n'match characters, that became far too cumbersome, so a couple years ago I re-sorted them by Format (HC/TP fiction, MMPB fiction) and then by publication date.

Non-fiction is more complicated: Sorted first by HC/TP Oversize (8x10 or larger) HC/TP all smaller sizes, and MMPB, then sorted by author (except for biographies, which are sorted by subject.) This is kind of a work-in-progress, someday when I have a nice lazy weekend I need to tear down & rebuild the categories and re-sort them, because they're frankly a mess at present.

Odd-sized pieces, such as Franz Joseph's Star Trek Blueprints are always complicated to sort, so I might need to do some more thinking about where to put them.

Oh, and I almost forgot that I have separate categorizations for kids and YA titles, which have been essentially shoved into whatever hole I can find for them in the bookcases. Yeah, I need to get that all sorted out one day...

 

[Timewalker]

I'd like opinions please!
Some members of my family complain about the number of Star Trek novels I have, I just can't sell any of them.
How long do you all keep Star Trek novels?

James

35+ years and counting... And as someone upthread mentioned, there are far worse things you could be collecting.

As for what I do with them? I read them. Over and over and over.

And over again.

If you have no choice but to get rid of them, do us writers and our publisher a favor: stage a massive Star Trek novel book-burning, and call your local TV news stations to come and record it. Make a big show of accusing us of peddling anti-American, left-wing, socialist propaganda, then douse the pyramid of books (make sure to leave empty space inside for air flow) with lighter fluid and set them ablaze.

The resulting bump in public awareness and the cachet of seeing our books up in flames ought to boost sales and help us steal a few spots on the bestseller list from the Star Wars books.

I'm seriously disappointed that an author, of all people, would advocate book burning (even in a joking way - this is a joke, I hope?).

I have fewer than a dozen Star Wars books I plan to keep. I have an equal number I plan to get rid of. I have several hundred Star Trek books that have been toted through several moves and will come with me again.

To get back to topic, how do you organize your Trek shelves? By series, author, chronologically, publishing order?

By series, and chronologically within series - for the regular-sized books. After that, I organize them wherever they happen to fit my shelf space.

I've been collecting a lot of fanfic this past year, both online and the physical 'zines from the '70s and '80s. Thank goodness I've still got room for that stuff.

But it's coming down to who gets the shelves in my living room: Star Trek, Doctor Who, Dragonlance, or my historical novels? 'Cause there just isn't room for everybody!

Of course, if the landlord would let me put shelves on the walls in addition to my standalone shelves, this wouldn't be a problem.

 

[Sci]

If you have no choice but to get rid of them, do us writers and our publisher a favor: stage a massive Star Trek novel book-burning, and call your local TV news stations to come and record it. Make a big show of accusing us of peddling anti-American, left-wing, socialist propaganda, then douse the pyramid of books (make sure to leave empty space inside for air flow) with lighter fluid and set them ablaze.

The resulting bump in public awareness and the cachet of seeing our books up in flames ought to boost sales and help us steal a few spots on the bestseller list from the Star Wars books.

I'm seriously disappointed that an author, of all people, would advocate book burning (even in a joking way - this is a joke, I hope?).

Of course it's a joke.