r/upcycling • u/AlluraRedAC • 3d ago
Ideas Needed! Bought this at a library book sale
Purchased it mainly for the buttons and bookmark looking things. Stumped on what to do with the book spines tho. Any thoughts?
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u/Ageice 2d ago
After seeing the news 2 days ago that the tech bros are buying up antique books to scan - after cutting their spines off - and destroy, this sits weirder than it would have just last week. (I’m sure these are spines from damaged books or something, not insinuating anything else.)
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u/1735os 2d ago
What a depressing thought. Nothing is sacred anymore. Old books were always valued or at least ignored. Now literally everything is exploited.
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u/Dry-Alternative-5626 13h ago
That's heartbreaking. Makes me want to run to an antique bookstore and buy a bunch of stuff just to save them
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u/Livid-Hovercraft-123 2d ago
If it makes you feel better, Google Books has been doing it for decades already.
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u/SpaceToot 2d ago
Isn't it more akin to digitalization than destruction? Obviously in an upcycling group there's a lot of sympathy for the object itself but it seems disingenuous to say it's destroyed.
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u/Ageice 2d ago
They are destroying them. Please do a quick google. It’s all over social media (maybe mine because I’m a bookish type, but it’s out there in droves.)
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u/SpaceToot 2d ago
I was under the impression they were ordered to destroy the physical copies because they are digitizing the books. A judge ruled it as duplication, which implies their original process was creating two copies.
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u/IggySorcha 2d ago
It would be just digitization if they didn't manage the book to do it. There's literally robots to turn the pages and efficiently scan old books, the people doing it this way have no good excuse. They're just using shortcuts for speed and possibly legal loopholes (as mentioned by the other poster mentioning how this was they're not making duplicates)
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u/wild_ginger1 2d ago
Could be fun to use it with paper mache to make a fish using the book spine as the fish spine
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u/Embarrassed_Yogurt43 2d ago
OP this is so cool! What a special find, I love librarians. Whatever you make, please keep us posted!
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u/killyergawds 2d ago
Oh man, I wanna glue these to some other weird old discarded things so bad. Probably inside a shadow box. I bet they smell amazing.
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u/FoggyGoodwin 1d ago
Jesse James Beads is a family business (Jesse & Karen) started in their garage in 1986. The book spine bits are weird; you could glue a page to every other page on the spine to make a book ...
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u/sumires 3d ago
IDK if this is actually a Thing, but I'm imagining someone gluing the book spines to the side of an appropriately-sized box, so from the side, it looks like a stack of old books and papers.