this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Funny: Home of the Haha

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[–] [email protected] 166 points 1 year ago (4 children)

White paper and black text is the norm because until relatively recently, it was much more cost effective... This could be done cheaply with modern tech, and should 100% be a thing...

I'd buy the hell out of dark mode books.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That question was just as stupid as that "you wouldn't download a car" ad. Hell yeah, I would! And read dark mode books!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At this point I can’t even remember what was actually in that ad and what was in the IT Crowd bit and memes making fun of it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Its context was that it was a plea from media companies to stop pirating movies/music. Its more “You wouldn’t steal a car, well downloading pirated content is the same”

Ot played during movie previews

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was in college for Computer Science when these ads must have just started because in a Computer Ethics class, I remember the teacher actually using "you wouldn't download a car, would you" argument.

I recall answering... "Would the original owner still have their copy? Yes? Then yes, yes I would download a car." The teacher did not like me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Pedantic as hell but justified, I like you.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Limited edition of 999 hand-numbered copies

But I want it!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I was going to say "but that uses dye" and then I realized we use a bunch of chemicals to bleach pages white anyway.

Though, you'd imagine that they would essentially need to bleach the pages then dye it...

It wouldn't be great to start requiring more resources to create pages.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Bleaching is to mainly remove tannins, to make the paper white, and to stay white over time. It also makes the paper better able to absorb and retain ink. You don't need any of those properties if you're printing in white, because you can't use absorbent type ink in something like this, it won't show well. You could dye in lieu of bleaching (and this might be cheaper actually).

Printing the text is the challenge. The ink has to be on the paper instead of in the paper... The methods required to do that and come up with a quality product have existed for a very long time, but they'd be methods used to create high end things like wedding invitations and greeting cards and not bulk products like books. I believe the first tech that could do this economically at scale was the photocopier (maybe mimeograph?), which basically melts plastic onto the surface, and could apply clear white text onto black paper as easily as black on white.

I would imagine though, that the tech that could do this in the most economically viable way, would be to ablate the text in with lasers, similar to thermal printing. That would actually reduce the consumables used, maybe even by a lot. likely would overall entail much less hazardous/caustic consumables too... Dark mode printing could possibly be incredibly "green" :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Buy an ebook reader and you can do it today.