Internet is "changing the world of collecting"

A little humor from Doug, very little...

Necro-Threads rising... Happy Halloween !!!

BTW... no mod is safe.

 

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I know it seems the web has been with us forever. I am sure that younger folks can’t imagine a world without it.... Though this is a ten year old thread it speaks volumes about how we saw our hobby being intertwined into it. Way cool necro-thread.

 

I remember when I was a young man I helped my dad look through rolls of coins trying to fill those old blue Wittman albums. Now with the internet you just click- click and find anything your want and delivered to your door in a few days. Don't really know if you can call that collecting or not but I guess it is what it is. Sorry for the rant, just thinking about good times with my dad.

 

What's also nice about books is that they are often third-party peer-reviewed.

How often is information on the internet treated to such scrutiny?
Yeah, I didn't think so, either.

 

On the other hand, I just picked up a classic book (circa 1965) on coin "varieties and oddities", written by one Frank Spadone. It lists a great number of coins with machine doubling or other forms of damage, along with fanciful premium values for them. I understand that Mr. Spadone was in the business of selling such coins. He apparently found a publisher, or a series of publishers, who weren't concerned about the truth of his claims as long as the book sold well.

More recently, I remember the "ancient astronaut" excitement in the 1970s. Lots of books, making lots of fanciful claims -- and they consistently sold much better than any books pointing out that the claims were garbage.

Misinformation wasn't conceived on the Internet.

 

You can if you are an advanced collector and just click-click WON'T find you what you are looking for, at least not anytime soon. So you have to keep looking and looking and looking then hopefully one day it pops up. And then hopefully you have the money available and can get it before the next guy.

 

Unless one reads the equivalent of an entire book on the internet (which can cause headaches), the internet will never be able to match the depth or breadth of any book. Learning something to an expert level requires deep reading that the internet doesn't usually provide on any subject. The internet is great for introductions or quick dips into a subject, but it will never beat a book for obtaining true knowledge of a subject.

 

I couldn't disagree more, mainly because I often end up reading much MORE than the equivalent of an entire book on the Internet. (A good display is well worth the money, and nearsightedness is the opposite of a handicap. )

A book doesn't let you pick an unfamiliar term, search up several references on it, get a good overview of what it means, and then pick right back up where you left off in the original work. A major library does, but even there, the process is time-consuming and disruptive enough that you often skip it.

 

You need to learn to use the internet and a book together. I replaced a book form dictionary with the internet a while ago. Then you can do exactly what you said. The internet is good for looking things up, of course, but you have to work much harder on the internet for depth. The internet is unfortunately not a very deep place, but it does contain a lot of information. I don't disagree with that. Also remember that I said "unless one reads the equivalent of an entire book on the internet," so I basically agree with you on that point.

Also, every eye doctor I've seen has told me that prolonged exposure to computer screens, though less so for today's flat screens, is hard on the eyes because the eyes have a hard time finding a focal point due to the pixellation of the images, which subtlety vibrates. I spend all day in front of these things, so I ask a lot of questions about exposure risk. I personally couldn't stand reading an entire book in one or a few sittings on a computer screen. Some e-readers are okay, though.

 

Former ANA President and president of Krause Publications, Clifford Mishler, calls collecting "a gene you do not inherit." Something special, something ineffable defines collectors as a type of person. Sometimes it appears in families: Melvin and George Fuld are a classic example. Usually, even in families, it is more by association (uncles, cousins, in-law) than by strict genetic transfer.

 

Just by analogy, we look to the ancient Greeks for the roots of science. But, Democritus and his atom and even Empedocles suggesting based on fossils that mountains were once under water was not science. Science is a very specific way of examining your experiential world. Science qua science could not exist before the Age of Reason (circa 1650 forward).

So, too, with collecting. Spink & Son was founded in 1666. It was the Encyclopedists of the French Enlightenment who labeled the Classical era, the Dark Ages, and the Middle Ages. Only when antiquity was defined as something different from today could collectors pursue it. And, yes, the roots of that renewed interest in the ancient civilizations can be found in the Renaissance.

Think also of the lack of periodical publications for collectors. Did the emergence of collector magazines change (i.e. "ruin") collecting?

 

That is a whole other discussion, but let me suggest something, being a professional writer. I write online, as I am doing now. I have a blog. On my blog I write whatever I want because in most cases, I get paid to write what other people want.

The upside to writing for pay is that the editors oversee the work. They do more than check spelling and grammar. An editor has an over-arching view that the author does not (usually). The editor suggests paths for depth of presentation and improvement of the work that the author does not (typically) perceive. I am working now on a feature article for The Numismatist. The editor offered many good suggestions for improving the manuscript that I sent in. Note, however, that I have told this same story in print three times before. I know my facts. But those other publications do not have professional editors. They took what I sent and were happy for it and it was good work, but they had no expertise at collaborating with writers.

And, yes, then there is the proofreading. You don't get that on the Internet.

That said, when I worked at Coin World, we had a popular book in the company library that managing editor Bill Gibbs wrote a note in forbidding us to cite it. The book was just too wrong on too many points.

Easily the two most popular works are Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem by Amir D. Aczel (New York and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996) and Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh (New York: Walker, 1997; Anchor Doubleday, 1998). I found the Aczel book to be contaminated with errors. I found no mistakes in Singh’s work.
https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/06/two-books-on-fermats-last-theorem.html​

So, yes, we know that books have errors. But the Internet has more. For all of the egegious examples you can find about failures in print, you can find thousands more of the same online.

Correcting errors online is also easier and potentially more powerful. It is one of the many reasons why I subscribe to the E-Sylum. (https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum/)

Overall, "print versus Internet" is a multifaceted topic.

 

Yes, that is another point. Editors send articles to reviewers. There are stories of areas in physics where one reviewer had to pass on doing the work because they knew even with the name removed who wrote it. And there are stories where that confidentiality was breached and compromised. But, yes, overall, significant works get reviewed by peers.

I mentioned sending an article to the ANA. They sent to someone else (two someone elses) to be reviewed. On the other hand, I reviewed a chapter in a Whitman book about paper money of Texas before it was published.

You don't get that on the Internet.

 

Those were two different experiences. And as you note, you miss the time you spent with your Dad. I don't know if dads and kids click-click-click together these days, but I am pretty sure that some dads and kids still look through rolls of coins together. (And that applies to the others kinds of collecting, of course.)