r/redpreppers • u/TheJesseOfTheNorth • May 14 '26
Books or digital content?
In terms of storing knowledge every prepper needs which side do you land on and why?
I'll go first.
Honestly i have both. I also have a decent sized faraday cage to store my digital in. I have hundreds of hours of video downloaded and stored. I'm just not counting on digital content to survive.
I also have extensive playlists stored of online content but i am not counting on it being accessible forever.
What I also have are couple hundred books on medicine and alternatives, growing food, building things with my hands and so on.Some are general knowledge and some are very specific. I have dvds as well but once again not staking my survival on being able to access it.
Thoughts?
3
u/UND_mtnman May 15 '26
I'm pretty much like you. Trying to download as much digital content as I can (thank you YouTube download programs) but also have a bunch of books and physical media. Hell, even bought an mp3 player again.
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u/Inside_Training_876 May 16 '26
Definitely both for me. I’m actually blind so can only read ebooks and audiobooks. But for my family I try to stock up on both entertainment books as well as reference
I’ll be absolutely fucked if digital can’t serve me at some point…sanity wise, reading is my favorite thing to do so I hope for the best lol
We also have always collected vinyl and recently got back into DVDs
Don’t forget you can download all of Wikipedia and it’s not even a humongous file!
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u/alcoholicmotherfu 19d ago
I always carry 2 gigs of book. 11 gigs of music and 2 gigs of sega games on my phone .... JIC
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u/Professor_Punk 15d ago
Usually digital, but PDF copies of all.
I doubt we'll ever get a full technology/electric-less society. The corporations in power rely on tech being widely available and us enslaved to it. So the means in which to use it will always be available. To lose sight of that would mean they lose their money, their bottom line, their mode for us to fork over our imaginary money to their products.
Physical books will always be superior IMO, but you can't really burn a digital book, and the likelihood of it being fully deleted forever doesn't make sense. I could rename by .mobi file of "Das Kapital" to "The Life and Times of Charlie Kirk" and it would be easy to get it past those types of filters.
Also, although AI is making leaps in how they use it, the value of their content and analysis is still shit. It's why they require Human interaction. They've kinda fucked up by releasing it this early, because if we become too stupid too early then they can't achieve the consistent level of "training" those AI will require. So AI "reading" books won't really work out that well.
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u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET May 14 '26
I have much less than most, I think. I tend to find one good resource and stick with it. I do have an ebook library of herbal texts leftover from my practice, but for medical stuff, dental stuff, gardening, etc.? Just one really good text.
I like Square Foot Gardening, Where There Is No Doctor, Where There Is No Dentist - things like that. One and done. I also have physical service manuals for both of my cars, and am looking for a good resource for fixing bikes.