anybody noticed this before?

[miriam_e]

When you put volumes of books on a shelf the information inside is organised in an odd fashion. You start at the front of the first volume and move through to its end, then jump over to the start of the second volume and go through to its end, towards the first volume, and so on. This is quite discontinuous.

And it isn't any better if, like the Japanese, you read right to left.

Comments

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

But one gets away with it, because one doesn't read volumes of books at a time; one generally picks up a volume at a time, and a volume is internally consistent with how one reads.

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

The other nifty thing about the scheme in your second diagram is that the titles are presented in the correct order when reading spines on the shelf (or when the books are piled in a stack...you pick from the top of the stack, etc. From a data-organisation/retrieval POV, this makes a lot of sense).

[gillen.livejournal.com]

Heh. I was once similarly obsessed and redid all my bookshelves to stack the books vertically on their sides so the information flowed seamlessly from top to bottom.

This is an old old error

[senseless.livejournal.com]

Clearly the binding on books has been put on the wrong side.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. It is probably why is seems rarely noticed too.

We have an amazing ability to compartmentalise information. In this particular case it is completely unimportant... but tickles me somehow. :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Actually, the second diagram has the spines the wrong way around for a left-to-right reader. But they are the right way for stacked volumes. The trouble with a stack is the difficult in getting at volumes near the bottom.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

heheheheh :)
You sound as obsessive as me. :)

Re: This is an old old error

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

heheheh :D
This response had me laughing aloud. Thank you.

Re: This is an old old error

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Just re-thinking your reply. If the books are inserted into boxes, the way some DVD sets are these days then the spine of those boxes reverse the order and everything works out neat... like your (joking?) suggestion of the spine being on the wrong side.

I had assumed you were joking, because the binding is what holds the pages together and it doesn't matter which side the binding is on because the books will still open exactly the same way. But if you were referring to switching the label on the edge (using a box the volume slides into, or a flap over the non-spine edge), then yes, that fixes everything.

From Your Drawings

[senseless.livejournal.com]

It appeared to me if the binding were on the other side people being people would turn the stack around so the binding is out but now the books are ordered 3 2 1 in spite of being read left to right and everything is fixed in the my Universe.

[lilygoat.livejournal.com]

You may have just ruined my life. I'll spend the next several years tearing out my hair and trying to reorg my books without them being "wrong" to my OCD sense...I can't stack them, I can't put them chronologically backwards...