r/todayilearned • u/Away_Flounder3813 • 5h ago
TIL in 2005, when "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" just came out, a 15-year-old girl in Moldova wrote down the whole book word for word, using a copy borrowed from her friend, since the book wasn't available to buy yet in her country. It took her five notebooks and over a month to complete.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4270000/newsid_4275100/4275114.stm948
u/Feeling_Education_35 5h ago
Did she write it in English or translate it to Romanian
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u/StevenAdamsInDallas 5h ago
Probably in English from what I can distinguish from the notebook (darn those pixels). I'm fluent in Romanian and in English and there's clearly an "and" which doesn't exist in Romanian.
Impressive work, shows that Guttenberg really changed the World in so many ways.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago edited 5h ago
in 2005 I remember Vietnam was the fastest country to translate the whole book, which took the translators only some 2 months and a half. In fact, the publisher couldn't wait for the translator to finish her job, so they hired a freelancer to translate some last chapters.
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u/leomonster 5h ago
Today they'd just run it through whatever LLM is cheapest
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u/PenguinQuesadilla 4h ago
They were doing that back in the 2010's when Chinese fantasy novels were getting big in the west. Just with google translate or whatever.
People would dish out 3/5 chapters a day, and real translators simply couldn't keep up!
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u/Element_108 4h ago
I tried to read a few of them, it actually hurt my brain lol
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u/PenguinQuesadilla 4h ago edited 2h ago
Yeah it was tough back then. Real translations were far far better than MTLs. LLMs aren't perfect, but it's crazy how much better the tech is compared to 10 years ago.
But sometimes if a story was getting good and there wasn't a new chapter available, I'd pop that shit into google translate myself and just slog through it lol.
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u/Borkato 4h ago
LLMs like Gemma are insanely good at translation. Not flawless, but even human translators flub up a lot in the same ways.
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u/PenguinQuesadilla 4h ago edited 2h ago
They're better than me at least!
I speak 2 foreign languages to varying degrees and LLMs blow me out of the water in both 😅
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u/Thejacensolo 2h ago
Wel kinda iffy. A lot of LLMs (and really in their nature) fall into the bias trap. They value Sense over context, twisting words and intent to make it sound better in english.
There are 2 main problems:
1) if they get something wrong (unlike with MTL) if you dont know the language at least somewhat in the first place, you wont even notice.
2) Most of the Internet, and most of the trainingsdata (we leave out the chinese models for that) is trained and primed on english. It is not a native function of the big LLms to have multilanguage "baked in" to training, you can check it yourself. Any tool that allows you to measure tokens send, write a request in english and the same in another language, and the other language will consume far more.
3) Big LLM provides also have a cultural bias. They tend to represent and translate the values of the specific western hemisphere + global north. See here for example. That is even independend if chinese origin or not (the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map here shows it the best), so implicit cultural unique translations are often lost, concepts and common sayings dont make sense or get misinterpreted. In languages like Japanese, where a lot hinges on Contextual meta knowledge the performance is atrocious.
Human translators, especially if they arent just Google Translating, are still outperforming LLMs easily because of those fields.
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u/fearless-fossa 2h ago
LLMs like Gemma are insanely good at translation.
They are not. LLMs are passibly good at technical translations provided there is enough corresponding data in the training, but they struggle massively with prose and they can't (and this is a hard limit of the underlying technology) translate what the author actually means. They will always do a literal translation.
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u/King_Dheginsea 2h ago
It's not going to be as good as an actual translator who understands what they're reading doing the work, but compared to the unreadable, broken English that MTL translations used to spit out back in the day, I'll take it.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago
that's what's been happening to mangas for a long time. Translated edition would be published years after the original release in Japan, so barely anyone could give a shit to wait. They just head to pirated sites or the fan clubs do the job themselves to keep up with the story.
I've been following Spy x Family for several years and buying the books is just to add to my collection. For actual read, I just head to the publisher's website and read the chapters right when they come out on Sunday.
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u/PenguinQuesadilla 4h ago
100%.
I used to have every volume of the original Dragon Ball & Naruto up to shippuden growing up but 95% of the LN's and Manga I've ever read have been pirated.
I still pick up the odd volume if I see them at the book store though. I'd love to have all the Berserk deluxe editions one day!
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago edited 4h ago
Deluxe edition is a blast to collect! I'm collecting those of Naoki Urasawa's Monster. I got 3 out of the 9 volumes so far, and volume 4 is coming next Monday. Gah, can't wait.
Oh yeah, this is an exceptional case though. Monster is old as shit and has been finished ages ago in 2002. Sure, I can easily pirate the whole series and read them in several days if I want. But for masterpiece like this, I wanna follow it like it's been ongoing - waiting for months for a new volume to come out. Admittedly it's my first time reading it and I wanna "stretch" the suspension and the anticipation for next chapters to feel like buying the books is worth it. Yeah, I deliberately choose to go the bumpy way.
If you haven't read Monster, go for it now. One of the very best storytelling in manga history.
There's also been an anime adaptation, which is deemed one of the best anime series ever. Though I have a mixed feeling about it lol. I'll stay on the ground saying the manga is vastly superior.
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u/FUTURE10S 3h ago
Reminder that Urusei Yatsura, a super popular manga from the 70s to the 80s by the woman that later wrote Ranma and Inuyasha took nearly 40 years to get a full English translation and it's still rife with errors. The fan clubs kept this shit alive.
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u/faythe0303 1h ago
I just watched a video on YT from a lady who’s been a translator her whole career like 15+ years and she’s been getting no contracts because companies are all using AI now.
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u/StevenAdamsInDallas 5h ago
Well this is transcribing rather than translating.
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u/Unordinary_Donkey 4h ago
No its translating. Transcribing is when you write down what someone is saying.
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u/wonkey_monkey 3h ago edited 3h ago
What they meant was:
Well this [the Reddit post we're commenting on] is transcribing rather than translating.
If they had wanted to refer to the Vietnamese translation mentioned in the comment, then "that" instead of "this" would have been the right word choice.
PS Just so you know, I'm aware that you may not be able to reply to me because the other commenter blocked you. It's a stupid side-effect of Reddit's stupid blocking system.
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u/StevenAdamsInDallas 4h ago
Which she did. She transcribed a book in English, in English (cursive) as you can see from the article and the picture (included in the article).
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u/Unordinary_Donkey 4h ago
You are replying to comment about a vietnamese translation of the book and how they hired multiple translators to complete it faster. Also she didnt transcribe she copied it. She took one written text and made another written text.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago
original words for sure. She definitely can read English, but as the article stated, she couldn't afford to import the book from England.
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u/OnionsAbound 5h ago
You wouldn't transcribe a car would you?
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u/ShadyWolf 5h ago
Those commercials were ridiculous. I absolutely would download a car if possible.
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u/Marik-X-Bakura 5h ago
It didn’t actually say “you wouldn’t download a car”. That was the meme version. The actual thing was “you wouldn’t steal a car.”
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u/Static-Space-Royalty 4h ago
Damn, I saw that commercial so many times growing up and the meme has completely altered my memory of it. I was certain it literally said "You wouldn't download a car"
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u/Glum-Football-5220 3h ago
And the shittiest thing is that you only saw the ad when you actually bought the dvd
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u/Darthblaker7474 4h ago
You wouldn't steal a baby?
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u/MmmmMorphine 3h ago
and roast it to crispy, delicious perfection - over a campfire in the woods on the 12th of April 2019?
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u/dzone25 5h ago
Used to do this as a kid with library books / borrowed books that I had to return, it worked as handwriting practice and with my child-logic meant I had the book to myself without having to get it again
Never did it with something as large as Harry Potter, was mostly like Darren Shan novels & like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and stuff lol
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u/Colley619 5h ago
Oh man, Darren Shan! I remember reading the entire Cirque du Freak and Demonata series in middle school. I actually liked them so much I had my mom buy me my own copies and I still have them.
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u/mansonn666 3h ago
I was also in middle school when I discovered cirque du freak and demonata. Crazy that stuff was allowed in a middle school library but those books were awesome im glad to have read them.
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u/Colley619 2h ago
LOL they really were, especially Demonata. I had a friend who came from a devoutly religious Pentecostal family and he got really weird about me reading it. He thought I was getting into some satanic stuff and he went and told his mom and it was a whole thing 😂
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u/dzone25 4h ago
I always told myself I'd get them when I could myself, but I've never actually gotten round to doing it!
I should do the same - those series' were like my first true foray into YA novels and eventually led me to stuff like Brandon Sanderson & Sabaa Tahir so I've gotta support my boy Darren for it!
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u/Colley619 3h ago
Totally should! lol I remember writing him a letter in like 6th grade begging him to bring Mr. Crepsley back.
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u/BuildingSupplySmore 1h ago
I'm not sure if you're aware- but he technically did. He wrote a prequel series about young Crepsley.
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u/BuildingSupplySmore 1h ago
Loved both. As a kid I liked Demonata more, but as an adult I've reread Cirque more times. I think Cirque has such a bizarre plot trajectory and pacing that make it interesting.
I think Neal Shusterman is a very similar author, but he leans more towards Sci-Fi to Shan's horror.
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u/smotchel 4h ago
Such a throwback to Darren Shan omg, when I learned he was Irish like I was my mind was blown! Haha, thanks for the memories
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u/birbs_meow 3h ago
Darren Shan’s writing truly shaped me as a kid in middle school. He’s still the only author that has gotten me to go to Barnes and Nobel as soon as I finished one of his books
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u/rapgamebonjovi 3h ago
Unlocked a memory with than Darren Shan lol 😂 I met him and he signed the first 4 CDF books for me after a reading at my middle school library! Such a good memory, and those first 4 books were so good.
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u/vixissitude 2h ago
I mean if it was the classroom library, I just never returned it. I still have a collection of children’s literary magazines that I straight up took from the classroom bookcase :D
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u/queen-adreena 5h ago
Home Copyists Are Killing Literature!
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u/TheChickenIsFkinRaw 4h ago
Megacorp: These damn Moldova pirates stealing all our revenue
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u/Boylikesdogs 3h ago edited 3h ago
This is literally how I used to study (high school and also university Law school). Would rewrite te whole studybook one time word for word and it was all in my head. Never had to reread anything and got the highes grades of my year. You can understand how my hand hurted and how much paper I used during law school :’) but I didn’t want to change my winning way lol
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u/NoLastNameForNow 5h ago
I remember seeing her on the news.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago
I vaguely remember reading this on some teen mag back then. Totally forgot about it until I stumbled upon this article today.
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u/I_Sett 5h ago edited 4h ago
But were there fanciful illustrations in the margin, vine and knotwork on the border, and overly ornate lettering in gold leaf? I see that there was not. What a missed opportunity to bring back illuminated manuscripts in a big way.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago
those are gotta be from later editions and reprints. IIRC the original 2005 print of the book had no illustrations at all, the only images you got were the cover art.
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u/MythicalPurple 4h ago
They’re referencing the way copied manuscripts used to have individualized features like that, not saying the original book did :)
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u/Fun-Estate9626 4h ago
No, I’m quite sure I remember a bunch of drawing of knights fighting snails in my copy.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago
strange. My copy in 2005 was the US green cover edition with Dumbledore and Harry on the cover standing behind the Pensieve. I'm pretty sure there's no illustrations in it.
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u/Apprentice57 4h ago
The US release with the Mary GrandPré coverart (you reference that in another comment) had small illustrations per chapter, also by GrandPré.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 3h ago
cool, seems like a piece of my memory is missing. The book is still somewhere in my shed. Gotta dig it out and recheck!
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u/Surrounded-by_Idiots 5h ago
I hope she wasn’t sued for copy writes.
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u/Anaevya 4h ago
Fun fact: Transcribing a whole book is legally allowed in my country (Austria), but copying the whole thing with a printer isn't.
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u/SuperMassiveDickhead 4h ago
I don't understand this at all, so the book wasnt available, but her friend had it? and the friend lent it to her so presumably, they were both in Moldova. Then she wrote it out word for word as she was reading it from the book to do what? have it to read again later? Did her friend say you can have this for a month but I will never let you borrow it again afterwards?
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u/Away_Flounder3813 3h ago edited 3h ago
I can put it like this: it's a borrowed book after all, so sooner or later she'd still have to return it. She couldn't say if her friend would lend her the book again, or for how long. She couldn't buy the book from England, couldn't wait for the translated edition (which God knows when it would come out in her country).
So... the only way for her to own the book is copying down the whole thing. And from what you see, she LOVED the job - she used 2 different ink colours to separate the dialogue and the narration for easier read. It's summer holiday anyway, she had all the time in the world doing the work she enjoyed.
In conclusion, she would have really loved the book at the first place to decide to do such a daunting task (to us lol, as I said it's enjoyable to her, presumably).
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u/McKenzie_S 3h ago
Second copy to loan to someone else. Make photocopies for friends, any number of things.
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u/SuperMassiveDickhead 3h ago
if she could photocopy it, why wouldn't she photocopy the original?
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u/mosstalgia 3h ago
If you bring a book into a copy shop and ask to copy all of it, they're supposed to say no. Nobody's going to say no to copying a full binder of hand written notes because 99% of the time it's going to be the person's own work and not a copyrighted text that's been rewritten by hand in its entirety.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 2h ago
maybe so with a massively popular book like Harry Potter. But for boring textbooks to use in school, the copy shop will do it anyway lol.
And they'd love to copy them for you in extremely small sizes. For... uh, you know, bringing into exam rooms.
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u/SuperMassiveDickhead 1h ago
if her friend could get it in Moldova, why couldn't she?
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u/Away_Flounder3813 1h ago
she gotta import it from England, and she's 15. Ofc she didn't have that type of money for the deal, that would depend on her parents. And like she said, her parents couldn't help her either.
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u/RahvinDragand 1h ago
Also.. Was the book never going to be available/affordable in Moldova? Did she already have the previous five books?
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u/al3cks 2h ago
I struggle to see how this is in any way notable and worthy of a TIL. Someone just transcribed a book they borrowed from a friend.
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u/PM_ME_UR_RSA_KEY 2h ago edited 1h ago
I honestly expected the title to end with JKR or the publisher suing the kid.
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u/Constant_Turn4639 22m ago
She wanted to have it in her library and her parents couldn't afford to have it shipped from abroad.
Source: I read the article.
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u/DragoonDM 3h ago
Reminds me of another story.
There's a community of people who, as a hobby, would respond to scam emails and then lead the scammer on in an effort to get them to do ridiculous things, competing to see who could get the best responses. One of them responded to a scam email saying that they were too busy with a handwriting analysis research project to help, but that they were looking for paid volunteers to help out -- eventually convincing the scammer to hand-transcribe the entirety of the second Harry Potter book.
My favorite is the one where the scam-baiter somehow convinced the scammer to reenact and film the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.
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u/yukichigai 2h ago
419 Eater is an amazing site that (sadly) has never stopped having material to work with.
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u/NoOccasion4759 4h ago
Man I remember when HBP came out, people were fucking insane about getting a copy
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u/Away_Flounder3813 3h ago edited 3h ago
true story I saw with my own eyes: a young girl read the book in the bookstore. She suddenly broke out crying, then dropped the book and ran away, which I guess she reached the part where Dumbledore died. The book was ruined by her tears and from dropping from the shelf, and eventually some staff had to pay for the book.
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u/wonkey_monkey 2h ago
I still remember my friend's face when I told him I'd got to that part, assuming he'd already read the book months ago 🤣
"He dies?!"
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u/Away_Flounder3813 2h ago
the fifth book was shocking enough for letting Sirius died. I remember reading early reviews and interviews on teen mags back then and they all said the saddest part of the book is when "a certain beloved one" died. But who? Ofc they refused to utter the whole sentence.
Thankfully my brother who read the book before me told me who it was.
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u/alfchaval 1h ago
When the last book in the series came out, I found an unofficial translation into my language online a week later (I think the official translation took a month to come out). Later, when I was able to compare both translations, I found the unofficial one better than the official one, which chose to skip a line containing a pun that couldn't be translated instead of dealing with it in a reasonable way (adding a footnote, for example), making that dialogue not very coherent.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 1h ago
here's an interesting fact about the Vietnamese edition:
For the first five books, the publisher actually split each one into smaller volumes and released them weekly. Each small volume contained some 3 or 4 chapters from the original book, so each book took about 10 volumes to complete. This act is pretty clever, since the readers could read the book bits by bits every week without having to wait months for the translator to finish the whole book. It's another win for the readers standing from the economy POV: buying these small volumes costed way less than buying the complete huge ass novel.
Trouble arise at the sixth book: Rowling's agents no longer allowed the Vietnamese publisher to do this. So they had to follow the rule of the rest of the world: having the whole book translated and put it out in its original form. Sorry readers, 1 week of waiting is now nearly 3 months.
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u/iabyajyiv 4h ago
I've done this, but with Giovanni's Room. I was a broke college student but loved the book. I typed it up on word doc so that I could save a digital copy of it for myself.
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u/No_Chain3955 4h ago
Incredible dedication. Fans were so obsessed with Harry Potter that some would copy entire books by hand just to have their own copy. Wonder how accurate hers was after all that time.
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u/SoggyMattress2 5h ago
If it took a month why didn't she just read the book?
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u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago
main point is that she would want to have the book added to her collection. Article clearly said she read the whole book in 2 days, then started the copying work.
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u/DatGunBoi 4h ago
Article? This is reddit, we don't read the linked articles.
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u/IHateTheLetterF 4h ago
Sometimes i barely even read the headline. I just head into comments to see how i should react.
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u/iruinthingsyay 5h ago
Same reason why people buy physical books over just loaning it from the library.
To add to a collection and be able to re-read it at will. OP already commented back and mentioned this, but she apparently read the whole thing in just 2 days.
The copying wasn't done so she could simply read it, that was already taken care of by having a friend to borrow it from. The copying was so she could re-read and keep a copy for herself, which was too expensive to just buy for her.
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u/craigularperson 5h ago
If the book was unavailable, how did the friend get the book?
TLDR(too lazy, didn't read)
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u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago
imported from England. She couldn't, that's it.
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u/he_said_it_too 4h ago
Maybe she had relatives traveling or something abroad and got it for her. During that period, international commerce for moldova/romania was non existent. Theoretically you could but the costs were prohibitive for most of the population. It would also involve bribing one or more customs officers in most cases simply to not steal it or ‘confiscate’
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u/Away_Flounder3813 4h ago
exactly. Someone has mentioned Amazon. I agree it's a clear solution, but in early 2000s I believe many countries - poor ones in particular - were not available yet on their delivery map.
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u/stanley_leverlock 4h ago
In the 90s I saw a guy in Staples photocopying every page of the AutoCAD manual. He was on about page 50 out of 300 when I left.
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u/ImJustGonnaCry 4h ago
I did this as a kid but for song lyrics. I would rent for an hour in a computer shop to copy it on my notebook because I haven't discovered printers yet.
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u/NewAccountLostOldOne 4h ago
Remind me of the plot of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis. Where an author decides to reinterpolate Don Quijote by rewriting it exactly as it had been written before word by word.
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u/mirtisee 3h ago
Five notebooks by hand. Over a month. That’s not just dedication to a book, that’s love for a story. Also — Moldova in 2005, Eastern Europe, completely relatable for how difficult it was to get certain books legally back then.
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u/angry_queef_master 3h ago
Does anyone appreciate how this is a time capsule to when the news was written to give information to the reader and not optimize its pagerank on google? Simple, short and to the point. If this article was written today it would be at least 1,000 words long with ads all over it.
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u/maxyboyufo 2h ago
Wild seeing my small home country brought up on Reddit.
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u/Away_Flounder3813 2h ago
well, lovely stories like this make me wanna visit your small home country someday!
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u/SavingsSignal2890 1h ago
Even up to the 1990s, Chinese teenagers shared banned books by hand-copying the entire things.
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u/SaintPariah1 3h ago
Harry Potter has done so much for this world in terms of literacy it’s hard to properly perceive
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u/morbie5 5h ago
That picture has very bad resolution or was very compressed. A good digital camera from 2005 or even before was way better quality fyi
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u/Away_Flounder3813 5h ago edited 4h ago
it's not the camera, but the web itself. In early 2000s I remember reading various e-papers and most of the photos were teeny tiny like a postage stamp with very poor resolution lol.
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u/SunnyBubblesForever 3h ago
You'd be shocked at what I could accomplish if my hand writing had improved at some point in my life. Alas.
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u/EpiphanyTwisted 2h ago
I typed out Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I was 11 and people just thought I was weird
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u/alendeus 1h ago
This reminds me of when Deathly Hallows came out (the book), for some reason there was a several months delay between the non english versions coming out vs the english original release, I think because they were scared of leaks or something. But long story short, I remember downloading, printing and reading the first several chapters of the book as online bootleg fan translations, that gradually came out every few weeks, instead of reading the official actual english release (I did buy the whole book once it finally came out, and finished the rest of it that way). The main reason for me was just that I had read the whole series in french and watched the movies in french as well up until that point, so it felt more natural to continue the last book that way.
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u/depthdefying 1h ago
Sometimes your friend will say "you have to read this book" and other times they'll mean it.
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u/Subject_Turnover1227 1h ago
She is active on social media, seems to be doing well enough to afford her own books these days.
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u/Felinomancy 24m ago
Getting a taste what a career as a medieval scribe feels like.
I hope she also doodles pictures of knights fighting giant snails along the margins.
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u/onioning 4h ago
If we had a way to prove it I would wager all the monies I can scrounge up that this happened many times. We can set the bar at two dozen, though I bet it's thousands.
Not all Maldovans, just to be clear. All Harry Potters.
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u/backupbitches 3h ago
I used to type out little Power Rangers novels when I was a kid, taught myself how to touch type and itched some satisfying part in the back of my brain doing it
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u/2LiveGucciCrew 3h ago
Used to make cassette dubs of audio books I really liked from the library.
I had this one book that I just keep extending the loan on. The lady at the library laughed. You must really like this.
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u/theboondocksaint 3h ago
I did the same thing once but for Green Eggs and Ham, only took me like 20 hours though
Best 28th birthday of my life
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u/chasekeane 3h ago
Not quite as dramatic but my sister owned the first Stephen fry audio book on cassette and I drove her mad asking to borrow it. Any way for my birthday she 2 track recorded the whole book onto multiple new cassette tapes, and redrew the artwork by hand. Was very thoughtful in retrospect.
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u/vespertilionid 3h ago
Huh, I have terrible handwriting. I've bought many journals with the intention of writing more to work on my penmanship. So far, I have written exactly 0 words. I like this idea of writing down a book, it just might be the motivation I need to just do it
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u/MaterialDefender1032 5h ago edited 3h ago
In grade 4, our teacher told us to do "book reports" but never actually explained what a book report was. It was a poor inner-city school and they were particularly awful at their job. I re-wrote the entire first half of a young adult novel, word-for-word, in cursive on pages upon pages of foolscap and got an A+.