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Remember Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper?

Plenty of writing found on an alien planet but no way (at first) to translate it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnilingual

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I may have been reading or re-reading that when I wrote the post originally. Highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t run across it.

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Also Stanislaus Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub"

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I was just re-reading it about a month ago. It's 313th of over 600 books in my epub file/pile on my hard drive.

I know it's 313th as I just spent 3 days figuring out how to, in my Linux world, pull out a list of items in a file, goose it over to Libreoffice and line number each item.

OK, yep it took me 3 days, maybe I'm slow bit I'm persistent. grin.

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I wonder if the loss of books accounts for any of society's ills?

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It's not the loss of physical books. It's that people stopped reading the classics, and than happened before the loss of physical books.

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