First off, we should acknowledge that your argument has shifted significantly - from an ontological to a practical concern. The ontological question, whether the archive exists or not, is independent from the practical question of whether or not it is useful. Initially you said that no archive could contain more than ~10^80 objects because the number of atoms in the universe placed an upper limit on its contents. Now you say that this website does not contain its books because of the amount of work necessary to retrieve them. Would you consider this to be different if the quantity of texts was less than 10^80? If not, we should recognize that you have shifted from your earlier argument, which was untenable.
As for your present argument, i would first point out that you should not treat quantitative differences as essential differences. Any archival system requires some sort of key system for retrieval. Print libraries have the Dewey decimal system, the internet has URLs, and libraryofbabel.info has its book locations, strings of letters and numbers which you are correct to point out are just as information-rich as the texts themselves. But you claim that because of the size of keys, the texts in this digital archive do not exist - this is fallacious. How large must a key-value system get before it ceases to exist? If a poem's title is longer than its text does it cease to exist? Greek philosophers parodied the confusion of quantitative and qualitative thought by asking how many grains of sand we needed to add together before we had a heap. Once again, you have confused a practical and an ontological argument - the length of keys (and quantity of text) may affect the usefulness of libraryofbabel.info, but they cannot affect its existence.
You consider three heterogeneous things in your examples - a floating point register and the set of possible floating point numbers, libraryofbabel.info and the texts it contains, the human mind and what it "actually thinks about". Let us begin with the last - you claim that the human mind only contains what it "actually thinks about." If this is so, what is a memory? Your failure to grapple with the difficult category of possibility leads to the ontological confusion in your argument.
If we limit our consideration to practicality, I would agree that the libraryofbabel.info is not useful in the same way as a digital archive like JSTOR. In other libraries, one can find texts by subject matter, author, period, etc. and learn something new from their contents. libraryofbabel.info exists to show us the same language we have encountered already in a new context. This allows us to reflect on the essence of language, which is not restricted to the intentions of a conscious and rational speaking subject (as you imagine when you speak of what we "actually think about"), but is always open on irrational excess.
I'm actually making an ontological argument, though I concede that I was not entirely clear.
Imagine I give you a box which I claim contains all the positive integers. You object because there are an infinite number of positive integers and no physical object can possibly contain an infinite number of things. So to prove my claim I invite you to query the box and ask it "Do you contain X" for any X you care to name.
So you ask: "Do you contain 1?" and the box answers "yes". "Do you contain 842198843?" Yes. "Do you contain Graham's number?" Yes. The busy-beaver number for a million-state Turing machine? Yes.
But then you ask it, "Do you contain negative one?" and the box answers "Yes." And now you protest: I claimed that the box contained only positive integers. No, I reply, I claimed that it contained all of the positive integers, not only the positive integers. In fact it contains all the negative integers too. But this in no way diminishes the power of my initial claim, because surely if it is noteworthy that I built a box that contains all of the positive integers then it must be twice as noteworthy that I built a box that contains all of the positive integers and all of the negative integers too!
So then you ask it, "Do you contain one half?" Yes. Again you protest because one half is neither a positive nor a negative integer, and again I respond with the same argument. "Do you contain pi?" Yes. Same argument. "Do you contain the Godel number of the proof that Peano arithmetic is consistent?" Yes. Ditto.
So you ask, "Do you contain a unicorn?" Yes. Aha! Now you've got me, because whatever else the box may contain, it obviously does not contain a unicorn. No, I reply, of course it does not contain an actual physical unicorn. It contains the phrase "a unicorn". In fact, it contains all possible phrases. It is not merely a box that answers "yes" to any question that is put to it. It is a box that in fact contains all numbers and phrases (is this starting to sound familiar?) and so "yes" is actually the correct answer to any question of the form, "Do you contain X" for any possible utterance X.
The LofB is just my box with a slightly different UI. It is a UI that does a better job than mine of obfuscating the fact that what it underneath the UI is completely uninteresting, and the question of whether or not my claim that the box "really contains" all the things that I claim it contains is just wordplay. The interesting question is not "to what questions will the box answer 'yes'" (or "What works does the LofB contain?") because the answer is "all of them." The interesting question is "What queries can be made of the box/LofB?" Because the queries have to exist in this universe and so they are subject to the constraints of the laws of physics. And in particular, their number is finite. Not only finite, but fairly small: less than 2^500 or so. It's a number that's so small you can actually write it out by hand in a matter of minutes!
It is that tiny subset of the vast space of possible queries that is the interesting thing. Of all the possible questions we could potentially choose to ask, we will only ever be able to ask a tiny, tiny subset of them. So we should choose wisely. And, I submit, quibbling further over the LofB would not be a wise choice.
The whole site takes up a few MB! It doesn't store any books at all.
As to your other question, I'd say 1)The library undermines the integrity of rational thought or endeavor, and thus teaches us to reconfigure our thought to do without purpose. 2)On the other hand, when decontextualized pieces of language can take on new, unforeseen meanings - they can become more meaningful, not less.
The library is a paradoxical place. It's up to us to do what we will with it.
Hey mariusz - interesting ideas. for the first, I was new to coding when i started this project, so i dont really know how people go about sharing their code. I imagine I could put it on github or something like that - but I'm a little apprehensive that someone might be able to find a way to do something malicious to the site if they were to know its inner workings. So I'm not sure - I too think about the posterity of the library, though.
As for the second idea, the forum exists for librarians to share any sorts of discoveries they make in or thoughts they have about the library. But I would never say there could be a page with nothing interesting on it! After staring at these pages for a possibly unhealthy length of time, I can tell you that there's something interesting to be found in all of them.
and keep in mind what Borges said: "In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters - dhcmrlchtdj - which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god."
Putting the code up on, say, GitHub would also help with stopping people from doing malicious things to the site, because people aren't always mean and villainous, they can be nice as well and help out. One of the benefits is people fixing your code for you!
If you're worried that somebody will do something malicious... what is there that one could maliciously do? As long as you don't have, for example, credit cards on there, not much to steal then.
Perhaps somebody is malicious enough to decide to take down your website for their perverse pleasure, in that case anybody can have their own, local copy of the library in case the internet-facing one goes down.
EDIT: What I meant and managed to completely fail to convey well in the first paragraph is that by obscuring the code, the vulnerabilities that you're afraid of people finding don't go away. And people can find them nonetheless. By opening the code, other people can fix vulnerabilities, etc. But keeping this paragraph in mind, to relate it to the others, seeing as how your library still exists, nobody seems to have bothered to try to destroy the library in the first place using their own means, so what difference will putting the source up make? :)
tl;dr: Security by obscurity? For shame. Put the source on GitHub! There's nothing to lose, and everything to gain. :)
I didn't pre-generate the books - that would have taken longer than the lifespan of the earth (that didn't stop me from trying, though!). The books are generated by a pseudo-random algorithm which uses the "location" as the seed. So you get random seeming text, but the same page is in the same place every time. I described some of the coding process here: http://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html
The bookmarks would only need to map to the book locations - you would only need sufficient values for the number of bookmarked pages, not the entire range of possibilities.
I think yk's idea is excellent - I'm actually working on it right now. You're correct that the book locations need to be about as long as the book to provide sufficient unique values - but it isn't humanly or temporally possible for people to bookmark that many pages - so a separate index of bookmarked pages could use much shorter urls.
When I'm at the search results at http://libraryofbabel.info/search.cgi and I try to click the "Location" link for a result, everything freezes for about 15-30 seconds.
As for your present argument, i would first point out that you should not treat quantitative differences as essential differences. Any archival system requires some sort of key system for retrieval. Print libraries have the Dewey decimal system, the internet has URLs, and libraryofbabel.info has its book locations, strings of letters and numbers which you are correct to point out are just as information-rich as the texts themselves. But you claim that because of the size of keys, the texts in this digital archive do not exist - this is fallacious. How large must a key-value system get before it ceases to exist? If a poem's title is longer than its text does it cease to exist? Greek philosophers parodied the confusion of quantitative and qualitative thought by asking how many grains of sand we needed to add together before we had a heap. Once again, you have confused a practical and an ontological argument - the length of keys (and quantity of text) may affect the usefulness of libraryofbabel.info, but they cannot affect its existence.
You consider three heterogeneous things in your examples - a floating point register and the set of possible floating point numbers, libraryofbabel.info and the texts it contains, the human mind and what it "actually thinks about". Let us begin with the last - you claim that the human mind only contains what it "actually thinks about." If this is so, what is a memory? Your failure to grapple with the difficult category of possibility leads to the ontological confusion in your argument.
If we limit our consideration to practicality, I would agree that the libraryofbabel.info is not useful in the same way as a digital archive like JSTOR. In other libraries, one can find texts by subject matter, author, period, etc. and learn something new from their contents. libraryofbabel.info exists to show us the same language we have encountered already in a new context. This allows us to reflect on the essence of language, which is not restricted to the intentions of a conscious and rational speaking subject (as you imagine when you speak of what we "actually think about"), but is always open on irrational excess.