What you seem to be talking about is a group of people a few years to a few decades post collapse, who want to operate or rebuild preexisting tech and need a reference work. If they had a copy of wikipedia plus a good technical & reference library, it would probably answer most of their needs. A special book isn’t essential.
What I was talking about is a group of people completely lacking pre-collapse knowledge and experience. You can’t give them instructions for building a radio because they tend to ask questions like “what’s a screwdriver?” and “how can I avoid being burnt as a witch?” That’s what a real stones-and-sticks to high-tech guide book needs to address.
You might think of “my book” as a subset of yours. My book would be more likely to be useful (though hopefully not) and could be expanded to add the material necessary for yours. And your book would be a library in itself, there is no possible way that such a “book” would not span many volumes.
A single long “book” would have high quality cross links, well ordered reading sequences, a uniform style, no internal contradictions, etc. In that sense it’s a book as opposed to a library collection.
There’s a mixup of two different scenarios here.
What you seem to be talking about is a group of people a few years to a few decades post collapse, who want to operate or rebuild preexisting tech and need a reference work. If they had a copy of wikipedia plus a good technical & reference library, it would probably answer most of their needs. A special book isn’t essential.
What I was talking about is a group of people completely lacking pre-collapse knowledge and experience. You can’t give them instructions for building a radio because they tend to ask questions like “what’s a screwdriver?” and “how can I avoid being burnt as a witch?” That’s what a real stones-and-sticks to high-tech guide book needs to address.
You might think of “my book” as a subset of yours. My book would be more likely to be useful (though hopefully not) and could be expanded to add the material necessary for yours. And your book would be a library in itself, there is no possible way that such a “book” would not span many volumes.
A single long “book” would have high quality cross links, well ordered reading sequences, a uniform style, no internal contradictions, etc. In that sense it’s a book as opposed to a library collection.