Singer Taylor Swift poses backstage with her awards for Top Artist, Billboard Chart Achievement Award, Top Female Artist, Top Hot 100 Artist, Top Digital Songs Artist, Top Streaming Song (Video) for “Shake it Off” and Top Billboard 200 Album for “1989” during the 2015 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada May 17, 2015. (Photo by L. E. Baskow/Reuters)

A participant poses with his laptop during the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress on its opening day on December 27, 2016 in Hamburg, Germany. The annual event is bringing together 12,000 computer hackers and activists who will meet over the next four days to share expertise and discuss topics related to the society and the digital world. (Photo by Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images)

A woman uses a virtual reality (VR) headset to view images by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in Mexico City, Mexico, 23 May 2018. The technological giant Google launched the “The Faces of Frida”, an interactive digital exhibition that treasures the heartrending work of the Mexican artist to tell her story from different points of view, with attention to the invisible details. (Photo by Sashenka Gutierrez/EPA/EFE)

Students learn how to use an airsoft gun from Taiwanese military instructors at Kaohsiung Municipal Sanmin Senior High School in Kaohsiung on January 11, 2024. Kaohsiung City launched a national defence education program using digital technology for all its high school students. The program also promotes drug prevention in cooperation with the Taiwan defense ministry. (Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP Photo)

A woman holds broken umbrella as a powerful typhoon hits Osaka, western Japan, Tuesday, September 4, 2018. A powerful typhoon blew through western Japan on Tuesday, causing heavy rain to flood the region's main offshore international airport and high winds to blow a tanker into a connecting bridge, disrupting land and air travel. (Photo by Nobuki Ito/Kyodo News via AP Photo)

A camel calf is seen among a herd in the desert near Dakhla in Morocco-administered Western Sahara, on October 13, 2019. In the Oued Eddahab desert in Western Sahara, Habiboullah Dlimi raises dairy and racing camels just like his ancestors used to, but with a little help from modern technology. While his animals roam free and are milked traditionally, by hand, at dawn and dusk, they are watched over by hired herders and Dlimi follows GPS coordinates across the desert in a 4X4 vehicle to reach them. (Photo by Fadel Senna/AFP Photo)

A Polisario fighter sits on a rock at a forward base on the outskirts of Tifariti, Western Sahara, September 9, 2016. At a rocky outpost in Western Sahara, a new generation of soldiers who have never known war are mobilising as tensions resurface in one of Africa's oldest disputes after a quarter century of uneasy peace. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

People will spout about impermanence of digital records, but books are really fragile, too. Alexis Arnold from San Francisco wanted to illustrate that with her project The Crystallized Book: collecting books and growing Borax crystals on them. Books range from literature classics to magazines, and there’s even a mysterious and arcane tome called “Linux: The Complete Manual”.