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.
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."
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.
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.