Regarding books, there should be perhaps some way of accessing the what remains of the internet, perhaps building some sort of sattelite dish that can access the remnants of the Starlink network or something of the sort that is connected to orbital datacenters and arctic vaults containing wikipedia archive and all the books you’d want. Wikipedia without images is not that big, easily fits on a flash drive.
Maybe add more books to computers, e-inks and flash drives that are usually completely empty. I find it hard to believe that in the near-future people would suddenly go back to printed paper books as a preferred text storage medium.
The internet itself is essentially dead and unsalvageable as we know it - Even if you could grab some Starlink equipment, the ground stations the satellites connect to would be without power, assuming they were intact at all. This issue propagates down every network junction, data center, etc. Despite popular belief, the internet isn’t particularly resilient, just a handful of services - not data centers, not servers, but just software running on a server going down is enough to cripple significant portions of the modern web. Considering that CDDA base is modern day, orbital datacenters or arctic server vaults are both non-starters as they don’t exist currently.
Even stretching belief with a presumption of sheer luck that some slivers of useful internet stayed up and connected physically, navigating them is an entirely different story - the very same holes that all but assuredly destroy the network would also make DNS routing impossible, and search services like google are unlikely to survive or be able to index anything that remains. Actually finding anything on the network that survives would be a challenge worthy of a decent computer skill. And all that to gain access to what is statistically spam mail, pornography, and content distribution network data, the latter of which is likely inaccessible as the parent service is dead.
Finding more digital content on devices is at least a technically plausible option, but practically it’d be just as scarce. If I took a hundred random peoples smart phones, 99 of them won’t even have any sort of ebooks or the like on them, just apps to connect to web services for content. The lone device that may have ebooks on it is very likely to just be random entertainment literature, fantasy novels and such. The odds of someone having a book that’s actually useful to train anything is going to be the one in hundreds, optimistically. Whereas even today, people buy hobby craft books for no other reason that to put on a shelf to decorate, even if they don’t read them or actually do the hobby. The current rate of finding recipes on sd cards ripped outta smartphones is already extremely generous in my opinion, I can pull 15ish recipes outta a hundred cards.
Everything in the modern world going cloud has made the CDDA survivors life difficult. Your right that its weird we’d go back to paper books, and in the CDDA verse we very likely didn’t. We put everything on the internet, and then the internet died.
As far as I understand most satellites were destroyed in the cataclysm, and that would most likely disproportionally affect low earth orbit satellites (due to increased drag due to atmospheric expansion during the event).
As mentioned, very little would remain active on the ground side, and what would be would probably be military and thus heavily encrypted. While dimensional computing magic probably would be able to break the encryption schemes used (as might quantum computers that don’t exist yet, at last officially, assuming the military hasn’t wised up yet but leave their traffic to be cached and decrypted when the technology becomes available), it won’t help you unless you’re temporarily aligned (as a disposable asset, possibly with an expiry date) with any of the very few actors that have access to such technology.
Well, you know there are pirate torrent sites, and most of them have some sort of content preserving initiatives. Book oriented ones usually (I know at least two that do this) just combine all their content into a single torrent and its not that big, about a Tb, with monthly updates of some Mb - and I personally know 3 people that seed it. So probably you’re right and 80% of people have nothing, but on the other hand of the remaining 20% some should have quite a bit.
Hub01 should probably have everything as well. Universities as well often have a LOT of texts stored, are often sneakily seeding torrents or maintain public services like ntp or linux distro repos or some such.
Torrents are pretty dead too with the network crippled and/or gone. Even if we assume that some fraction of users did somehow survive, the interlink between them is busted, and the trackers that help connect seeder to leech are in the same state - Remember, Peer to Peer is dependent on centralized trackers to introduce peers to each other. If the internet is damaged to the point that most uplinks and data centers are craters and/or powered down, those centralized trackers are either dead or unable to reach the peers and leachers.
Hub01 having some of their own data could work, and would definitely be likely to have useful data on hand. However, they’re also exceedingly aware of the sheer value of that content, and unlikely to just blindly connect it out there for free. Having them hand out valuable data, or grant access to data as you do quests with them would be reasonable. That being said, its far from “everything”. Without spoiling much on Hub01’s background, their data is going to be extremely advanced but on an extremely narrow field. They’re no more likely to have books or data on blacksmithing, surgery, agriculture, or sewing than anywhere else.
Internet connections would not work given the essential framework would have collapsed and become innacessible - especially after the power grid died out.
What the Hub01 would have would be, at best, a LAN and their own local servers, something that would most likely be very well protected from outside interference.
In a situation like this, the best a player could get is radio - if the radio towers computers actually worked.
Their research data network. It wouldn’t have any physical connection to anything else for security reasons, and so can only be accessed physically (and they’d probably learned some lessons from Stuxnet too).
An external world network that used to connect to the external world for professional use. Heavily protected and encrypted access (with external access probably prohibited by protocols anyway, with exceptions granted on an individual device basis (their drones have to be connected, after all)). The computers in that network might have some things downloaded, but not any internal data that wasn’t explicitly intended to be sent out (e.g. limited research data traded for wanted research data), but even that would probably be removed immediately after use.
An internal “leisure” network for the staff (they’re humans, after all). This network might make use of the same external connection at the second network, but sit on the “outside”, so the staff could access the Internet for their own use without compromising the secured network. Anything that normal people might have on their computers might exist there. Don’t expect to be able to access this data from the outside, though, as the admin staff is probably the same as those maintaining the secure network, so don’t expect to find passwords along the line of “Admin1”, as they’re probably scanning everything for easily cracked passwords.
I’m not saying you could connect to torrents and download an archive. I’m saying you could find a PC or something that has one already. You could very rarely find one at someones house but more likely to find at some educational facility or some business IT department where IT people like to do their own stuff on spare capacity.
Anyway my point is that most people actually have some sort of educational material at home on paper or on their devices, some have more, some have little, some have a shitton, but judging by my acquaintances and myself you could get at least one skill levelled up to 7 on literature from just one home.
Oh and according to the lore, shit didnt go down immediately with no warning, it was a gradually escalating process. There was plenty of time for not completely clueless people to download stuff on their phones or their PCs before the internet went down. E.g. Survival Manual | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository .
Are people forgetting that radio tower basecamps can allow missions for hacking remote systems to obtain data? As long as that remains part of the game, it means that somewhere, somehow, the internet still survives in some form.