23 ms·

Digital books wear out faster than physical books

• xkcd1963 4y ago
  But they can be replicated much easier and much faster
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it. I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.
  • powerset 4y ago
    If your goals are 1) pay for it 2) have the convenience of no DRM, then it sounds like doing it this way worked out fine. Except maybe that pirating as a second step is slightly less convenient than downloading directly from the same place you bought it.
    • LAC-Tech 4y ago
      One good thing about technical ebooks is that they know their audience can just pirate it if they want, so they don't bother with DRM. Was happy to pay for my digital copy of "Practical Object Oriented Design".
  • Yujf 4y ago
    I generally buy books that came out recently (but pirate 10+ year old books) and the first thing I do to a new book is crack the DRM so I can just save an EPUB that I can read where I want to read it, when I want to read it.
    • bragr 4y ago
      Authors that published 10+ years ago don't have bills to pay? This is a weird moral distinction to me.
      • systemicdanna 4y ago
        If anything they could depend even more on these individual purchases.
      • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
        Larry Correia has a great article[0] about where his money comes from. His backlist (previously published books) are his bread and butter. [0] https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-royalties/ https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...
      • angelbar 4y ago
        They can work again... like everybody
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        I don't get paychecks from work I did 20 years ago. Why should anyone else? Moreover, the copyright term used to be 20 years way back in the 1700s-1800s. If 20 years was good enough back then (before overnight international shipping was possible), it's good enough now.
        • jibbers 4y ago
          Your first paragraph had me thinking differently, but the second drifts off.
          • midoridensha 4y ago
            The second is questioning the validity of current copyright terms. The argument for authors continuing to receive royalty payments many years after publishing something is based on copyright law, however current copyright law is the author's entire life plus 70 years (IIRC), which is ludicrous. Even in the age of sailboats this was considered ridiculously excessive and unnecessary. So look at the reverse: why is even 20 years necessary? For software, that's ridiculously long. If it weren't for pirates, we wouldn't have a lot of older software (like old DOS games) any more because of these copyright terms.
  • sohkamyung 4y ago
    If possible, consider buying from DRM-free bookshops instead. Libreture maintains a list of them [1]. [1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/ https://libreture.com/bookshops/
    • LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Great list! I have bought from InformIt which is on there, can confirm DRM free.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. Even without publisher/legal issues it's clear that preservation of digital media for even the next 10 years, and especially for the next 100 or 1000, is at risk. But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? The way to preserve media is to distribute it and store it in many places, not just one central location. Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats? Also, figuring out what information is "meaningful" and which is completely useless or redundant is extremely important. Because we want to store everything with the potential to be important in the future, but we also have an incredible amount of data (hence one of the reasons why IA is the only major archiver). It may be good to strategize data collection, e.g. a shallow list of all sources and a deeper list of popular sources, a sample of various sources from every region, etc
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years. Zip files containing HTML documents... we'll be able to read them for a very long time.
    • anthk 4y ago
      LOL. Were are you from? I have books from 1800 at home.
      • nix23 4y ago
        Maybe from Hogwarts...have you seen want they do with their books?
        • anthk 4y ago
          Seriously, here in Europe books are treated with a lot of care because books were and are relatively expensive, unlike mangas in Japan which were sold like chip bags. Maybe a lot of them have a folded page or such, but the content it's readable. Try that with IDE disks from a Pentium II.
• kgarten 4y ago
  I moved my apple account between countries and lost a lot tv series and books I bought ... oh sorry I didn't buy them I bought the right to temporary view them. same with some old games/apps, they work still perfectly on my older iPhone with newest updates, yet due to changing the store and developers not "updating" them they are no longer available for me. moved to android, with linageOS.
  • systemicdanna 4y ago
    Do you know if that affects movies bought through Apple’s TV app (US)? I have quite a few movies in my collection and would be really annoyed if they didn’t work in Europe.
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      There are still countries where the Apple TV app hasn't even been released. Summing up the Wikipedia numbers, about 100 countries have access to this app. Even in Europe, Apple TV+ isn't available everywhere (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411). In countries like Albania they don't even seem to make iTunes Movies available. According to this community post (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253966277 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253966277) that implies that DRM'd content is not available in those countries, and that you'll need to download your movies and for them to work depending on the country you're visiting. If you're coming over for a temporary visit, setting up a VPN on your home network may be a good idea. Many American services are not available in other countries, even if you're a paying customer.
    • lrvick 4y ago
      Purchases of DRM movies are like purchasing an unlimited free rental card from Blockbuster. They are not yours. Streaming services will even edit or censor movies as they please. https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/hbo-edits-game-of-thrones-coffee-cup-1203207545/# https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/hbo-edits-game-of-thro...! https://scribe.citizen4.eu/everything-80s/why-are-streaming-services-editing-our-favorite-movies-6a03efc32168 https://scribe.citizen4.eu/everything-80s/why-are-streaming-... Honestly the only way to preserve most digital-only video media today is piracy.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  I totally agree that digital media isn't anywhere near as permanent as many people think. Here today, gone tomorrow. But I've moved all my reading over to Kindle, even so. Because my old eyes can't handle paperbacks anymore. And reading glasses make me so very ill. That's a personal problem, yes, but it is 100% of why I buy eBooks now and why I'm glad they're an option. I guess I could back up the Kindle books, right? They all claim to have no DRM, at the beginning of each book.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    Calibre + DeDRM plugin can make your purchases yours. There are also sites that host pirated books. In 2013 or 14 when I decided to get an ereader, I went from Nook to Kobo because Nook books weren't crackable, and then from Kobo to Kindle because I liked the form factor and fonts better. The moment I can't strip DRM from Amazon books is the day I pirate everything, and will purchase deadtree books to give to the library.
• falcolas 4y ago
  This is a really weird article for me. Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside. That's about it. These three technologies are some of the oldest and most robust we have when it comes to digital media at large. Being concerned about reading and displaying HTML pages in a zip file in a decade is absurd. They're both already over 30 years old themselves. DRM, yes. DRM is a complete and utter pox on the digital media world. Almost as bad as trade-bound paperbacks which tend to fall apart after (sometimes during, grrr) a single read. Preserving trade paperbacks, however, takes more effort than removing ebook DRM, and both procedures are well documented with broadly available tools.
  • kazinator 4y ago
    If you don't copy those files to new media, the piece of hardware itself that they reside on may be unusable. How easily can you read some HTML sitting on a 500 megabyte IDE drive from 1995, versus a book printed in 1995? If you come across such an object, you don't even know what is on it, and whether it is worth it to delve into it.
    • falcolas 4y ago
      Hence my comment about needing a backup strategy. If I go to a library to read a trade paperback from 1995, it's going to have been re-bound. And that's if the paper has survived. Trade-bound paperback books - which are usually price equivalent to ebooks - require intervention to remain usable for more than a few years. As for my own collection, I have no books from 1995 left. They've mostly fallen apart or been replaced with ebooks (which are still in great condition).
      • goosedragons 4y ago
        What do you do to your books?? Chew on them while reading? I've read and bought paperbacks more than 30 years old. Yeah, I imagine a popular book in a library that's constantly checked out wears out faster, but every 27 year old trade you have is ruined? Seriously?
    • deleted 4y ago
• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Planet Money did an episode on the "e-Book Wars" between libraries and publishers a week ago: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishers-ebooks-e-books-macmillan-protest-amazon-bezos https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe... I learned a few things about digital library books that made me sad: * Publishers only allow a certain number of "rentals" of digital library books, after which the eBook license expires. * Publishers also put an expiration date on the license, so after maybe two years, the eBook license expires even if nobody borrows the book. * Publishers have repeatedly put hard limits on the abilities for libraries to purchase eBook licenses, for example allowing only one copy per library for new releases. * Publishers raised the prices of library eBooks to be far higher than a physical book. A $15 physical book might cost $60 as an eBook to a library.
  • systemicdanna 4y ago
    This is really sad. Artificial constraints on a medium that was supposed to democratize access to information. I am right now in line to borrow the new DeGrasse Tyson’s book and will have to wait for almost 6 weeks for my turn. They have only 3 digital copies available and almost a hundred people waiting ahead of me.
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      The funny thing is that I found a DRM-free copy of the book you mentioned on the internet in less than a minute. PDF or ePub, your pick; probably converted from the same source. Whatever these publishers are trying to do, they're only hurting their honest customers. It's trivial to find popular eBooks online regardless of library licenses and DRM usage yet honest people's lives are made so incredibly difficult for no good reason.
    • candiddevmike 4y ago
      Hundred people waiting for a 5-10MB file to become "available". You'll eventually get it, and you might even like it so much that you purchase the physical copy, but that purchase won't happen for months because of some artificial constraint like this.
• linuxhansl 4y ago
  Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one. Every hoop is taken to make them like real books whether it makes sense or not, except for the time when you actually want to lend or give them to someone else. Then it gets complicated, depends on the vendor, or is simply impossible. I have no need for that. Imagine 200 years in the future, all license servers are disabled and we cannot read our own (digital) books anymore.
  • Turing_Machine 4y ago
    There are tons of DRM-free ebooks out there, including some from major publishing houses.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    Digital books are fine. You can get many of them without DRM. DRM sucks. Period. But as of today, it can be removed after purchase, which means its longevity will depend on backup strategies, not licensing servers. Can that change? Sure. But it's not the case today, and we don't see it on the horizon.
  • pdonis 4y ago
    > Digital books are a scam. Not if you like carrying your whole library around with you everywhere. Try doing that with physical books.
  • NoPicklez 4y ago
    Digital books under DRM fit what you're saying, but not all digital books are under DRM.
  • sammalloy 4y ago
    > Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one. It seems like less of a scam and more of a technology constrained by publishers and authors. Lots of people borrow digital books from libraries, for example, without ever buying them.
• xoa 4y ago
  >Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. No, it worked terribly because they hadn't been stored well and were covered in mold (even the ones from only 70 years ago) or otherwise falling apart. I couldn't search them for specific phrases I remembered my grandfather reading me as a child, and I didn't have the physical space of my own to store them all either anyway. Even making a stab at indexing them all was enormously labor intensive. I was the only one in the family interested in even trying. It really sucked. >Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. Yes, it was excellent, since naturally it was DRM-free or I wouldn't have paid for it. I have digital stuff from the 80s, still perfectly preserved, that I can call up as I wish, when I wish, anywhere I wish anywhere in the world. I'm 100% onboard with the correct argument that modern copyright and DRM go against the core bargain of IP (societal agreement for public benefit) and could use major reform. But I don't think this piece does a very good job of making that argument, the entire comparison and pretending that books don't require any sort of preservation and so on really distracts from the core issues.
  • riversflow 4y ago
    > It really sucked. Huh, I have a number of books that have been in my family for a long time, reading them is awesome. I never got to meet my grandfather, so reading the same copy of Huck Finn he did, or referencing the same dictionary he used is about as close as I can come. That said my dad's collection of fiction ebooks will carry a lot of the same value, if only because there is _so much_ fiction out there.
  • jonathanstrange 4y ago
    It's not hard to store books correctly, though. My father collected around 30,000 books during his lifetime. (He was a professor at a higher education facility for librarians.) Most of them are from 20th Century but many also from 19th Century and a few of them are up to several hundred years old. They're all perfectly readable. The only issue is dust. It pains me a lot that the collection will eventually have to be sold at large by the meter and his library will disappear because nobody in my family has the space for so many books.
• vel0city 4y ago
  DRM-laden digital books should be seen like the extra cheap paperbacks which fall apart sitting untouched on the shelf after a couple of years. Extremely different than the well-bound books one might think of when handling a 100 year old book. Non-DRM'd ebooks in formats which are open, easily parseable, and that people care to archive should be fine for a long time. Some people here are talking about a decade as if we won't be able to parse epubs or text files in 10 years. I've got documents >30 years old already which are still easily parsed, and I don't imagine I'll have problems rendering them in another 30 years. I'll be utterly amazed if we can't render a basic HTML document, text-focused PDF, or hell even just ASCII text in the year 2032. I also have little doubt I'll still technically be able to load my DVDs or Blu-Rays of that data in 2032 and copy it into the holographic crystal storage devices that'll come out just before that.
  • systemicdanna 4y ago
    Is there a non-DRM format + an e-reader combo that allows for bookmarks, text selection, dictionary search? Ideally I would prefer to keep my Kindle but would really love to buy and own non-DRM books.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Onyx BOOX fits this description. Its bookreader, Neoreader, is quite good. The devices themselves are Android tablets, with an e-ink display. You can install and use any other Android ebook software, including among those, Koboreader, PocketBook, and FBReader. My preference among those is actually Onyx's reader, at least on their own devices.
    • rolobio 4y ago
      PDFA? I wouldn’t call it e-reader friendly exactly, but it is pretty universal.
    • madars 4y ago
      You can use Calibre to convert your ebooks to MOBI/AZW3, which Kindle accepts, and if you put your Kindle in airplane mode (so it stops getting OTA updates) and wait log enough it'll probably get a jailbreak at some point. At which point you can install KOReader for superior PDF/DjVu reading experience. Last jailbreak covers Kindle software <= 5.14.2; so Kindle Voyage and earlier all should be supported. (See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346037 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346037 HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31220553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31220553)
• caconym_ 4y ago
  Last year I decided to exit the Kindle ecosystem after buying quite a few books in it, and cracking the DRM was a pretty near thing. I was lucky to have an older Kindle device sitting around that didn't support Amazon's latest DRM. It seems like they may be winning the arms race. As an individual with a few hundred ebooks rather than an institution with millions of them, I'm a lot less concerned about losing my un-DRM'd files and/or the ability to read them, but I very nearly lost my entire ebook library just because I fell into Kindle's convenience trap. I've decided now to only buy ebooks that don't have DRM.
  • teraflop 4y ago
    IMHO, there is effectively no moral or ethical difference between cracking the DRM on a book you've purchased and downloading a copy of the same book from Library Genesis. And the latter is usually more convenient, in my experience.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    This is why I love buying eBooks from Baen.com directly. Edit: fixed. Stupid autocorrect
    • rolobio 4y ago
      That is a placeholder site?
      • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
        It was supposed to be the publisher, Baen, but I didn't catch my autocorrect. Fixed.
  • Havoc 4y ago
    The newer kindle stuff is crack able too just a little bit more painful
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• bnj 4y ago
  I’ve definitely had a better time with maintaining my collection of digital books through more than one move to different countries. I’ve kept three or four of my most cherished books, but my digital collection are independent of location. I’ve always made a habit of trying to get digital copies of any book that I’ve felt was worth buying. DRM is a completely different story, giving books a shelf life which is limited to the lifespan of the retailer and often less.
• novalis78 4y ago
  I consider my extensive library of physical books ‘nuclear powered reading devices’ - with that mindset they are actually very lightweight. The occasional move was always a great workout and the motivation to find a permanent home and build it out as a dynastic seat for the family and a bunker for civilization quite motivating. Electronic reading materials on the other hand are the … great for immediate and temporary research.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    As a much younger person I used to dream of a day I would be able to hold a whole library in the palm of my hand. That dream was technically realized a long time ago ( a lot of useful books and papers are in epub and pdf formats ). But now that I am older and recognize certain dangers coming from DRM corners that is already all too present in gaming, my dream changing to something akin of my own personal physical library. I am not there yet. I need to be able to justify its own substantial room, but.. the more I think about it, the more I think about it is a worthwhile goal. It actually may be a good thing for the little one as well ( come to think of it, my parents' shelves were creaking under all those books; maybe there is something about recreating the imprint of your parents after all ). I absolutely agree that for immediate research nothing beats electronic version short of a personal librarian.
• Havoc 4y ago
  They’re cheap though. I’ve accumulated quite a collection via kindle daily 0.99 sales. Takes a Bit of patience but they do have quality in there occasionally
• sbf501 4y ago
  Not if they are stored in the cloud, where the bits are constantly being shuffled around various media. It is never the case that a bit stays on the same sector of the same media indefinitely. A personal library is effed, tho, because some flash fails if the blocks are not cycled. E.g., multi-level cell flash requires at least a refresh, of I think, 36 months (don't quote me)? Basically: the blocks need to be copied and erased periodically (this isn't wear leveling it is something else and I'm now out of my depth). Probably not an issue with lower density, thicker oxide single-bit-cell flash. I still keep my favorite books in paper format. All of my digital books are loans from my library. If I really like it, I buy a physical copy. As for libraries and DRM, well, that's a horse of a different color.
  • trgn 4y ago
    > Not if they are stored in the cloud myspace was a cloud and lost all music. I get your point, but books have proven to stand the test of time. We just don't know yet for digital media. I mean, very concretely, are amazon's ebooks going to be functional 200 years from now?
    • sbf501 4y ago
      Amazon's ebooks or the database that holds them? Two different things. I believe every book amazon has in their database will never be lost, at least until WW3. They won't rot. They won't be eaten by worms. Acidic ink won't deteriorate the cellulose. We won't need to have gigantic buildings to house them all. Meanwhile the world's cloud storage will continue to expand exponentially, and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again. Way better than what happened when the library of alexandria was razed and the intellectual progress of the human race was set back probably several centuries. I'm bullish on the cloud, if you didn't notice. :)
      • trgn 4y ago
        > the database that holds them? But that's completely useless if there's not the software and hardware infrastructure to make the contents of that database readable and searchable. That will be really tough to do. > and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again. That doesn't happen automatically. Instead of librarians, it will be sys-admins scp-ing shit all the time. And they will totally accidentally delete entire archives at some point. Or forget, and the actual storage medium will degrade. > I'm bullish on the cloud, if you didn't notice. :) hehe :)
• lrvick 4y ago
  The biggest issues are often DRM. Most ebook readers will lock out books if you cannot constantly ask a DRM server for permission. A great example is when Microsoft shut down their e-book stores, and the supporting DRM infrastructure. The books stopped working. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 Then there was that one time in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted Orwell titles including, ironically, 1984. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-sued-for-kindle-deletion-of-orwell/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-sued-for-kindle-deletion... There was also the more recent incident where Amazon censored a book on transgenderism. You can argue this book has dangerous takes, but there is no excuse to delete any book. It was published and relevant for someone studying these issues. Even books by horrible people like Mein Kampf must be preserved for researchers. https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/09/based-on-false-assumption-amazon-still-censoring-book-on-transgenderism/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/09/based-on-false-assump... Other than rare exceptions like NoStarchPress, Ebooks on most platforms are not yours. You will not be able to loan them to a friend, pass them down to family, or resell them. They can also be remotely deleted or edited, and there are powerful book censorship political movements that want to legally mandate exactly that. The CCP already makes use of this power, such as their edits to Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/12/edward-snowden-says-autobiography-permanent-record-censored-in-china https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/12/edward-snowd... I know it is a pain, but if your only digital book purchase option is a DRM eBook, the ethical thing to do is buy a paper copy. Every DRM eBook purchase is a wallet vote that you find this situation acceptable.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    I'm less bothered by a bookstore ceasing to carry a title than I am by them deactivating modifying books after purchase. Every purchased book should be an unmodifiable snapshot, and any good faith updates should only replace a purchase of desired by the owner. Owner being a stretch of a term, as we know.
• ultra_nick 4y ago
  Is it possible to build a computer that would last a century with light use?
  • lrvick 4y ago
    https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/ https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
    • ultra_nick 4y ago
      :(
• FpUser 4y ago
  All my books are on PC for more than 20 years and I do not notice any wear. Probably because I did not read the article. On a serious note my personal hard drive is mirrored on 3 computers and backed up off-site as well
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I think cloud providers should offer an eternal storage option, for example 10gb for one time payment of $100 sounds reasonable.
• fideloper 4y ago
  Many of the books I read as a kid would never have been read if they weren't a physical chunk of dead wood in front of my face, sitting on a book shelf. Now, as a full-ass adult with young kids, I usually buy books from Kindle. It's far more convenient to use the Kindle app on my phone. But there's a voice in the back of my head wondering if I'm doing my kids a disservice. They don't see me holding a big chunk of dead tree and reading. They just see be looking at my phone. I also feel like Kindle is setting up a situation where my kids won't have the joy of discovering a book, or author, serendipitously. When the books are just sitting there on a shelf (they were in my bedroom as a kid, basically just as overflow because we had too many in the house), it's easy to get bored and pick up a book. But I wonder if kids even get bored now. They have phones! If they're feeling the slightest bit bored, out comes the phone. (That's how I am at least, a full-fledged adult who didn't have a phone growing up). Maybe the idea of discovering a good book out of boredom is dead.
  • squeaky-clean 4y ago
    Learn a trick from the kids and hide your phone in a book ;p Works until they ask why you never turn the page
  • kevmo 4y ago
    Sounds like you already know you're doing your kids a disservice.
  • theNJR 4y ago
    I have this exact worry as a dad of a seven day old. During pregnancy, my wife and I read various new parent books out loud to each other. The plan is to continue that with baby. Maybe she’ll associate the Kindle with reading, but my dad collects books, so I grew up absolutely surrounded by them. If he just had a big kindle library, not sure it would have had an effect
    • vel0city 4y ago
      Consider taking your kid to the library often, pretty much as soon as they can walk. The library near us even had a good collection of board books. My kid loves going to the library, playing with some of the toys, looking at the small aquarium, and browsing all the books to pick out the three to take home for the week. He's under 5 and has already checked out about 200 books! Be sure to pick up at least one for yourself while you're there to set the example during the week!
• unnouinceput 4y ago
  Click-bait title. It's about devices, not the actual digitized book. I have .pdf files from 90's when I started to learn assembler, they still apply (for basic and medium) today and I can read them just fine on my Foxit reader.
  • Tepix 4y ago
    To be fair, there are probably other files from that time which you can't read anymore easily.
    • unnouinceput 4y ago
      to be fair there are books from hundreds of years ago written in dead languages which you can't read anymore easily. as for file formats, pretty sure you can find readers in some internet archive + operating systems which you can just as easily get/create and emulator for.
• willywanker 4y ago
  The issue here is with DRM and having to move across storage media. I still have ebooks as text files from 20 years ago that I got off the Gutenberg project, and tons of EPUBs which are guaranteed to be readable since they are just zipped up HTML/XHTML files and not proprietary. For that matter I have Pascal code from high school in the early 90s sitting around on floppy drives and then later hard drives.
  • Vrondi 4y ago
    Yep, the Shakespeare text files I downloaded in the 1990s are still perfectly readable on basically any tech device, and have traveled across floppy discs, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, etc. They've been read on laptops, Palm PDA, PlayStation Portable, Windows Mobile Phone, and Android.
• poulsbohemian 4y ago
  I’m kinda ok with this. Books I suspect I’ll only read once I’m ok to buy digitally. Books that I think my kids might read, that I might read again, I buy as paper
• mattmaroon 4y ago
  This is a great example of how people in tech often get wrapped up in theory and just don’t junderstand how things work in practical reality. Yes, DRM sucks in theory, but in reality this is all rarely a problem. I got the original kindle a little over 15 years ago, and I can still open the books I bought back then on my new Kindle and read them just fine. And in another 15 years, I will probably still be able to read those books just fine on whatever Kindle I have at that point. Yes, I am aware that that may not be true, and I may have to re-purchase these books again at some point, though it seems unlikely. But in the meantime I get the benefit of buying them for cheaper, not having to devote a bunch of real estate to hundreds of books, and being able to text search since most of the books I want to open again after a long period of time or some sort of reference book. Yes, these likely won’t outlive me. But if you’ve ever known anyone who died that had a lot of books it’s usually not a treasure trove but rather a bunch of crap that has to be shuffled off to good will. I’m perfectly happy with this trade off. And that’s not even counting the environmental impact.
  • tjr225 4y ago
  • est 4y ago
    > DRM sucks in theory, but in reality this is all rarely a problem. > And in another 15 years, I will probably still be able to read those books I bet the non-DRM books you bought on your kindle can also be opened 15 years later.
    • rocket_surgeron 4y ago
      I'm willing to bet that .epubs will still be readable by the brain-computer interface all humans will be implanted with at birth in 100 years. And there will be some trashy harlequin romance novel hipster fan club in 2122. Code written in 1972 is emulate-able and readable today so we're halfway to the 100 year benchmark the article sets in its first sentence. I have numerous books that are more than 100 years old. I am afraid to read them because they are fragile. I am not afraid to emulate Magnavox Odyssey ROMs from 1972, and won't ever be.
• notatoad 4y ago
  personally, at a time in my life when i'm relatively unsettled and moving a lot, my digital books have lasted a lot longer than my physical books. maybe some day i'll have the luxury of storing a whole bunch of books, but they've always been one of the first things to to to the thrift store in a move. i've got my hardcover omnibus of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and a kindle.
• kristopolous 4y ago
  It's almost as it the more refined the technology, the lesser the shelf life.
• sorwin 4y ago
  Terrible example, digital media can last far longer, under the same circumstances. Have a USB drive Hard Drive, or USB? Plug them in 10 to 15 years later, chances are, they will have far less damage than a book in all those years. It's an unfair comparison.
  • TuringNYC 4y ago
    I have some books on CD-ROM. They have no damage, true...but good luck finding a computer with a CD-ROM drive now.
    • kipchak 4y ago
      CDs are also at risk of disc rot, which might be a non issue for hundreds of years or fail within 20 depending on the CD and storage. From a Library of congress study: "The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer." https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rotting-and-dying/ https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rott...
  • krmboya 4y ago
    - Assuming the hardware does not change - Assuming the software does not change - Assuming the usb device is stored securely and lightly used. Bit rot is real
    • obsrvatlarge 4y ago
      Need to store virtual machines with both the operating system and the reader/converter software included. There are lots of bits that can rot...
      • sorwin 4y ago
        No, you don't lol. You do realize both the algorithm to decompress the media, and the media as well can be stored alongside, right? Including. any instructions to actually use that media.
• KerrickStaley 4y ago
  A related thing Brewster didn't mention: When libraries "buy" ebooks from publishers, what they're actually buying is a license to lend the ebook a fixed number of times. For example, after a library lends a HarperCollins ebook 26 times, it disappears from the library's virtual shelf until it's purchased again. A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out. The above is from a fascinating Planet Money podcast on the relationship between ebook publishers and libraries. Transcript at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385. I'd encourage listening to the whole thing.
  • strix_varius 4y ago
    > A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out. Is this the real range? Intuitively, it seems low, but I have no idea. I remember those "Due date" tables in books from my childhood, with what must have been at least a couple of dozen rows...
    • DocTomoe 4y ago
      Hm, I worked at a national library during my university years, for some extra cash and free access to the more silent part of the building. State/National libraries in Europe often work on a "required (free) copy" aspect: publishers are required to provide the national library with a free copy of any book they publish. This makes them huge, but it also makes them have all kinds of books of different quality, both content-wise and built-quality-wise. Most books are never checked out. Those that are get checked out rarely (unless the book is incredibly influential or some professor makes them required reading for their course). 30-100 checkouts may translate to 20-60 years of being in library circulation. But those are mostly spent sitting on a dry shelf, when no damage to the book occurs during normal operation (e.g. no fire / no water damage). 30-100 checkouts, each for two weeks (with the option to extend another two week) spells 1-6 years the book will live with other people - and here is where things happen. Books are transported FROM the library to houses and flats (often in containers that are not very good for the purpose, think backpacks, canvas bags - often leading to shear to the pages and stress on the binding). They are put in environmental conditions that differ vastly (extreme cold in winter. High humidity). Individual pages are being turned and worked on, creating stress on the binding. People have coffee cups that fall, and pet cats that urinate. Pages sometimes rip. People also have kids with crayons. They themselves have text markers and pencils. They may overstretch the binding, to "make the book lay flat", or read in bed, or in the bathtub. And eventually, they bring the book back. Of course, the lady who takes the book in will do a quick check on whether the book is in an acceptable state - but she has no idea how it looked when we lent it out. In the bad cases (again: cats urinate), the book is immediately discarded and replaced with a new copy if possible. For less bad cases, damage still creeps in and accumulates. And eventually, glue will give in, pages will become loose, the book will fall apart. Compare that to the privately-owned book, which is often bought, read once or twice, and lives on a shelf for the rest of it's existence. That one also gets damages, but they don't count up that much. National and University libraries often have contract or in-house bookbinders who will repair a damaged book, which means removing the cover, and rebinding the book into a "library binding" - that often comes with a more sturdy cover or - with softcover books - a thick plastic film over the cover. Many libraries also clip the edges of softcover book to make them rounder, which increases longevity. But ultimately, there is no more thing to fix. I think 30 checkouts is a good estimate for most softcover books in public libraries, 100 being on the high-end, high-maintenance, highly-invested national library end.
• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Text files and static HTML, on the other hand, live on forever
• shaburn 4y ago
  Used books from the post amazon days will be increasingly, investably rare.
• romdev 4y ago
  I've got mixed feedback on this. I had a house fire a few years back where all my paper literature was soaked, and stayed in water for days to weeks. Books, and especially my comic book collection consisting of Sandman and other very collectible treasures, were transmuted to a soupy, unreadable mess. It was a very emotional time salvaging what little I could of these gifts from friends and family. Interestingly the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies from 1990 and prior were in water tight containers, but I knew from previous attempts to recover data from them that I'd be wasting my time trying to get ancient BBS text files from them. Digital media will expire, but I've got IDE hard drives from 30 years ago that have fared pretty well, and thankfully I had the foresight to duplicate the magnetic media that has a known shelf life to media that might survive a bit longer. And data grows in size and scale, so a 20MB hard drive from the 80s is pretty easy to preserve as long as you're organized, and plan, and don't procrastinate too long. But thinking about it - like life, isn't data meant to expire? Maybe your descendants will appreciate a few pictures of you, and some journal entries or your great novel draft. But I have no interest even in my mom's or Hemingway's kindergarten buddies. And especially if there are published books on a shelf, they're almost always replaceable. Think of who will be cleaning out your house when you die while you curate your data, and try to preserve what's of greatest worth to you and that audience. And finally, last time I visited my father he showed me a 6" thick bible that had been in the family since the early 1800s, with beautiful fonts, colored illustrations, and the first few blank pages filled with marriage and birth records. There are some books that can't be replaced or duplicated, and should be cherished like a child.
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  I don't know about this. There are a lot of considerations and trade offs, and simplifying the difference it too much usually a sign that someone doesn't understand the problem or is biased towards a position and wants you to be also. Paper books have a fantastic UX. A book comes with all the information you want and also the renderer, and the interface is so intuitive that anyone that has even a vague understanding of what writing is can tell exactly what it is and how it is used, no tutorial necessary. They're huge though, humongous, and they degrade. What we do with electronic books is re-use the renderer and only store the data separately, and this means that we don't have to instantiate the renderer with every set of data, this saves tremendous amounts of resources and space. Imagine every book you could ever want to read on one piece of paper, that's the limit of where this electronic book thing can go. But the hardware is not passive, so using it consumes resources, and non passive things tend to degrade faster, and formats degrade (for some reason, I think financial reasons, can we settle on a format already? Let's do epub), storage hardware degrades... I personally like electronic books. If we can come up with some type of cheap, small, long lasting storage hardware, like microSD cards but much, much longer lasting, settle on a format that can store basically any writing and drawing you could want (gzipped LaTeX and PNG anyone?) and reading devices that consume miniscule amounts of power, have no moving parts, are cheap and render well, I think we have a winning combination.
• JetAlone 4y ago
  We are woefully unready to adopt a paperless existence.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lacker 4y ago
  Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. This question made me curious, and I took a look. The first Kindle book I ever bought was Shadow of a Dark Queen, by Raymond Feist, in December 2010. It still works just fine. (Now I wish it had been something more intellectual and respectable. But no, the first four Kindle books I got were the four books of the Serpentwar Saga.)
  • FrankyHollywood 4y ago
    I also thought this is misleading, I can still read the 30 year old txt files I have in backup (copied from old floppy disks). As long as data is not stored in some obfuscated proprietary format you will get along just fine. Either software is available, or the format is known and you can write a decoder. What if the format is unknown? Well, try reading old Egyptian, this problem is not new...
  • Gentil 4y ago
    Couple of things to remember. Internet Archive is in the world scale. And you are already using a proprietary format with that book from 10 years ago. The post talks about keeping a tab on all the books available in Internet Archive. Which is a freaking huge number. Then keep them all up to date available in at least a single format is a problem. Not to mention some books would only be available in epub, some only in pdf and some are just txt files. And users would want books to be available in certain formats too. Keeping that number of books up to date from a librarian's POV (like internet archive) is really hard. The formats, the software etc. This is why they counter the marketing of publishers that says "digital copies are forever". They are not. There is server, hard disks, then the software of it all and a never ending dependency hell and issues like that. Just add security to the mix and then boom, it's already crazy hard. Another intersting thought would be, can you try to keep all the digital books you own Into a multiple formats? Everything! The free ones you downloaded like the pdfs, the epubs and all the formats including probably the technical books you own. Try doing that. Then during a sale, you buy books from humble bundle and some books are only in pdfs. Uff. Now you need to make all those pdfs into mobi format so that you can read them in your kindle. This effort for dealing with this and software needed for that should paint a good picture. Now scale it up to the whole world with multiple languages and bizillion editions and so many more complexities. :D PS: I am not arguing. Just thought you might have overlooked the context. If I misjudged, my apologies. :)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• EGreg 4y ago
  https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-and-other-digital-content-in-2022/ https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...
• kebman 4y ago
  Sure, if the "book" is a one-to-one representation of a physical book. It's not, though.
• freddie_mercury 4y ago
  I used to work in a fine & rare book room at a library. The kind of thing behind a lock & key, climate controlled, you need to apply for permission to look at anything and you're monitored while you do it. The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library. Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/ https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/ and see the entire British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts...something I wouldn't actually ever be allowed to do with the physical books. But the post is pretty misleading it says > Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade. But every library I've been at also has active maintenance for their physical books! They control the humidity, they check for water leaks, they look for pests. Nobody is throwing 100+ year old books into an aluminium shed. Also, I now live in a country where I don't speak the local language especially fluently, so reading books published here is less fun. Importing physical books in my native language is extremely expensive, since books aren't especially light. Shipping is often close to the price of the book itself. And delivery usually takes weeks, anyway. Digital books actually are available to most of the world in a way that physical books aren't.
  • adalacelove 4y ago
    > Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable The ones that made it, obviously. Uncountable have been lost.
  • atoav 4y ago
    The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the information. If you find a thumbdrive with the same flyer as a pdf from a hundred years ago it will take a team of experts with specialized (or at this point very old) hardware to figure out the contents. Video is even worse: a film roll that you can look at with your bare eyes vs some realplayer codec nobody can decode. This is why the library of congress lasers video onto analog film for archival. Reading an analog film is a question of blasting light through the transported film. Reading the equivalent realplayer file involves a little bit more in terms of hardware, OS and software (and this is just one codec I picked randomly).
• the_black_hand 4y ago
  This is exactly what happened to ancient civilizations. They digitized everything in the cloud and when it crashed all that was left was the pyramids.
  • JetAlone 4y ago
    Unironic spirit science enjoyer?
• vixen99 4y ago
  Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine. On the other hand my paperback copy of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality (2004) is falling to bits with chunks of pages departing from the spine.
  • oblio 4y ago
    > Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine. You either got very lucky or that thing is not actually from 1643. That book is probably worth tens of thousands of dollars if it's genuine. Extremely unlikely, though :-)
• rkagerer 4y ago
  This is why I care about getting egoods (books, movies, etc) in a format that I fully control. I still listen to >decade old audiobooks that are simple mp3 files, moving them to my latest device is a piece of cake.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Makes sense. The print is way finer.
• johlits 4y ago
  Everything digital just feels like modern day "content". Long live the physical I say.
• Tepix 4y ago
  Another thing i haven't seen mentioned is the typeface. Old books can be hard to read if they are set in Fraktur. With an eBook you can just change the font at-will. My eBook reader is also waterproof so i can read in the bathtub without worries.
• ivanhoe 4y ago
  The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books over the same period of time and worrying of humidity, acidity of paper, insects, mold, etc. And not to mention how super-expensive the paper-books restoration is, if (or better once when) they get damaged by time.
  • robinsonb5 4y ago
    Digital data doesn't wear out, but it also doesn't degrade gracefully. Usually if a printed page starts to degrade there is at least the opportunity for someone to notice and take corrective action before the content is lost completely (scanning, processing and re-printing, perhaps). Digital data tends to go from "fine" to "gone" with no middle ground.
    • ivanhoe 4y ago
      That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. We certainly know by now how to build a redundancy that will guaranty the data safety. For most of the libraries it's really a budget problem - they've been given huge expensive buildings with controlled air conditions for storing paper books and that's sort of taken for granted, but then governments take cuts on providing them with proper IT infrastructure and knowledgeable staff for maintaining the digital data copies.
      • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. the point is exactly that: if you have to rely on very complex setups to keep the data fresh, it means that the data is not safe. can you imagine an hard disk surviving from the ancient Egypt to us?
        • 4y ago
• braymundo 4y ago
  There are great initiatives out there to prevent this from happening. The best one I know of is https://standardebooks.org https://standardebooks.org. Highly recommended!
• simeonrumy 4y ago
  Can't wait to buy a house to actually own physical books - until then kindle is the best approach!
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  This makes sense (ish) but I also think it's not an apples to apples comparison. Reprocessing into newer formats makes the digital copies more useful than physical books, not as useful. Adding metadata makes them more useful, not as useful. Backing up onto newer mediums, and just new drives, sure, but I'd love to know why backing up to something like AWS Glacier wouldn't be viable, and much cheaper than having a huge building and employing lots of people to run it and look after physical books. (I love physical books, incidentally. Just don't love the comparison here.)
• martopix 4y ago
  Look, I got an ebook for free from a publishing company (that wants me to adopt it for my course). Of course, you can't just download it: you have to sign up to their own website, where there is a dreadful reader. What I mean by dreadful is: the PDF page does not feel my screen, therefore I have to scroll down. This is fine. Except that scrolling down does not show me the next pages, so reading is: scroll down, then click on "next page", then scroll down, then click on "next page", etc. etc.. Each page takes about 2 seconds to load. In order to understand whether I'm interested in an academic book, I have to flick through it. I got tired even before going through the front matter. So for what concerns me, this ebook is already "worn out".
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bricss 4y ago
  I still can open 20 years ol PDF
• _trackno5 4y ago
  Had this same thought the other day. I got Lost Men In London (by Olaf Stapledon) from the public library the other day and kept wondering why the paper used for the pages was so thick compared to most books you buy nowadays. I flipped back to the first few pages and saw that book was printer in 1934. I was amazed to realize the book was nearly 90 years old and held up really well. Sure the cover was worn and paged yellowed with the time, but it was in pretty great condition for something that old
• longlivebooks 4y ago
  What if we had a world where digital books were just .txt files? E-book readers can format the book with any font, margins, or layout they want, but the book itself is just a plain text file. Is such a world possible? I believe that simple text files can bring books to life regardless of the technology used. Even if all e-readers are gone, you can still use Vim or Notepad to read books. Even if the editor went away, I could code a small editor to convert the bytes in the file to characters on the screen.
  • f1refly 4y ago
    That's pretty much what epub files are. You can unzip them and then read the html they contain. You can also use something to strip the html tags and only plain text will remain.
    • matwood 4y ago
      Exactly. And some modern books are taking full advantage of that fact and including javascript for interactivity. Though I'm not really a fan of this direction, some of the childrens books I've worked with have been pretty cool. Also note that while EPUBs are zips, the first few bytes are not compressed. Doesn't matter when unzipping, but if you want to make changes and re-zip you have to account for it.
  • anthk 4y ago
    A few books need images. For instance, to show up some weird figures in mistery books.
    • iggldiggl 4y ago
      Then there are various typographical and layout features – at a very minimum cursive, bold and possibly underlines should be not that uncommon. Quite a few books use footnotes, which are a bit of a paint to represent in a plain text format that's lacking the ability to explicitly link footnote symbols with their corresponding texts. (So you either need to introduce hard pagination, or convert them to endnotes, neither of which is really satisfactory.) Sometimes the pagination is explicitly played with, so even if your digital book doesn't use hard pagination, it'd still be useful to at least being able to force a new screen page. Font sizes occasionally get used for creative effects or to otherwise convey meaning, and the same goes for font selection itself. Sometimes even colour is used. And some books get quite creative in with playing with layout and typography effects. The Raw Shark Texts had some ASCII-art style pages, but utilising a proportional font (!) [1], and House of Leaves went totally bonkers in its use of creative typography (https://www.google.com/search?q=House+of+Leaves+typography&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=House+of+Leaves+typography&t...). [1] Even if those were based on a fixed-width font, you still need a way of indicating to the e-book reader software "Hey, here's some ASCII art, please don't reflow the text here and don't put a page break in the middle of the art, either". With a proportional font you either need to make sure the exact same font you used for layouting also gets used for display, or just give up and include that text as an image (and an appropriate alt-text, especially if the text for the ASCII-art isn't just random gibberish, but actually meaningful text, too).
• amai 4y ago
  Better use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage : "Discs using this technology could be capable of storing up to 360 terabytes worth of data for billions of years." See also: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-silica/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
• jabbu12 4y ago
  [dead]
• daitangio 4y ago
  When I was younger (!) and I had time, I used Calibre to unlock my e-books to be sure I will be able to read it (only for archiving purpose). Now I prefer sellers who provide me pdf books. For this reason I prefer to buy technical books from O'Reilly or Packt: they cost more of the same book on Amazon, but I get multiple unlocked formats, and I can print some pages if I need to. It is okey for me to pay a bit more to get a future-proof format like a pdf one. PDF seems the only format which is a bit more durable nowadays. The 7-bit ASCII is probably the most "future proof" format we have: even a Commodore PET (1980) should be compatible with 7bit-ASCII as far as I know.
• isthisthingon99 4y ago
  I buy the book on Kindle, then I remove the protection and save it as a PDF. Let's see how long that lasts...
• tekchip 4y ago
  Most of the arguments against digital books, or files generally, seem to assume no one ever does the work to update the files. Bitrot, unsupported formats, etc. This seems to be quickly followed by some pretty clear survivorship bias argument about paper. A touch of sun, a dab of moisture, poor quality materials, the family pet, fire, and a paper book is toast. I have files, ebooks, images, documents dating back to the 1990s because they're important and I do the work every so often to refresh them and keep them stored safely. Same sort of work people do for paper books in places like libraries (personal or otherwise). Neither seems to be more or less durable. Ones, shorter existence than the other doesn't lend aid to proof for either side of the argument.
• underdeserver 4y ago
  EPUB, the current standard, is a zip containing UTF-8 HTML files. Zip, UTF-8 and HTML are all ~30 year old standards. They're not going anywhere. It's just that we haven't had the chance to see how long they'll last. As for the processing and reprocessing... We can't really do anything with printed books at scale without lots of manual labor. E-books open up that possibility. That's supposed to be a bad thing? Printed books only keep if nobody opens them. Books that have been read often start crumbling. You have to reprint them, or keep a pristine, untouched copy, to ensure they last. This is nostalgia, not science.
  • marcus_holmes 4y ago
    I have digital books from 12 years ago on my hard drive (I switched to digital 12 years ago and got rid of all my dead trees about 10 years ago). I don't see any reason why they won't still be available and readable in another 20 years, or 50 for that matter. I used to have about 500 physical books, which took up a dozen or more book boxes and were back-breaking to move (I move a lot - every year on average). Every time they got moved they got damaged, and in one place the only storage area for them was damp, so they started getting moldy. I have probably 2000 books stored on a couple of backup drives (duplicated). I can move them (and my e-reader) in my pocket. I did lose a few in the early days because I stupidly went with Kindle and Amazon's DRM crap. But I managed to convert most of them to EPUB and now I only buy DRM-free books.
    • jjice 4y ago
      What ereader do you use that lets you read PDFs and EPUBs (presumably those formats) easily? I've heard Kindles aren't very accepting of that and would love to have a good alternative.
      • r3trohack3r 4y ago
        I use the ReMarkable 2 for reading. It supports PDFs and EPUBs and the experience is pretty great. I can download a PDF to my phone and push it to the tablet via their cloud sync service. From my understanding, under the hood, the EPUB is converted to a PDF before getting displayed.
• cainxinth 4y ago
  I have almost a thousand epubs mirrored on my NAS (and backed up elsewhere). The device I read them on changes periodically, but the actual ebooks don’t wear out, are easy to transport, and get much more use than my physical library. I still love paper books and would never part with mine, but they are more like mementos or even artwork to me now. My paper books are heavy, get dusty, almost died in a flood once, can tear or be stained, are a fire risk, and would be very difficult to replace if anything happened to them. Digital preservation has its challenges, too, but acting as steward for epubs has been much easier than for paper books (for me, anyway).
• aleyva 4y ago
  I'm glad we can have both types :)
• orblivion 4y ago
  I don't quite get why they have to keep updating formats. Or why there's OCR involved in the first place. Unless they're talking about scanned books specifically. At any rate, I can't imagine a future where there's a trove of digital works from 100 years ago, but gosh darn it we just don't have the programs to interpret them anymore. No, there's going to be the interest in preserving it and they'll find a way. The cost per work will be minimal; they just have to revive each kind of software once, assuming they preserve the binaries or specs. Or just have one emulator for an old system that runs all of it. Or worst case reverse engineer the formats (again, once per format not per work). Is there a single case of digital material from let's say the 60s that we can't interpret anymore? However it makes sense to me that DRM and physical upkeep of the drives are real blockers.
• drummer 4y ago
  Piracy is yet again the better choice.