14 ms·

Physical books wear out in decades to centuries, computers break in years to decades. Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility f

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.
      - nix23 4y ago
        Ok, i folded the disk and after many hour of testing i have to say that your are right, it's not working anymore, however for the sake of correctness it was a Pentium4 era harddisk. But yeah being swiss i know what you mean ;)
- version_five 4y ago
  This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine
  - serf 4y ago
    go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load. I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme. Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      > Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years >> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.
      - version_five 4y ago
        (also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)
        chaxor 4y ago
        It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud". Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months? It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > citations My own experience - having a brand new paperback litter pages on my first read. Or buying a book only to find that the last signature was a duplicate of the one prior to it. I've also had a manga spine break on a second reading, literally dropping a whole section of pages on my lap.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      How are you reading them? Are you bending the cover to the back while reading?
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape. When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    For me, if I can really sit and enjoy reading and that's all I'm doing I prefer a physical book. But, electronic books do have a real convenience to them that I have to admit. If I'm reading one-handed (holding a baby, eating a sandwich, etc) I really appreciate a kindle for reading. Also, when traveling, the ability to bring 50 books with me on a flight, or camping, while taking up no space is amazing. But, yea, for the endurance of the storage media, physical books definitely have an edge in my eye.
- chaxor 4y ago
  A big point being made in this thread is that the technology for physical storage of the media becomes obsolete quickly. One could argue that the physical book itself is the original storage technology. But, as many have said, that book on Floppy disk is harder to access in today's world, and in the future, a 7200RPM hard disk external USB drive will probably be very difficult to use. It's already somewhat of a hassle for many devices using usb-C, rather than usb-A. So when we move to storing archives or cold storage (likely where most books will go) on DNA, information is provided by LLM AI, and all our devices have no ports whatsoever - it's pretty likely that external hard drive will require a lot of effort and money to get the contents out.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I have a SCSI hard drive or two I cannot access.
- ThinkBeat 4y ago
  I have paperbacks over 100 years old that are still easily readable. It is in the shelf. Before that it was on my grandfathers shelf. The transformation was quite easy. Shelf ot Shelf. Somewhere on an Amazon server I have a couple of thousand Kindle eBooks. How long will Kindle device be around and useable? They may disappear at any moment really. I have also bought book and publications in other formats. PDFs, Word docs, plain text, epub, etc. If I die tomorrow, and someone was interested in my literarily habits, they could go to my shelf and find that paperback, put it in their pocket and put it on their own bookshelf. My Kindle books will be unseeable and untouchable. (ands this might happen before I kick the bucket and I won't be able ot read them either. already a couple of books and publications are missing All my computer file books on a cloud somewhere or some harddisk will be invisible as well. If someone took an interest in my laptop to look at my digital bookshelf. of non-Kindle files. Well, it is a MacBook and strongly encrypted from what I understand. I dont think a future interested person will have an easy time looking at my shelf. Perhaps I should start gluing thumb drives to my bookshelf at regular intervals. How kong will usb thumb drives be around? How long do they last? I have a nice collection of floppy disks, computer cassettes (with programs), ZX Microdrive disks, Iomega zip drives, and a stack of backup streamer tapes of different formats/sizes. I have no idea what system they used and what it would take to read even one of them, I also have some movies in "HD DVD" format and a laserdisc or two. Not to mention a large assortments of memory cards for cameras that mostly contain RAW formats of long forgotten cameras. All these data storage ideas were sensible at the time. A thumb drive is sensible now. I have no idea for how long it will be.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android. There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble. I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap. All those digital mediums are not lost, and all of those digital files can be transferred to more current storage mediums without any loss in resolution. You're right that storing important files on your MacBook isn't a good archival strategy. It is a recipe for certain disaster. Its essentially storing your books loosely in the trunk of your car along with your gym bag and every now and then an open case of beer. It's not the place to store things long term, just a place to put things while you're working on them. If your logicboard dies, it'll take the storage with it.
- irrational 4y ago
  I have trade paperbacks from when the 1970s. My father has some from the 1950s. They are all perfectly fine. Maybe the ones from the 1950s are a little yellow around the edges, but that hardly affects the ability to read them.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either). EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuances, but a DRM-free EPUB book should be readable indefinitely. You can check this out by unzipping the EPUB and looking at the files inside with a web browser (if you're doing it from a GUI, you will probably have to change the file extension to .zip first, so it unzips rather than opens in your ebook reader software).
- layer8 4y ago
  > HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay... They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.
    - Vrondi 4y ago
      Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.
    - robin_reala 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
angelbar 4y ago
IPFS, torrents
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  Yes, the tech exists, but not the follow through
cachvico 4y ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
- notRobot 4y ago
  > IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.
- samplatt 4y ago
  >IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019. :-(
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? Copyright, of course. The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me.
- d4a 4y ago
  Not for a lack of trying http://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-summary-judgment-in-federal-lawsuit-filed-by-publishing-companies/ http://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-su...
  - lasc4r 4y ago
    The latest On The Media episode did a segment on this lawsuit as well, starts at 21 mins. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-infinite-scroll https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  > The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me. Because it's a library. If you happen to be lucky enough to go there and meet the people running it, it's very clear they are librarians doing what librarians do.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.
    - adalacelove 4y ago
      I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is fair use. It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone.
jayeshhere 4y ago
They actually store multiple copies. They even use IPFS to store it over decentralized network. But copyright is the main issue we don't see many services like open library or internet archive. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.
  - cbrogrammer 4y ago
    Saying anyone is "responsible" for a suicide is disingenuous
    - gkbrk 4y ago
      People are absolutely, 100% responsible for his death. A young person near the beginning of their career got sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, for downloading some PDFs of scientific articles. It's not like someone asked him to delete the PDFs and he killed himself in protest. His life was ruined to make an example out of him.
      - cbrogrammer 4y ago
        Well that is just objectively false. The man was never "sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines". It is blatantly false.
        hunter-gatherer 4y ago
        It is objectively false, but the spirit of your comment is grossly incorrect as well. He wasn't sentenced, but the "13 federal crimes" was a plea bargain offered by the prosecution. He killed himself beforehand. FWIW, I actually have a close friend who ended up in North Kern for a couple years because of a plea deal fiasco. For most of us who never directly interact with the criminal courts, navigating such curcumstances is complelty bonkers and stressful, as I'm sure it was for Swartz.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
You could use a laser to burn bubbles into a Qwartz crystal, for longer lasting digital media.
- nix23 4y ago
  Or printing it on paper...oh wait that's a book ;) BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive#Storage_and_future_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive#Storage_a...
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Use fb2, it was designed for archival purposes.
tornato7 4y ago
Check out Arweave. It's not quite as tested as something like BitTorrent but 'perpetual endowments' in theory make data on Arweave persist "forever"
- EGreg 4y ago
  Well, nftstorage seems to be free somehow in perpetuity. Something about extra filecoin for those who store the massive 40GB files that can be uploaded there… can someone elaborate on the tokenomics of that?
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  That kinda misses the point. The issue is that it requires active effort to keep it alive for more than a few years. While a physical book needs to be actively destroyed to completely disapper.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
Many countries have their own digital archives, generally as part of their government's archives (so not just digital), I have worked on tools for sending data to the Danish Digital archive and was interviewing for a job there one time but I messed up the interview because I'm a dork.
- erk__ 4y ago
  They even have archives of all Danish (.dk) websites to some degree. Though it is not generally accessible like the Internet archive is
tim333 4y ago
There are of course naughty book services using bittorrent and the like that store a lot of stuff without worrying about the copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis is popular.
selfhoster11 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. If you dispense with the notion that publishers control that data, it actually becomes incredibly easy to achieve all of this and more. Worried about data loss? Make more digital copies, spread them on more media. Worried about shifting formats? Convert to plaintext, mobi, ePub or PDF - those will be supported in open source software indefinitely. Still worried about files trapped in proprietary formats that you don’t know how to convert? Fire up a VM. As long as you can get files from under online DRM, the files are safer than ever.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? Copyright? I'd pay monthly to access an archive of media older than 20 years.
freetanga 4y ago
Agreed. But also since publishing is so cheap, an enourmous amount of garbage is published every year. I don’t care much if a reality celeb memoirs book vanishes from existence. Or that Python 2 handbook from 5y ago. The books that changed my life are sitting in my shelf and will be offered to my kids one day.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Plain text files haven't changed that much in the past few decades. We could (should?) transform at least text into plain files (instead of stupid epub/mobi/etc), and that might conserve them for ages
- crtasm 4y ago
  An epub is a .zip containing HTML, I'm pretty happy with it as a long term format.
Tangurena2 4y ago
The licensing that libraries are forced to use in order to support lending digital books only allows them to "loan" the digital book a certain number of times. Depending on publisher, it could be 50-200 loans and then the license goes poof - time to buy a new copy of the digital book to lend out. Yes, paper books can get destroyed. I remember spilling gravy all over one library book. That was an expensive book to replace. Plus I ruined all that gravy. > Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats? I'm sure they do. Personally, I'd really like to know what some "best practices" there are in doing this. Other than the digital preservation group at the Library of Congress, I'm a newbie at some of this. And no one else has thought about it. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/index.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/index.html The state agency I work for has to keep records forever. And they have to be readable forever. You can't have the statutes become unreadable because digital files get bit rot, or folks decide that they don't want to support older versions.
Siira 4y ago
> 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. This is pure hyperbole. The one and only challenge is rent-seeking. There already are lots of ebooks from decades before in PDF.

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.
    - nix23 4y ago
      Ok, i folded the disk and after many hour of testing i have to say that your are right, it's not working anymore, however for the sake of correctness it was a Pentium4 era harddisk. But yeah being swiss i know what you mean ;)
version_five 4y ago
This is nonsense. I have almost never seen paperbacks wear out. Obviously it's possible, but even in any of their common failure modes, they are still easily read. I don't know why anyone would argue that saved files are somehow more reliable, it feels not at all genuine
- serf 4y ago
  go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store, chances are good that the pages have warped, yellowed, and have become brittle. They will generally fall from the binding easily, or break apart in a jig-saw fashion under bending load. I use 'cheesy romance novel' as the benchmark, as they were notoriously poorly bound with cheap materials to reduce cost per unit to the extreme. Yes, a human could read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    > Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years >> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.
    - version_five 4y ago
      (also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)
      - chaxor 4y ago
        It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud". Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.
ncallaway 4y ago
> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months? It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > citations My own experience - having a brand new paperback litter pages on my first read. Or buying a book only to find that the last signature was a duplicate of the one prior to it. I've also had a manga spine break on a second reading, literally dropping a whole section of pages on my lap.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    How are you reading them? Are you bending the cover to the back while reading?
Eupraxias 4y ago
Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape. When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  For me, if I can really sit and enjoy reading and that's all I'm doing I prefer a physical book. But, electronic books do have a real convenience to them that I have to admit. If I'm reading one-handed (holding a baby, eating a sandwich, etc) I really appreciate a kindle for reading. Also, when traveling, the ability to bring 50 books with me on a flight, or camping, while taking up no space is amazing. But, yea, for the endurance of the storage media, physical books definitely have an edge in my eye.
chaxor 4y ago
A big point being made in this thread is that the technology for physical storage of the media becomes obsolete quickly. One could argue that the physical book itself is the original storage technology. But, as many have said, that book on Floppy disk is harder to access in today's world, and in the future, a 7200RPM hard disk external USB drive will probably be very difficult to use. It's already somewhat of a hassle for many devices using usb-C, rather than usb-A. So when we move to storing archives or cold storage (likely where most books will go) on DNA, information is provided by LLM AI, and all our devices have no ports whatsoever - it's pretty likely that external hard drive will require a lot of effort and money to get the contents out.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I have a SCSI hard drive or two I cannot access.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
I have paperbacks over 100 years old that are still easily readable. It is in the shelf. Before that it was on my grandfathers shelf. The transformation was quite easy. Shelf ot Shelf. Somewhere on an Amazon server I have a couple of thousand Kindle eBooks. How long will Kindle device be around and useable? They may disappear at any moment really. I have also bought book and publications in other formats. PDFs, Word docs, plain text, epub, etc. If I die tomorrow, and someone was interested in my literarily habits, they could go to my shelf and find that paperback, put it in their pocket and put it on their own bookshelf. My Kindle books will be unseeable and untouchable. (ands this might happen before I kick the bucket and I won't be able ot read them either. already a couple of books and publications are missing All my computer file books on a cloud somewhere or some harddisk will be invisible as well. If someone took an interest in my laptop to look at my digital bookshelf. of non-Kindle files. Well, it is a MacBook and strongly encrypted from what I understand. I dont think a future interested person will have an easy time looking at my shelf. Perhaps I should start gluing thumb drives to my bookshelf at regular intervals. How kong will usb thumb drives be around? How long do they last? I have a nice collection of floppy disks, computer cassettes (with programs), ZX Microdrive disks, Iomega zip drives, and a stack of backup streamer tapes of different formats/sizes. I have no idea what system they used and what it would take to read even one of them, I also have some movies in "HD DVD" format and a laserdisc or two. Not to mention a large assortments of memory cards for cameras that mostly contain RAW formats of long forgotten cameras. All these data storage ideas were sensible at the time. A thumb drive is sensible now. I have no idea for how long it will be.
- vel0city 4y ago
  There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android. There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble. I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap. All those digital mediums are not lost, and all of those digital files can be transferred to more current storage mediums without any loss in resolution. You're right that storing important files on your MacBook isn't a good archival strategy. It is a recipe for certain disaster. Its essentially storing your books loosely in the trunk of your car along with your gym bag and every now and then an open case of beer. It's not the place to store things long term, just a place to put things while you're working on them. If your logicboard dies, it'll take the storage with it.
irrational 4y ago
I have trade paperbacks from when the 1970s. My father has some from the 1950s. They are all perfectly fine. Maybe the ones from the 1950s are a little yellow around the edges, but that hardly affects the ability to read them.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either). EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuances, but a DRM-free EPUB book should be readable indefinitely. You can check this out by unzipping the EPUB and looking at the files inside with a web browser (if you're doing it from a GUI, you will probably have to change the file extension to .zip first, so it unzips rather than opens in your ebook reader software).

layer8 4y ago
> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay... They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.
  - Vrondi 4y ago
    Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.
  - robin_reala 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

angelbar 4y ago

IPFS, torrents

GenerocUsername 4y ago
Yes, the tech exists, but not the follow through

cachvico 4y ago

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

notRobot 4y ago
> IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.
samplatt 4y ago
>IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019. :-(

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? Copyright, of course. The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me.

d4a 4y ago
Not for a lack of trying http://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-summary-judgment-in-federal-lawsuit-filed-by-publishing-companies/ http://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-su...
- lasc4r 4y ago
  The latest On The Media episode did a segment on this lawsuit as well, starts at 21 mins. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-infinite-scroll https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...
gwbas1c 4y ago
> The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me. Because it's a library. If you happen to be lucky enough to go there and meet the people running it, it's very clear they are librarians doing what librarians do.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.
  - adalacelove 4y ago
    I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is fair use. It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone.

jayeshhere 4y ago

They actually store multiple copies. They even use IPFS to store it over decentralized network. But copyright is the main issue we don't see many services like open library or internet archive. Rest in peace Aaron Swartz

DocTomoe 4y ago
Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.
- cbrogrammer 4y ago
  Saying anyone is "responsible" for a suicide is disingenuous
  - gkbrk 4y ago
    People are absolutely, 100% responsible for his death. A young person near the beginning of their career got sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, for downloading some PDFs of scientific articles. It's not like someone asked him to delete the PDFs and he killed himself in protest. His life was ruined to make an example out of him.
    - cbrogrammer 4y ago
      Well that is just objectively false. The man was never "sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines". It is blatantly false.
      - hunter-gatherer 4y ago
        It is objectively false, but the spirit of your comment is grossly incorrect as well. He wasn't sentenced, but the "13 federal crimes" was a plea bargain offered by the prosecution. He killed himself beforehand. FWIW, I actually have a close friend who ended up in North Kern for a couple years because of a plea deal fiasco. For most of us who never directly interact with the criminal courts, navigating such curcumstances is complelty bonkers and stressful, as I'm sure it was for Swartz.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

You could use a laser to burn bubbles into a Qwartz crystal, for longer lasting digital media.

nix23 4y ago
Or printing it on paper...oh wait that's a book ;) BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive#Storage_and_future_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive#Storage_a...

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

Use fb2, it was designed for archival purposes.

tornato7 4y ago

Check out Arweave. It's not quite as tested as something like BitTorrent but 'perpetual endowments' in theory make data on Arweave persist "forever"

EGreg 4y ago
Well, nftstorage seems to be free somehow in perpetuity. Something about extra filecoin for those who store the massive 40GB files that can be uploaded there… can someone elaborate on the tokenomics of that?
Double_a_92 4y ago
That kinda misses the point. The issue is that it requires active effort to keep it alive for more than a few years. While a physical book needs to be actively destroyed to completely disapper.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

Many countries have their own digital archives, generally as part of their government's archives (so not just digital), I have worked on tools for sending data to the Danish Digital archive and was interviewing for a job there one time but I messed up the interview because I'm a dork.

erk__ 4y ago
They even have archives of all Danish (.dk) websites to some degree. Though it is not generally accessible like the Internet archive is

tim333 4y ago

There are of course naughty book services using bittorrent and the like that store a lot of stuff without worrying about the copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis is popular.

selfhoster11 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. If you dispense with the notion that publishers control that data, it actually becomes incredibly easy to achieve all of this and more. Worried about data loss? Make more digital copies, spread them on more media. Worried about shifting formats? Convert to plaintext, mobi, ePub or PDF - those will be supported in open source software indefinitely. Still worried about files trapped in proprietary formats that you don’t know how to convert? Fire up a VM. As long as you can get files from under online DRM, the files are safer than ever.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive? Copyright? I'd pay monthly to access an archive of media older than 20 years.

freetanga 4y ago

Agreed. But also since publishing is so cheap, an enourmous amount of garbage is published every year. I don’t care much if a reality celeb memoirs book vanishes from existence. Or that Python 2 handbook from 5y ago. The books that changed my life are sitting in my shelf and will be offered to my kids one day.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Plain text files haven't changed that much in the past few decades. We could (should?) transform at least text into plain files (instead of stupid epub/mobi/etc), and that might conserve them for ages

crtasm 4y ago
An epub is a .zip containing HTML, I'm pretty happy with it as a long term format.

Tangurena2 4y ago

The licensing that libraries are forced to use in order to support lending digital books only allows them to "loan" the digital book a certain number of times. Depending on publisher, it could be 50-200 loans and then the license goes poof - time to buy a new copy of the digital book to lend out. Yes, paper books can get destroyed. I remember spilling gravy all over one library book. That was an expensive book to replace. Plus I ruined all that gravy. > Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats? I'm sure they do. Personally, I'd really like to know what some "best practices" there are in doing this. Other than the digital preservation group at the Library of Congress, I'm a newbie at some of this. And no one else has thought about it. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/index.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/index.html The state agency I work for has to keep records forever. And they have to be readable forever. You can't have the statutes become unreadable because digital files get bit rot, or folks decide that they don't want to support older versions.

Siira 4y ago

> 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. This is pure hyperbole. The one and only challenge is rent-seeking. There already are lots of ebooks from decades before in PDF.