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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

by 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. :)

by lacker 4y ago

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. :)