“The books will stop working.”

I wouldn't rank it among the best ever written, but fascinating enough in its own right. I've read it several times, and loaned/given it to friends too. Now I'm wondering about the annotated edition!

I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal.

My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.

P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.

> The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets

Mesopotamian clay tablets are incredibly robust. We have many times more than we have the manpower to translate, not to speak of the ones still buried in more or less unknown locations.

Funnily enough, they survived much better in cities that were destroyed -- and burned, firing the tablets -- than in cities that weren't, where the tablets might eventually fall below the water table and dissolve.

But anyway, we don't have "a small number" of durable tablets; we have an extremely large number, including some entire royal libraries.

> Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.

This is not the case; China had extensive markets in printed popular works for centuries beforehand. Most of that work doesn't survive because of lack of interest. The fate of almost all printed material is total disappearance, because we can only maintain so much material, and printed material is a subset of all material.

From the introduction to Record of the Listener ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ ):

> At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record [夷坚志] had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it was not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country. Much of the Record was nonetheless lost as early as the Yuan Dynasty [less than 100 years later], an indication of the traumatic effects of the Song-Yuan transition. The current 207-chapter editions are based on post-Song redactions and later manuscripts by traditional and modern scholars.

Note that this is a famous work considered relevant today. Contrast the countless printed popular works that nobody thought were worth preserving in the first place.

The ability to make copies is not relevant in the slightest. The number of copies made is relevant, but only weakly. Information is preserved when people devote effort to preserving it, and lost otherwise.

How many times does this need to happen, for people stop paying for DRMed junk? Buy digital goods DRM-free only. Vote with your wallet, otherwise it's pointless to complain.

Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!