Is it possible to build a computer that would last a century with light use?
Digital books wear out faster than physical books
101–110 of 453 posts
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable Not really. The paper's acidic, which means that the paper degrades to the point of not being usable without a huge amount of intervention. I have trade paperbacks which are under 20 years old whose paper are downright brittle. > but libraries canno Which is, I hate to say, irrelevant to the discussion of preserving digital documents. Libraries are getting…
> Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not. Libraries are how humanity at large preserves documents! Sure, I might have a wonderful collection of books on my hard drive, but other than me (and whoever knows about my torrents), nobody's benefiting from that; whereas everyone with a local library knows (at least, in theory) that they can find information there. When I kick the bucket, what happens to my…
> When I kick the bucket, what happens to my hard drive?
Well you could write a will saying that you want it to be released to the public and then have someone come along and say, "they didn't really mean it."
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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…
This. My wife runs a podcast about trashy novels and some of the books she gets her hands on... or not, as it were in some cases, because the digital version is a must.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable. An ebook takes a migration plan to remain readable. Yes you can remove DRM, but libraries cannot, they have to keep paying, and they're being sued to prevent them from preserving and migrating their data.
When I go to Olin Library at Cornell to get physical books today I find quite a few that are seriously yellowing and I am not talking seriously old but books printed in the 1970s. Paperbacks I have from the 1970s in my farmhouse which is a horrible place to keep books are often still in usable condition but have gotten much worse in the last 20 years.
I am sad about the libraries at Cornell that don't have physical books now. There was something about wandering down aisles looking at physical books.
Is there a way for a member of the general public to access Cornell's electronic subscriptions, say from computers inside the libraries?
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
> saved files are somehow more reliable
I have a whole set of ebooks I picked up at a less than reputable site in '11. They're all in pristine condition, all perfectly readable. I have books on my Kindle that are older than that (though not by a lot).
My 5 year old copy of "Edge of Tomorrow" (The LN "All You Need Is Kill" movie tie-in release) is yellowed and the binding is coming loose due to re-reading. The ebook manga I got at the same time is also in pristine condition, and will remain so when the book is long gone.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Well, if they can't wait, they could buy it earlier.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#107I 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.
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.
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-thro...!
https://scribe.citizen4.eu/everything-80s/why-are-streaming-...
Honestly the only way to preserve most digital-only video media today is piracy.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#108Physical 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 Inte…
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.
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.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#109Physical 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 Inte…
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.
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.
Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's why it's great that the internet exists. A very large number of libraries can burn and no knowledge will be lost. Just copies of that knowledge. Those Alexandrians' should have focused more on their tech game. :)
What will happen to that digital knowledge if there is no electricity in the world for like… twenty years? I am not even thinking about “twenty generations”.
We'll be burning paper books as fuel.