Digital books wear out faster than physical books • Hacker News Board

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#451

Post by deafpolygon » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #295

armchairhacker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You will also happy to read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect Once something is mainstream and non-perishable, odds of it going away go down and it's foreseeable that it will be around for at least as long as it's already been around. This effect is super strong in tech, for base technologies, with lots of integrations, especially around enterprise/governmental systems (which don't get changed un…

Back to vim or emacs then!

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#452

Post by ivanhoe » Tue, Nov 22, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #439

ivanhoe wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally ANY digital format can be converted to a modern version fully automatically once the need arises. You need to solve the problem once, build a tool, and from that moment on you can convert as many files as you need with a single click. This is way cheaper and easier than dealing with paper rot and ink blended by acids from air and paper.

This is overly optimistic. Even just for videos you are going to have to accept either additional quality loss or size bloat when converting older obscure codecs to something your average modern device can play.

What you're saying suggests that those old codecs were superior to new ones (offering better quality at smaller sizes), which is not a case for most of formats. Also the "size bloat" with data from say 40 years ago means little today as space has become so much cheaper. If you have to expand your data from say 70kb to 120kb, which 40 years ago would be a huge deal, today it's something no one will even bother to optimize. And anyway, discussion was not about space economy, but about data being permanently lost, unable to be accessed ever again - which unless the medium is physically damaged is very unlikely scenario. There are always people willing to reverse engineer old formats, just look at the state of retro gaming now. I converted my original ZX Spectrum games from tapes to digital files, and can play them on my modern computer almost 50 years later.

Re: Digital books wear out faster than physical books

#453

Post by KoftaBob » Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 11:19 AM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #262

jayeshhere wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it be possible to "donate" storage to the Internet Archive in the form of being part of it's infrastructure but distributed? Like plug in an off the shelf NAS on my home network which acts as a backup for some part of the archive? Perhaps that is wasteful, but then again also resilient.

What you’re describing is how IPFS Collaborative Clusters work.

The Internet Archive team would need to host one, and then others could join as “peers” to help seed.

https://collab.ipfscluster.io/