Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened.
For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.
And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.
Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.
Also, the digital media they reside on changes, too—from Digital Linear Tape to PATA hard drives to SATA hard drives to SSDs. If we do not actively tend our digital books they become unreadable very quickly.
Then there is cataloging and metadata. If we do not keep up with the ever-changing expectations of digital learners, then our books will not be found. This is ongoing and expensive.
Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.
Also, how we use books and periodicals, in the decades after they are published, change from how they were originally intended. We are seeing researchers use books and periodicals in machine learning investigations to find trends that were never easy in a one-by-one world, or in the silos of the publisher databases. Preparing these books for this type of analysis is time consuming and now threatened by publisher’s lawsuits.
If we want future access to our digital heritage we need to make some structural changes: changes to institution and publisher behaviors as well as supportive funding, laws, and enforcement.
The first step is to recognize preservation and access to our digital heritage is a big job and one worth doing. Then, find ways that institutions– educational, government, non-profit, and philanthropic– could make preservation a part of our daily responsibility.
Long live books.
Illustration: midjourney AI generated.
Thanks for this article. A tangental point about the longevity of e-books ; I had a number of Kindle(tm ) e-books, on my Windows7(tm ) device, and one day Amazon ™ informed me that they were no longer supporting that operating system, and so the books were lost. I asked Amazon(tm) about it, and they suggested I upgrade my devices. In other words, pay more for the ‘privelege’ of reading something I thought I already owned. Now, I refuse to give Kindle(tm) any business. Thanks for all that you do to keep books available.
You really should be regularly upgrading your operating system just for safety reasons. But that said, you don’t have to pay for it and your books were not lost. You can use a free OS and if there isn’t a Kindle app for it, you can use the “Kindle Cloud Reader”. Not saying you should give them more money, but you can access the books you already gave them money for.
THIS!!! All of it. Don’t use unsupported OSs! The hacks are too well known, freely avail. Unfortunately.
Computer security is endless, tireless, we’ve become indentured servants to our devices. And we can’t live w/o them!
The cloud support does not always work with Kindle or Amazon. If they decide not to keep or sell the work of an author then your access to it can be restricted or completely denied. In other words they can act in the same way as the Nazi regime and suppress their work.
The only safe way, which still requires at least occasional checks, seems to be to download your books, music, films or any similar media onto an external hard drive, but these can degrade over time, it seems.
The writer refers to the frailties in the technology of the reproduction of physical books. If you look into that subject, you may find that his point is valid and that payments to or capabilities of other providers are not the issue. Upgrading one’s own OS is of course a good thing to do, but it does not address the serious and pervasive problem addressed in this article. Your ideas are hopeful, always a good thing, too.
It sounds very true that moving books from one “pub” format or pdf format etc would be time consuming. But arent these formats used to provide for drm and or proprietary readers with licenses to read those formats? If the text from books were just stored as data they would be universally readable/searchable with almost no work. The storage media would still need to be kept up, but we need to do that not just for books but all data. It is incredible how many books can be stored on a thumb drive that costs $5 in the checkout line at Microcenter. Digital for me please. Also for the love of Zeus all text books should be digital so my children dont get the same back problems I did from hauling a backpack full of them for decades.
Research has shown that digital reading is an effective way to learn discrete facts, however, comprehension on more abstract concepts are much more easily understood when read in print. Children’s backs may be saved carrying a tablet, but their comprehension will suffer.
The same thing happened to music – I used to own a mountain of songs that I legitimately bought/paid for, purchased via different platforms (i.e., Rhapsody, Apple, even from the bands’ own websites). They must still be out there…’somewhere’; but, for all intents and purposes, I don’t have in my possession right now even a ‘speck’ of that ‘mountain’.
This is why I love Programs that allow me to break the DRM protection of my ebooks I purchase and I can then own the file and convert it to whatever I need to read it on. If I buy an ebook I want the file and to do with what I want with it in a non-illegal manner.
That’s why you don’t own Kindle books. Unfortunately. Look it up.
Son unos estafadores de “cuello blanco” por eso las estafas se propagan cada día más…
This doesn’t make sense. The books are in your account, you can read the in your smartphone, pc, tablet or reader. They simply dropped support on you OS. You didn’t lost the books.
So true! I love my ebooks but tend to only buy novels and magazines. Books I want to keep, reference, cookbooks, photo and art books, etc. I still buy in hard copy.
The same problem exists with photos. As the keeper of the family genealogy, I have photographs that are nearly 200 years old. Still very viewable. I’ve been scanning and restoring them by the thousands but keeping up with media and formats is an endless challenge. My biggest fear is that when my toes curl up no one will know where or how to find all the family photos or take on the job of keeping them current.
This is not to mention all the photos that exist only on cell phones or social media by so many people. Down the line, there will be nothing for the generations that follow to find. Our history will largely die with them.
“Down the line, there will be nothing for the generations that follow to find. Our history will largely die with them.” Heartbreaking thought, but that is the whole intent of all those behind the anti-White Western culture drive today, isn’t it?
I now buy hard backs, they will certainly last me a lifetime, I don’t intend playing football with them.
This is why I remove copy-protection from the electronic media I own. For example, I have taken my Apple //e floppy disks, turned them into a hex-dump disk image (they are only 140K…), and store the resulting plain text file. At any point in the future, I can turn that hex dump back into a binary disk image. And, by using one of the license-free OCR fonts, I can ensure it’s easily machine readable.
Whether they are books, audio, or computer media, once I spend good money on them, I will continue to do what’s needed to make them transportable to future technology. I used to read books on my Palm Pilot. Those books were converted to EPUB and/or PDF so I could read them on current devices. When the next big tech change arrives, my property will be ready to make the switch.
Jeff – your comment is the exact point of the article. Your technical expertise seems to be higher than your average end-user. I applaud your technical efforts to keep your electronic media readable over generations. We need to have easy-to-use (e.g., a couple of button clicks and use of drop downs) tools that allow the average, non-technical user to be able to accomplish what you have accomplished.
It exists… look up Calibre. You just have to be technical enough to search for it and the instructions on how to set it up (there are many step-by-step walkthroughs).
I have found Calibre to be a versatile program to convert from one format to another. I like just loading a book in then tell Calibre what format I want it to be converted into.
Exactly!
Great article! Even if 100 years vs 10 years isn’t 100% accurate, digital books are NOT your property. You bought a license to read them, but you didn’t buy any property. Don’t believe? Read the contract you digitally signed…
Example: Amazon recently canceled my account. The reason they gave was that my account was accessed by an unauthorized third party overseas… I used a strong password and didn’t write it down or shared it with anyone, so that wasn’t my fault, but that’s how I lost access to hundreds of books I’ve paid to read over the years… I guess that could have happened if thieves got into my library and stole all my books too… But I don’t trust Amazon anymore…
The ebooks in question were prepared from physical books. Now ever since the 1960’s, publishers have included words such as “may not be stored in any information retrieval system” on the copyright page of each book they publish, but printing that restriction doesn’t make it enforceable vs. the first sale doctrine or the special library privileges in copyright law. That’s what this lawsuit is about.
Thank-you for clarifying that. Of course, most people realise that the rapid changes in technology, which are embraced by most young people but daunt many older people, make our technologies out of date fairly quickly. The home movies I took of my children reside (if they haven’t failed) on a small format tape that I have no way of reading/watching. None-the-less, I have had an expectation that digital books would last forever. As I prefer hard copy printed books and do not buy e-books I haven’t had experience of the changing technologies. I’m pleased to support your organisation in a small way so that these kinds of things can be preserved and made available to all for free.
Lol, did you try to download a physical book unavailable in stores for decades?
Électronic books are easily available for everyone for free…
Yes, quite easily. It’s called going to the Library.
I still do not understand why people by Kindle’s. At least if you have an e-reader, phone or computer you can check out and read the materials – For FREE. Also Amazon will not allow Kindle’s to download books from library servers because they want to charge for the book.
Going to the library is a lost art. I love my library.
Even if I can’t annotate on the books I get, the upside is when I move, I don’t need to move the books.
When I moved from Florida to Massachusetts, the biggest cost by a long shot was the moving of my books. Three-fourths of the cost. Had I known that, I would have donated those books to. I don’t even have them now. I could weep.
I agree with the use of Calibre. If I pay for a ebook, itʼs mine, no matter what Amazon says.
Where would I find a public library that has the number of 100+ year old books that Internet Archive and Project Gutenburg have? Even not so old books are weeded out regularly because libraries curate their collections based on space and what would be interesting or useful for their patrons.
Paper books were the vector of our collective knowledge for centuries and we would have much to loose if there were not the constant efforts of organizations such as yours.
The same problem occurs with every kind of digital media. People take countless photographies every days. How much will be available a few years? Most of them will be locked in a proprietary cloud anyway…
The Domesday book (1086) handwritten on vellum. Providing a complete list of the contents of England.
Still usable.
The Domesday book 2nd edition (1986) virtually unreadable due to digital obsolence
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
Revenge of analog. This is why I still own tapes and a VCR.
Richard Stallman predicted this in 1997, unfortunately the publishers read his story as an instruction manual.
“This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.”
Source: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
In verità la maggior parte delle cose scritte su questo articolo si possono tranquillamente automatizzare(effettuando conversioni, tenendo più formati dei libri) in 8 ore un computer può eseguire decine di migliaia di conversioni… Purtroppo l’unica cosa impossibile da automatizzare è la gestione dei metadati, che inevitabilmente deve essere fatta e mantenuta aggiornata dall’uomo e successivamente i computer aggiorneranno ogni singolo libro in base alle informazioni aggiornate, però la considero una soluzione accettabile rispetto al dover fare ristampe di libri ogni anno
Questo è vero, ma la conversione dei metadati non sembra abbastanza semplice da essere completata regolarmente dalla persona media. Inoltre, la conversione automatica di molti libri non sembra essere abbastanza precisa: troppi errori.
Great !
Not going to disagree with how digital books will not last longer than physical book. But saying “Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.” can be misleading.
Because paper books also need active maintenance. The environment that they’re in have to be controlled to ensure it’s not too damp nor too dry. It has to cleaned from imsects that likes to eat paper. Same with rodents.
Basically, don’t expect papers to last if they’re not kept properly.
What you have described is passive maintenance of paper books, not active per sé. There’s a pretty major difference
Cataloging and metadata also have to be upgraded. As a kid I was taught to find books using a card catalog; my kids have never seen one and wouldn’t be able to find a book in a library where that was the catalog method.
Paper quality can differ massively , I have a few ( PAPERBACK ) books 40 years old still white pages
Hello, In the Bulgaria have paper books on hardcover and paperback and on the Bulgarian language only. Unfortunately, the books on English language are not available at the Bulgarian bookstores and the digital libraries of foreign languages are not approved by the Bulgarian institutions (the most educational), because the parents, scholars and teachers are doesn’t approved to read paper and electronic of foreign languages. Fortunately, in 2022 I found digital libraries on foreign languages (the most English language) and I brought foreign language literature on English language. The Bulgarian language is not required. We can change the world to be better for new 2023 year.
Hi Vladamir from the US! We here take it for granted and your story is sad but inspiring. I hope you get to travel and live in an English speaking county. We have free public libraries. This site is good and all but look at Brooklyn New York has some free services, as does the US Library of Congress. Use a Vpn service and you access countless English resources!
Photographs have similar (parallel) issues.
Photos even more so , probably in the early era of mobile phones , let so many go due to crap picture quality expensive printers ect , no problem today.
Great Post !
If you keep a PDF file and EPUB files locally on your system (and backup) them – then its the same as having a ‘real’ or ‘physical’ book. With open source (Linux/FreeBSD/…) world/ecosystem there will always be some tool that will read (PDF) or convert (EPUB) it to other format.
Just make sure you keep those files on a filesystem that does not have bit rot problem and have ability to heal itself when some errors come from thy physical disk – like ZFS for example.
Regards.
This is what I wanted to say in response to the article. Simple text files have existed for decades and will probably continue to be easily usable for a long time. The same is true of PDF files, and of HTML (and EPUB ebooks are made up of zipped HTML files). That many commercially sold ebooks (like music, etc.) are likely to become inaccessible sooner due to incompatible software is more the fault of DRM than of ebooks generally.
The basic premise of this argument seems flawed. Paper books that have “sat on our shelves for hundreds of years and are still readable” are the exception, not the rule.
The vast majority of medieval-to-early-modern period printed material no longer exists, whether through destruction or natural decay of the inks and print media. The reason these books are rare is *because* of the inherent fragility of these print media.
There are no absolutes.
“Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.”
I am currently scanning some books that are right at 100 years old. They are flaking and deteriorating in my hands. The kind and quality of the paper used for physical books will have a lot to do with their longevity.
Why not print books by etching them into silicon wafers with microscopic text, like making microprocessors? Then, encase the book wafers in amber, and bury them in the dirt. They will last for millions of years, without any climate control interventions. They can be read with an optical microscope after polishing the amber. Much more durable than paper.
I maintain an off-line archive of every eBook I’ve obtained. I run everything through Calibré once, I strip the DRM if there is any and that’s it. I’ve had Kindles since the K3 (Kindle keyboard) to the latest 6.8″ PaperWhite, never had an issue.
Great article !
I have always been a reader. My book collection was up to 38 boxes last time we moved.
I am visually handicapped. Without the ability to blow up fonts on devices, I would have lost the ability to read books at all.
If you have a Kindle, Amazon will send you samples of pretty much any book. I finish a much higher percentage books then I previously did.
I said something similar to my eye doctor when he said I didn’t need readers yet. Can just zoom digital fonts, thank goodness.
My eyes wear out faster reading from a screen than from a physical book.
But yea, I have downloaded many books and essays that I never found a physical copy of for purchase or borrowing. The eye strain wins out however.
Get an eink screen! The eye processes it the same way as a printed page.
Thank you! I will look into it.
I’ve spent, literally, decades, sitting in front of a computer screen of one kind or another, and my eyesight remains 20-20 even though I’m 81 years old.
So don’t go telling me that computer screens will destroy my vision.
Is it worth persevering everything if nothing will ever stop evolving or changing? I fear libraries will be come outdated with the ever rise of freedom works works that can be legally copied and modified without checking into a library. I am writing free works under share alike but my efforts have been in vain.
Anyone regret storing data on Zip Drives? I think it’s called data extinction.
I don’t regret using Zip Drives, because I was able to get a USB Zip Drive (you can still get them today) and retrieve the data. It’s been awhile since I tried, but the last one I tried was at least 20 years old and I could still retrieve the data. What I regret using was CDs and DVDs – they deteriorated and the data was irretrievable after just a few years.
That’s very strange!
I have CDs and DVDs which I read from time to time, and many of them are 20 years old or older.
thanks a lot
The pdf existed 10 years ago. Just don’t buy stuff in stupid formats that were created to limit what you can do with a book you buy.
Take a look at the free Calibre program. It processes a variety of book formats, and it’s been around quite a few years.
This is a fascinating topic and one that needs to be discussed.
I have a lot of ebooks, and I have tried several readers. I settled on and bought Sony readers early on, as they were ecosystem-independent and could read several open formats. I still read on my beloved PRS-950 and my PRS-T2, and I hike and travel with my PRS-350, which easily slips into a pocket.
I use Calibre to manage my library, to strip DRM, and to manage my readers. I put every book into ePub format for my reader and I keep several archival copies both locally and in the cloud. I maintain about 5000 books in the Calibre library, and I have several thousand more waiting to catalog and store.
I could not reasonably keep a library of paper books this big in my home. I also couldn’t reasonably carry fifty or sixty books, along with periodicals and notes, in my pocket! Ebooks are remarkably liberating.
As long as I practice the same reasonably prudent data management and security techniques I practice with all of my other data, and I use a secure, open-source operating system like Linux, there’s no reason to expect that my ebooks won’t always be there.
Current versions of Calibre do not “strip DRM” because doing so is a violation of US Federal Law!
You have a few more books than I have, but not by very much.
I don’t see that you need quite so many copies of each file, but there’s little harm in that as disk space gets cheaper and cheaper.
While Linux is open-source, don’t delude yourself into believing it’s all that secure. It isn’t. As long as Linus Torvolds keeps the kernel as his own personal domain, you cannot be sure it is secure.
It is an issue that digital works need to be continually updated as reader software gets updated. But it still allows books to be more accessible by the general public than the few copies of printed books in the local library.
Or you could just get your books and put them on Google and you wouldn’t have any of these problems. Stop messing with bs software, OS and put them in the cloud where you always have access to them via any device. This isn’t rocket science, but maybe meteorology.
Except Google can delete the books if they believe you don’t have permission to make copies. It’s best to keep them in storage that YOU control (But you can set up your own server that allows you to access your books from any device…) But either way, you can’t access them without software and an OS. If you have something that works for you, sure, you as an individual don’t need to convert the books to the latest format. But, say there’s someone that can only access books using features the latest formats offer.
Get rid of copyright laws. Then books can be backed up, copied, etc.
Get rid of copyright laws? And how do you expect authors to be paid for their effort? Or even be recognized as authors.? Without copyright, you can steal someone’s intellectual property and parade it as your work.
I’ve been using calibre for years to manage my ebook library. Development can be slow and it has the occasional frustrating bug but I highly recommend it for drm free books. It allows you to edit metadata and convert to virtually any format your device might need.
I have had Calibre for some years, too, and recently, the makers have been updating it at a surprising rate. Almost monthly.
I have not tried to convert a format. I stopped when I got to the part about “connect your device to your computer” because I don’t use “devices.”
Well, I do have a Kindle Fire, but I have not figured out where the books get stored.
This 100%. Anyone reading e-books, irrespective of the device used, should be using calibre to manage their libraries. I’ve moved (almost) my entire library through several devices, from nook to kindle to kobo, various os tablets/phones and pcs. The ability to strip drm is the icing on the cake, buy from any of the dozens of vendors and use the books you pay for on all your devices.
First of all thank you for this article, I think this happens same with the music.
thats great !
I don’t remember where I read or heard this factoid but, apparently, there are millions of early digitized governmental documents inaccessible in stacks of obsolete computers deteriorating in the National Archives. I may not have gotten all the specifics right, but the point is that it’s very unlikely these records can ever be recovered.
Thank you, Brewster. In case no one noticed, we use your archive quite a bit on our online blogs and news/comments, research/advocacy pages:
** https://ContractWithAmerica2.com
** https://GordonWatts.com
** https://GordonWayneWatts.com
Gordon Wayne Watts
Editor-in-Chief, The Register
Nat’l Dir, CONTRACT WITH AMERICA: PART II (TM)
physical books, like tp and amazon boxes, are horrible fates for living breathing trees. the ideas and words matter, so let’s get our collective tuchus in gear and standardize format so the ideas aren’t restricted to the privileged few with dough.
My wife and I have a personal library of over 3,000 books, which stretches back more than sixty years (although a handful of the books are well-over a century old). None of our books are collector’s items, nor are any individual books worth much. I guess that our library will be carted off to a charity shop when we die, but it will see us out.
We have also had a wide selection of books and other documents in digital format. One of the problems is not simply that digital formats change, as mentioned in the article, but also that the machines on which the documents can be read become obsolete. My first sub-PC computer used 160KB 5.25″ floppy disks; followed by PC computers that read only 720KB and 1.4 MB 3.5″ floppy disks; followed by computers that read only CD-ROMs; followed by computers that use only USB drives. Most of my digital documents are ‘locked’ into thousands of computer disks (and not forgetting the Amstrad PCW disks) that are now, in practice, unreadable. I do have an intention to try to ‘rescue’ some of the digital documents, but my intention has to compete with my desire to read (and learn), as well as all the other demands on daily life.
I sometimes write about ideas that interest me, for which I now consider a digital copy of relevant material to be all but essential. I am currently considering buying a paper copy of the Penguin ‘Essays’ by Michel de Montaigne. There is no point in buying a paper copy if I am not going to read it. I have already accessed a digital copy of the book and have started to read it online. However, if and when I decide that the essays will continue be of value to me, I shall buy a paper copy, partly in order to have it easily to hand, but also because I guarantee that in a short handful of years, my digital copy will have been left behind on yesteryear’s computer. Whilst all my most recent documents are backed-up in ‘the cloud’, I have lost access to countless photographs and a lot of music that was backed up in ‘the cloud’, that is, until the respective services were closed.
I had a song on a vinyl record. That tech went by the wayside.
So, I bought it on reel-to-reel tape. That tech went by the wayside.
So, I bought it on cassette tape. That tech went by the wayside.
So, I bought it on a CD. That tech went by the wayside.
So, I bought it on a DVD. That tech went by the wayside.
So, I bought it on an MP3 device. That tech is going by the wayside.
And each new recording cost me, which means the publisher got multiple $ for the same song.
Is it any wonder that people take the “illegal” route?
And don’t get me started on phone tech, video tech, cars, etc!
I am an artist and photographer doing a lot or research in antique manuscripts and technical manuals in different languages to help me with my projects. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I have been able to freely access thousands of books, some of which are so precious that they can never be seen in their original form, or only one page at a time behind heavy glass in museums the world over… Archive.org is a TREASURE, and I can’t thank it enough for the amazing work it is doing. As I consider myself technologically inept, I can’t navigate the constant technical upgrades; thankfully there are experts who can do it for me. In the meantime, I just keep my downloads in pdf format on individual hard drives, hoping that they’ll remain usable for some years to come. Even with limitations, the digital era is a blessing, and I am truly grateful for the incredible resources it places right at everyone’s fingertips.
Slightly off topic here. This is indeed an important point of consideration regarding archiving of books or print of the past. Native E-books though, those created without a tangible format, will slowly become increasingly more of a multimedia endeavor with less text as we move forward, potentially with their own evolving formats.
Wow, thanks for putting into words what I have sensed all along. This is why I’ve never owned an ebook and still read good old fashioned books (and value them) today. I value the old books because it is documented information that cannot be manipulated, and it’s history like it or not. I love books, collect and read them, love the library, and archives. Thanks to all who contribute to these things I value.
There is some truth in the article, but only SOME!
Changing from SATA drives to SSD makes absolutely NO difference to ebooks! That’s one false claim.
I’ve been buying Kindle books for considerably longer than 10 years, and they all still work. (Well, sometimes I have to go to Amazon and remove the book from my devices and then download it again, but not very often.)
I did have an ebook reader (name forgotten) that went out of business; they offered a free program that converted all of them to .PDF format, and that’s still readable. The DRM was all removed.
But, I agree that none of that is likely to last 100 years. That’s one reason I keep my several-hundred printed books right where I can find them any time I want.
Brewster Kahle Can I help? I mean, do you need volunteers to update books (formats)?
Yes! we need lots of help.
Music, images, sounds, and texts – all are available in various digital formats. Our eyes and ears can’t make sense of digits without some electronic device. The formats change and new devices are required. I hope we never loose the originals. Someday we will have machines that are analog, as we are.
Just last winter I made a project of handling about 200 3.5″ floppy disks from the Apple 2+ days in the late 1970’s. I WAS actually able to locate a USB version of a 3.5″ floppy drive to ready them, but I would say probably over 30% of the disks were no longer readable. The original data was lost, lots of old outdated software installs, nothing of any real value, but in most cases I was able to reformat them which would renew the magnetic storage.
We don’t really store any digital books on our systems since we read everything via Kindle devices, but I have 70 thousand tracks of digital music and am digitizing 100 years of b&w famiy photos, and over 60 years of 35mm slides, along with about 50 thousand photos from digital cameras.
My computer network provides 30 terabytes of online storage, and as the projects progress, I make multiple backup copies on removable drives which will be distributed to younger family members.
For you techies out there, my moto is nested functions: Backup ( backup ( your backup ) )
Which all goes to show how good it is to have the Internet Archive available.
I did not read all of the comments and everyone should know that, when a digital book goes out of print, censored or in purchased by another publisher, it not only disappears from the online library but from your personal library as well and you will not get your money back!
Do you have a specific example of a book this has happened for? Or is it something they have in the Terms and Conditions?
In the same vein, records are easily lost as well, especially if there is a desire on someone’s part to change them. I’ve been in the same university job for 51 years. I wrote the Grad Program. As various other Grad Advisors take the position, I find my grad students telling me that they don’t need this course, or they need that course. I go back to my original paper trail, hike to the advisor’s office, and say, “unless you can show me that this passed the departmental and university curriculum committee, this is the Bible.” Can’t imagine what has happened to millions of departmental “edicts” over the years. If it isn’t on the shelf in the minutes books, it will be superseded by a new bright idea 10 years later.
thanks
Well thanks so much for the update
Consider saving the e-books as pdf, which can’t be changed. Any chance that future readers or computers will not be able to read pdf in future. I don’t think so.
To my mind next century will be from the mass of data of the information age just a big empty hole – except maybe at the libraries. Downright ludicrous.
Scholarly societies such as the American Institute of Physics have wrestled with this problem for decades. They might have useful advice, and data on how expensive it is to do what they have been doing.
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Revenge of analog. This is why I still own a VCR. I also own a number of books (I love old books) that are well over 100 years old, have never had any special maintenance, and are still perfectly readable. The oldest print matter I own is a pamphlet from 1706. As easy to read now as the day it was printed.
Interesting. This is something I started pondering about a year ago and is what first got me to start looking at The Internet Archive more closely.
https://blog.devgenius.io/paper-as-a-digital-storage-medium-4096c5062da
Thanks for the article.
This only applies to formats that want to prevent excessive sharing or guarantee someone has paid for the ebook. Once it is stored in plain text like html, or even PDF, it is easy to read and access, I have documents from the early 90s that I can still read and share, and it has been 32 years and counting.
Problem arises when people want to profit from the ebook itself and try to complicate things.
Anyone who has worked in a used bookstore or used a library pre-tech (card catalogs!) knows paper books are a LOT of maintenance. If you have a large library, you better have a sorting system. You better also have lots of empty shelf space because adding new titles in could force you to shuffle every shelf down trying to make space. As someone else said, books 100+ years old are the exception – while they’re readable, you likely wouldn’t want to. If they’re leather bound, you don’t want to touch them too much. Most of the paper is very fragile. Covers and binding are falling apart (these are usually the only ones we see in the shop – old Bibles for repair.) If there is a scan available, you’ll want to read that one.
Hi
I will be pleased to publish an Italian translation of this post in my “Cassandra Crossing” column. However, I was unable to find the license of it.
If you agree, is it possible to have a republish right statement from you for use under a free license like CC By Sa?.
Keep up the good work! Marco Calamari
I wrote this and you can use it as CC-by. Thank you!
-brewster
oh great post thanks
Texts, books, music and computers have been in my (academic) interests since the mid-1980s. I live in Greece but I did my graduate work in the humanities in the US in the early 1980s where I first encountered library computer terminals. At that time some US friends of mine had just bought and used the first “word processors” (typewriters with very small screens on which you could check the 2-3 typed lines of text before send them to paper). As Greece has always been part of “West Europe” books in English, French, German, Italian have been available in the book market and there were/are specialized and general non-Greek language libraries and institutions available to academics and the general public.
My first PC (1986) was a British made Amstrad PCW with a separate printer attached to it but a few years later I could afford to buy an IBM PC and save my writings on WordPerfect for DOS. In any case, I kept printouts of my Amstrad PCW texts that I later scanned and converted to Word/Writer texts. My WordPerfect DOS texts were later machine converted to Word/Writer docs. Similarly, when at some point in the early 2000s turntables almost disappeared from the market I recorded my vinyl records and created music files that I burned them on music CDs. In the 2010s after my house basement flooded fortunately with little damage to my stored physical academic books for personal preservation reasons I scanned a lot of my books in PDF format just in case the originals were destroyed. All this resulted in a waste of time and money just for me to have my work, library and entertainment available when needed.
This personal story of “digital preservation” shows that even individuals who have lived half of their lives in the 20th century cannot rely anymore on just one format in both printed matter and sound if they want to keep using it. Therefore, I fully understand the library/ries problem nowadays and I am for a standardization in formats and reasonable prices especially for the same content but in a different format. However, the cost of converting from one format to the other must not be out of the pocket of the user but from the budget of the seller. A friend of mine was furious recently because he told me: I bought the same book in paper but I found it most versatile to have the electronic version which I must now buy in the same price I bought the original book which I owe and may not even be able to download to my PC. Also, he said, I first bought the vinyl record of my favorite band, then as a good buyer I bought the cassette version to play on my car player, then the CD version, then a subscription on a music platform and now I found out that there is a technologically improved vinyl record again in the market. How many times am I supposed to pay for the same music in my lifetime?
I think it is obvious why technology changes and DRM serve very well the seller but not the buyer. So, something must be done about it and both libraries and individuals must own what they buy regardless of technology changes.
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