Digital books wear out faster than physical books | Hacker News Reader

Digital books wear out faster than physical books

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777 pointsAmorymeltzer435 comments

Physical 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 Internet Archive? The way to preserve media is to distribute it and store it in many places, not just one central location. Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats?

Also, figuring out what information is "meaningful" and which is completely useless or redundant is extremely important. Because we want to store everything with the potential to be important in the future, but we also have an incredible amount of data (hence one of the reasons why IA is the only major archiver). It may be good to strategize data collection, e.g. a shallow list of all sources and a deeper list of popular sources, a sample of various sources from every region, etc

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

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 read the broken pages pretty easily with effort, but one of the niceties about the book format is that it reduces the user burden to such a degree as to allow them to become entrenched in the material rather than the physical good.

> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years

>> go buy a cheesy romance novel from the 70s at any local thrift store

Okay, but a "cheesy romance novel from the 70s" is 50 years old at this point. That's...a very generous interpretation of "will wear out in months or years". I suppose it's true that "500 months" is technically months, but...that's not how that phrase is typically used.

(also the fact that it's for sale in a thrift store is a dead giveaway that it's not completely worn out yet; are there many 3-1/4" floppies, or even CDs, storage media from 20-30 years ago, max, that are readily picked up by a layperson and perused now?)

It'sbeginning to be a hassle now to even extract info off of external drives with usb-A, due to all the migration to USB-C. More devices will likely switch to wireless only, fed by big companies' shitty "cloud".

Hopefully some will fight the good fight to keep at least desktops with ports long enough in order to allow for a personal NAS and IPFS to keep our docs accessible.

No it isn’t: I’ve found books missing half the pages in a thrift store.

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.

You've never seen a paperback made in the 1960s-1990s? The paper is brittle and the pages are literally falling apart. You can't read paper where pieces of it have fallen off and disintegrated.

Certainly not true of every paperback from then. I wandered downstairs and found several books on my shelves printed in the '70s, '80s, and '90s in totally fine condition. On the oldest books the paper has started to yellow a touch, but are otherwise fine.

But even a book from the 90s is 20-30 years old at this point. I'm not sure if that fits colloquially with a claim that they fall apart in "months to years". I've never had a paperback book I've purchased fall apart within 5 years (hell, I can't think of a time one fell apart within 10 years with the exception of severe water damage).

I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.

> I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.

I have. I had one fall apart on my first read through it. Pages just dropping out of it.

I also recall, as a teenager some years ago, buying a hardcover book from a store in the airport, and realizing that the last 20 pages were the previous 20 pages pasted in again.

Ultimately, the books I cared about re-reading, I've replaced with ebooks. Because aside from the convenience, I don't have to worry about the book's condition, deterioration, mold, et.al.

My AD&D Unearthed Arcana fell apart in months.

Although that was notoriously bound poorly.

> I just...have never seen a book fall apart in months.

I've had the binding snap on mass market paperbacks when I opened it the first time. Not exactly a shining beacon of quality.

I have a few sci-fi novels from the 50's that are in fine shape and many more through the 60's to 90's that are even better. Where are these people buying such poor quality paperbacks?

The oldest hardback in my library is right around 300 years old and beyond a bit of foxing in quite good condition.

They used much higher-quality paper 300 years ago, so those books don't fall apart. Somewhere in the 20th century they used really crappy acidic paper for the mass-market paperbacks. If you're looking at sci-fi novels in hardcover form, this doesn't describe those; they generally used high-quality paper. I have a bunch of those from the 70s-80s that are fine too. Go look at the crappy romance novels from the 80s, and you'll see a very different story.

Cheap pulp-based paper was a creation of the 19th century.

The 1898 Report of the Librarian of Congress has an appendix titled "The Durability of Paper" addressing just this concern:

<https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...>

I have many paperbacks from the 1950s to the present day. Some of the really old ones are a little yellow around the edges, but brittle and falling apart? Never. I have no idea what you are talking about.

My shelf is full of scifi/fantasy paperbacks from 80s to late 90s. A lot of these have their binding already broken. This happens especially to small (cheap) format books of more than 500 pages.

No problems with small books of reasonable lengths. At some point the number of pages in the popular books exceeded the durability of the cheap binding tech in use.

brittle and falling apart? Never.

How often have you read them? Many of my most beloved cheap paperbacks from the 80s and 90s have been replaced at least once since they've literally fallen apart as I was reading them. Also my books from the 50s and 60s seem to be of higher quality than books from the 80s and 90s (or that could also just be survivor bias).

I have run across many books where the binding has disintegrated and the paper has degraded, but never to the point where a book could not be read. Assuming the book was handled with care (so that the unbound pages are not lost), every book could be read in its entirety.

I'm not saying that your scenario can't happen. I am saying that I would be surprised if all but the most carefully maintained digital library would outlive the cheapest of print books. Keep in mind that, at a bare minimum, a digital library must be backed up and transferred to new media every few years. You may get away with storing digital for a decade untended, but two decades is a bit of a stretch. Also keep in mind that even the slightest amount of bit rot can make an entire book unreadable. While this isn't really true of books stored as plain text, most modern formats seem to used some sort of compressed container (e.g. ePubs are compressed).

> You've never seen a paperback made in the 1960s-1990s?

I own tons from the 80s, all are in perfect condition. Also a few dozen from the 70s and they're all fine.

I also have a few books from the 1800s, those are hardcovers not paperbacks but also in reasonably good shape.

I have books from 1800's in a perfect condition. Also, comic books from the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Unless the ebook we are comparing to (from the same time period) was a literal .txt file, it is unlikely you will be able to open it on a modern computer without processing/conversion of some kind.

They can fall apart but can be re-bound. I have a bunch of such fixed books where I got the cover and the binding replaced.

I've got a dozen or so paperbacks from the 1930s on my shelf that I read from time to time, and hundreds from later decades. Most (> 90%) are only slightly yellowed and stiff. The remaining 10% vary from crispy around the edges to falling apart. Sure, paper eventually degrades, especially cheap non acid free paper, but we know for sure (because they're in libraries and still quite readable) that the content of quality paper books can last for centuries, and probably, with good care, millennia.

Keep in mind that bindings often last a lot less than that: One of the reasons genuinely old leatherbound books have those horizontal ridges on the spines is that they cover the (often also leather) laces used to re-bind the book and hold the pages together. This gave the classic works a certain look that was later replicated by publishers as just decorative ridges on the spine - but the origin of the feature was that those leather ridges were functional (they also acted as wear bumpers, but this was a secondary bonus) and a key part of the rebound book's structure!

I'll add one more big item to the anti-electronic book column: It is simply impossible to build electronics that last for decades with lead-free solder. Leaded PCBs will still eventually have tin whisker problems, but the new "green/RoHS" lead-free PCBs always stop working much sooner than leaded ones. Worse yet, no one cares because obsolescence design cycles are single-digit years now. Prior to lead-free electronic controls, appliances lasted many decades: Almost all of my major appliances are over 30 years old now, and some have never been repaired at all! They're a little less efficient, but much cheaper over the long haul, as I'm not replacing them every few years - that makes them arguably better for the environment, too, as there's no waste filling the dump, either...

Real books last centuries. E-books can't. We're a long way from Andromeda's "flexies"...

> 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.

Either that specific edition is of bad quality or you need to learn how to take care of books better.

But that's kind of the point of the whole "electronic books last longer" argument. You don't have to worry about either of those things with electronic books.

Instead you have to worry about new things, like not regularly backing up your files to new media since hard drive failures and bit rot are real. You may also have DRM, logins, and paywalls to overcome which are total non-issues with paperbacks.

Ultimately, it's a trade off. Assuming that you have a DRM free digital copy of something and that you're remarkably careful about keeping back ups and multi-site/format copies a digital file could easily last 100 years, just like a well cared for paperback could last a hundred years. At that point, the difference between them is how easy it will be to read the contents. For the digital copy you will need a certain type hardware and software which may or may not exist or be easy to obtain in 100 years, but you need nothing at all for the paperback.

I like books, so I think the best bet is both the physical copy and multiple digital copies in various formats. It's not as if we have to chose one or the other, so it's okay that both options come with different strengths and weaknesses.

Chuck a ebook on any storage medium and wait 20 years, and odds are the file is unusable, due to the file being incompatible with new software, the storage medium being unusable, bitrot or a number of other factors. Maintenance is required for both physical and digital. Physical requires a relatively dry space and not bending the spine, which anyone's grandma's dog can do. Digital requires backups + regular recovery testing to be guaranteed.

There's plenty to worry about with maintenance of both formats, but for paper most of the investment is upfront. For digital it is an ongoing investment, with the benefit of a pristine copy being maintained.

A physical book goes from pristine to yellowed and loose-leafed. An ebook just completely stops working. The failure modes are completely different

Paperbacks are easily lost, stolen, or destroyed by things like flood, fire, mildew, insects.

While digital books are also stored on media that can be lost, stolen, etc., the magic comes from storing multiple copies in different places.

In the 3rd world or maybe in the "cardboard" homes in the US, Maybe. But under a proper shelf, wardrobe, desk or box, books last for long.

I still have a comic book compilation (hard cover) from the 70's right here. The condition it's perfect for its age.

And yet those things have happened to me, despite storing them properly.

If you like pulp fiction from, say, the 1930s, they are very expensive if you can find them.

https://comicbookplus.com

Most paper contain acid. The acid breaks down the paper. Pages become very fragile after some time(100 to 200 years?). Paperback uses cheap paper that contain acid. Paperback books will not last forever. More expensive acid free paper is often used by artists. Acid free paper is made plant fibers, but often not wood. It could be cotton. This will have a much longer life span. This paper is too expensive for most books

The problems with paperbacks, and even a fair number of hardcover books, is acidic paper (archival quality is acid-free cotton-rag), and for paperbacks, binding glue, which often fails with time.

If the pages don't literally crumble to dust, they fall from the binding, especially when actually read.

There are some formats which survive better, but many books will in fact deteriorate beyond readability within 50 years or so.

Bullshit. I can go to a second-hand bookstore in Spain right now and buy tons of volumes from the 70 and 80's.

The math book I'm reading right now it's from the 70's.

I admire your enthusiasm.

You might care to temper it with a balance of rigour in verifying your own beliefs and anecdotal experiences, your haste to dismiss that of others, and as in assessing your own methodology and its potential weaknesses.

I could perhaps have been more clear to indicate that use of acidic, pulp-based paper is more common in paperback publications, rather than universal. The point remains that as a cheaper publication mode, that cheaper publication processes and materials are more prevalent. I have encountered issues with pulp-based decay in both paperback and hardcopy books.

I'd linked an 1898 reference to issues with high-pulp, acidic paper degradation in an earlier comment (also submitted as an HN item). It begins:

The Library of Congress is indebted to the American ambassador at Berlin, the Hon Andrew D. White, for the following copy of the regulations adopted by the Prussian Government for the security of the national archives, and teh special danger involved in printing or writing records on paper made of wood pulp.

Wood pulp is extensively used in the manufacture of modern paper.

Paper made from compositions containing wood pulp decays more or less rapidly in proportion to the amount of wood pulp used.

Such paper is unfit for official use where permanency of records is essential or important.

<https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735036&vi...>

The specific issue is somewhat less the wood pulp than acidic materials used in its preparation and their interaction with the pulp. Wikipedia has a good article on the matter:

Paper degradation is a slow process, but it is significantly accelerated in an acidic environment. In the mid-nineteenth century, the method of paper production became popular, in which resin-alum glue was added to the paper pulp.[3] The aluminum sulphate remaining in the paper form, in reaction with water, acids that catalyze the decomposition of cellulose (acidic hydrolysis). In this process, the cellulose chains are shortened, which reduces the tear resistance of the paper, and at the same time increases the cross-linking of their structure that causes the paper to stiffen and become brittle.[4] Parallel to the degradation under the influence of water, the cellulose chains react with oxygen, in result of oxidation the chains are also shortened.[5] Not only cellulose, but also the lignin contained in the paper is oxidized, which leads to the yellowing of the paper.

... The process of self-degradation of paper causes exceptional difficulties in safeguarding the collections of archives and libraries. For example, an analysis of the book collections of the Jagiellonian Library, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Książnica Cieszyńska, the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Cracow University of Technology proved that as much as 90% of the resources published by the mid-1990s (to be precise in 1996 in Poland) have all the features of acidic paper.[7] It turned out that these institutions, established to care for the heritage of the past, are not able to effectively carry out their mission.[8]

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidic_paper>

As to books published in the 1970s and 1980s, I have, or have had, numerous instances of these in my own personal library, purchased new, which are in the process of or have entirely degraded beyond usability, the latter having been discarded.

Those Spanish examples you've encountered might be a useful foil on which to consider a further concept (and common methodological / sampling error): survivorship bias:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias>

No, he's right. Your comment was bullshit. Even really poor quality books will last at least many decades longer than any ebook reader and format. Good books last centuries to millennia. (And the ones with really good content tend to get re-bound, as well, lasting nearly forever...)

No ebooks can last more than a decade or two, and even if the files are perfectly readable, you often need a LOT of supporting hardware and software to use them.

Take even a very simple example like a Kindle in 15-20 years time: The LiPoly battery will fail, it may not be able to phone home to validate your DRM anymore, for many reasons: Amazon my have updated the APIs to a form unusable by your old device, your account may no longer exist, the wireless network standards may no longer be compatible or in use (original Kindles already suffer from this!), the charger may be long-gone (or you can no longer find a type-A USB port to plug the charging cable into), the lead-free solder will have developed tin whiskers and shorted out PCB connections, the grid may have collapsed due to the instability of renewable energy or a Carrington event, and in my experience, the microUSB charging connector on the Kindle itself will most certainly have broken, anyway, as they always do (and I'm NOT hard on my devices...) Exactly NONE of those issues will ever prevent a book from providing you access to the information it had from the day of its printing.

Thanks, I'll take paper. *ALL* digital data/info storage is ephemeral. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.

(And BTW, history shows that the fall of civilizations (and their support structures, of course) does happen with alarming frequency. For the last few thousand years, books( (or close cousins like scrolls, etc.) have proven to be as resistant to that sort of thing as possible.)

You are refuting an argument I did not in fact make.

Actually, several arguments I didn't make.

I have at least a couple of thousand paperbacks that are at least fifty years old. Not one of them is unreadable. A few of the cheaper ones (mostly very cheap US editions) are falling apart but that doesn't have much effect on readability.

This entire thread is essentially "I have an anecdote about an old book falling apart, so therefore old books are bad". Reminds me of people at work who push back against changing business processes because "what about this one edge case that might happen?" where the edge case is minor, rare and can be easily identified and handled manually where the new process would also save literal hours of time per week.

The paper of mass-market paperbacks has a high acid content and over time the paper will crumble. Take a look at mmp from the 1950's if you don't believe this. That is why librarians wash books, to get the acid out. Rag paper with no or little acid content will last 300, 400 years or more. Books from the incunabula, properly tended, have not crumbled into dust.

> Trade paperbacks will wear out in months or years

I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Decades, I could start to believe. *Months*? I've never had a paperback be unusable within a decade. Do you have any citations or data for trade paperbacks wearing out in months?

It's just *so* incongruous with my personal experience of even the cheapest paperback I've ever bought.

> citations

My own experience - having a brand new paperback litter pages on my first read. Or buying a book only to find that the last signature was a duplicate of the one prior to it.

I've also had a manga spine break on a second reading, literally dropping a whole section of pages on my lap.

How are you reading them? Are you bending the cover to the back while reading?

Untrue. I still have and use the 1$ paperbacks I bought for college 30 years ago, and they're in great shape.

When it comes to reading, non-electronic books are superior in just about every way for me.

For me, if I can really sit and enjoy reading and that's all I'm doing I prefer a physical book.

But, electronic books do have a real convenience to them that I have to admit. If I'm reading one-handed (holding a baby, eating a sandwich, etc) I really appreciate a kindle for reading. Also, when traveling, the ability to bring 50 books with me on a flight, or camping, while taking up no space is amazing.

But, yea, for the endurance of the storage media, physical books definitely have an edge in my eye.

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.

I have a SCSI hard drive or two I cannot access.

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.

There are still USB floppy disk drives out there. They work fine in Windows and Linux. They'll even work with USB-OTG on Android.

There's a listing on eBay right now for a USB 750MB Zip Drive. I imagine you could get it working in Windows and Linux without much trouble.

I've got a monitor that supports something like a dozen different memory cards. Memory card readers are incredibly cheap.

All those digital mediums are not lost, and all of those digital files can be transferred to more current storage mediums without any loss in resolution.

You're right that storing important files on your MacBook isn't a good archival strategy. It is a recipe for certain disaster. Its essentially storing your books loosely in the trunk of your car along with your gym bag and every now and then an open case of beer. It's not the place to store things long term, just a place to put things while you're working on them. If your logicboard dies, it'll take the storage with it.

Have you tried to read a 5 volt smartmedia card recently? I came across a few 2 megabyte 5v cards when going through my Dad's stuff a few years back. I stuck them on EBay because it was better than just throwing them away, and was astonished when they fetched £30 a pop. I can only imagine they're used by some classic synth gear or something like that.

I have not recently but I think the card reader attached to my monitor supports the 5V cards. I don't think I've touched a smartmedia card since 2003.

They were really popular back in the day though. They seemed so futuristic, this ultra thin plastic chip seemingly storing your data on these etched gold patterns. It definitely seemed like something out of science fiction. SD cards are so plain in aesthetic comparison.

You overestimate how much people will care about your bookshelf after you die. Usually most of such book collections like that get sold for cheap or tossed out. Yes, a few interesting ones may be kept. But books are dime a dozen, the point is to read them, not to keep them around indefinitely.

Another problem is the ease of reading. When there's a book on my shelf, anyone visiting can take a look and dive into the book. Or my kids could wet their feet in different topics, something which is not possible with digital formats.

I have trade paperbacks from when the 1970s. My father has some from the 1950s. They are all perfectly fine. Maybe the ones from the 1950s are a little yellow around the edges, but that hardly affects the ability to read them.

LOL. Were are you from? I have books from 1800 at home.

Maybe from Hogwarts...have you seen want they do with their books?

Seriously, here in Europe books are treated with a lot of care because books were and are relatively expensive, unlike mangas in Japan which were sold like chip bags.

Maybe a lot of them have a folded page or such, but the content it's readable. Try that with IDE disks from a Pentium II.

Ok, i folded the disk and after many hour of testing i have to say that your are right, it's not working anymore, however for the sake of correctness it was a Pentium4 era harddisk.

But yeah being swiss i know what you mean ;)

> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed.

While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either).

EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuances, but a DRM-free EPUB book should be readable indefinitely. You can check this out by unzipping the EPUB and looking at the files inside with a web browser (if you're doing it from a GUI, you will probably have to change the file extension to .zip first, so it unzips rather than opens in your ebook reader software).

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.

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 remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.

Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.

HTML1 [1] isn’t that different, it’s mostly just a much smaller subset.

[1] https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

Gzip is not a container format. Pkzip is far more flexible.

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 unless someone makes a strong business case why the change makes more money) and consumer hardware (which tends to linger for aeons since it's so distributed).

Back to vim or emacs then!

>and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.

Also, several other tiny insignificant Operating Systems like Android(/Linux) [apk files] and Windows [builtin explorer support]. Let's also not forget Java JAR files.

It would be a bit tragic if HTML goes out of use, but JavaScript continues XD

There are already websites that intentionally hide everything until JS loads even though all the content is still in the HTML. Not to mention sites where the HTML is just a stub to load JS.

The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG.

However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.

> However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.

Or DRM. HTML still being used isn't going to help you when its wrapped up in an encrypted blob. We're not there yet (except for video) but you can bet there are plenty of actors who will jump at the chance.

HTML isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility.

The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead.

The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead.

Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, you lose the DAISY format support, and external resources. (EPUB2 let you use full URLs to specify parts hosted externally, like webpages, but EPUB3 requires itself to be self-contained. Not a bad change, but still a breaking change.) NCX replaces just using a HTML5 nav element, and a few more things.

All of those things mean that there _are_ technical documents that exist, that _aren't_ readable without some effort to update them.

Yes, but all of those deprecated elements can still be rendered just fine by some of the current browsers. And even if, say, you couldn't display an index page with frameset, then the stuff inside the frames is just plain old html files anyway, which you can display easily. bgcolor, etc. all still render fine in current browsers as well.

The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular.

> The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular.

Vs. decent-quality old "dead tree" books, properly stored, can be ignored for centuries and still be perfectly fine.

You might want to ask a good historian or librarian about all the incredibly important (historically, to us, now) documents which we know existed, but we do not have, because there was no continuously-operated, high-budget "Holy Brothers of Document Preservation" monastery doing all the re-copy work needed to preserve them. (And maintain off-site backups in case of fire at the Monastery, and ...)

(If you aren't familiar - most of the materials used for documents in ancient times degrade fairly quickly. Unless (say) carefully stashed in a nice, dry cave in an arid climate. And even that stuff tends to be "crumble if you touch it" fragile.)

> (And maintain off-site backups in case of fire at the Monastery, and ...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia

For every important historical work we have, there are several more, at least as important, that we know we're missing. And presumably even more that we've never heard of.

Oral history. And before someone says anything, Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, the 4 day one. Done every year. Still.

(hgroup is in the HTML living standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/sections.html#the-hgr...)

But it was removed in 2013 [0]. So depending on age and strictness of your rendering engine, you don't have a guarantee for how it'll be handled.

[0] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013A...

Neither is "LaTeX"; but, like Latex and other text-based formats, the content of the document is, in general, human-readable when it's read, unlike, for example, jpeg images.

None of that is unreadable. You can always download a browser from a few years back and open the page with that. So while there may be some inconvenience with old information, there is no loss of content.

Until you can't. You don't need to download and install anything to read a book from 50 years ago.

The day <marquee> goes from deprecated to removed will be a very sad one :(

> The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead.

Those are all basically cosmetic/layout related, though. The text itself is still perfectly readable.

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either)

I very strongly disagree. The amount of technical overhead required to render a simple zipped XML from some storage medium is immense. Even if you store this on tape, you need a tape machine to read the bits. If you manage to pull this off, you won't get anything useful, because the XML is zipped. Deciphering a ZIP and translating it into bits which only make sense if you know that they represent binary numbers and must be read according to an obscure translation table (UTF-8) which is stored also digitally, someplace else, is more difficult than deciphering the enigma code, the hyroglyphs, and the Inca knot language combined. And even if you manage to pull off this unbelievable feat, you still require a parser, a renderer, a display or a printer to even get close to the possibility for a human to read it. For all of that, you not only need electricity, but the devices required are usually easily broken, and manufacturing them requires knowledge and a technical overhead (and also an amount of electricity) orders of magnitude larger than simply using them. Not to mention all the raw materials required to produce a display, a CPU, etc, which may simply be unavailable to future generations.

Now imagine humankind after a complete societal collapse. Tribe A finds, in some basement that survived the apocalypse, a collection of basic medical books. Tribe B finds, in another basement, an unlabeled hard disk containing the entire Wikipedia, as a zipped XML file. Which tribe is more likely to survive?

I would argue that we shouldn't care about something in the extremely distant future, and what would be the second worst case scenario (the worst one being human extinction).

There's no way to really plan for it (prepping is a joke) and it slows down progress if we really do it.

Yeah, I'm a bit worried about UTF-8 : it might be impractical to read with 8-bit only CPUs ?

http://collapseos.org/

At least the ASCII part should still be easily readable ? But not much of a relief for non-latin alphabet languages...

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.

The PDF/A format was developed specifically for long term document archival.

IPFS, torrents

Yes, the tech exists, but not the follow through

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

> IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.

>IA.BAK has been broken and unmaintained since about December 2016. The above status page is not accurate as of December 2019.

:-(

> But I really wonder why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive?

Not for a lack of trying

http://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-su...

The latest On The Media episode did a segment on this lawsuit as well, starts at 21 mins.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...

> The fact the Internet Archive hasn't been sued out of existence yet never ceases to amaze me.

Because it's a library. If you happen to be lucky enough to go there and meet the people running it, it's very clear they are librarians doing what librarians do.

While I cherish the sentiment I very much doubt it's shared by all content right holders and copyright lawyers. And it takes only a handful to disagree.

I think they put reasonable barriers to piracy. They are of course possible to circumvent, as every other barrier in existence, but you can also scan or make photocopies of a physical book. And this is actually a good thing. Mildly related: the other they I was watching something on Netflix on my phone and found something funny so I tried to take an screenshot to share with my friends, which quite frankly I think is fair use. It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone.

To unlock that feature you have to buy a second phone.

> It didn't work because it seems that although I paid for my phone, it's not really my phone.

Root it.

Not an option.

Rooting the device voids the warranty.

It's not a reasonable thing to ask the average person.

> Rooting the device voids the warranty.

I’m pretty sure it would depend on the country you’re in . Even if that’s actually the case in the US

Even if it doesn’t void the warranty, it voids SafetyNet, so now Netflix and other apps might refuse to work.

And even if it didn’t, it increases the attack surface. Random apps can ask for root, and the average user won’t know what it means.

And even if you know the risks, now it’s much more of a hassle keeping your device up-to-date.

So yes, rooting is theoretically a solution, but it’s not practical in the least.

If Netflix refuses to offer their services on a device that you own, you're always free not to pay netflix and instead take your money and attention elsewhere.

Just remember that that doesn't mean piracy.

If there's no ethical company left to purchase goods from, then there's no ethical issue with piracy.

And that's the problem with "owning your device entirely".

Most people are not capable (or willing) to own their device to its full extent and take responsibility for it.

The options are not limited to "A sanctified centralized authority controls and limits all my devices" and "I need to recompile the kernel by hand".

For most people "owning their devices" means being allowed to meaningfully change OS (or even just modify it) without losing major functionalities.

Is there a root method that falsely reports that SafetyNet is still intact?

It doesn't if you're using Magisk - which is the case 99% of the time. Magisk has been updated and passes SafetyNet under Android 12 too - no other means of rooting a modern phone is safe anyway.

So now you need to stay up-to-date with the newest advances in rooting (which I clearly wasn't).

It's nice if this is a hobby (and I have rooted my phones in the past), but for the average user (even the average technical user) who just wants to get on with their day without becoming an expert in rooting, it's a complete no-go.

Importantly, it's a very poor substitute for regulations mandating that manufacturers offer us these options without having to go through back doors. I believe that any energy spent on technical workarounds to manufacturer locks is better spent on political activism to enable true device ownership through regulation.

Not having a warranty is, frankly, also a part of it being really your phone.

"I want to be allowed to do whatever I want, but if I do something I regret, I get a refund" is not a coherent position to take.

Bullshit, warranties is the way to keep manufacturers honest : if it only has minimum legal manufacturer warranty, you know it's crap.

And it should be illegal to void warranty for rooting.

My understanding is that (precedent aside) in the US the law clearly says that the manufacturer has to prove that you managed the product under warranty.

That is those "warranty void" stickers are not enforceable (under that specific law) by themselves, they need to argue that the user actually damaged the product.

How do you know the phone doesn't have multiple levels of root and you're only breaking the topmost one?

I was thinking of doing that but then I don't think you can use netflix at all or if you make your way around that your banking app might not work etc

Not practical if you want to use the phone for payments and identity services because a lot of those will refuse to work on a rooted device.

Hardware remote attestation will end that soon. Every app will refuse to run on modified devices and it will be impossible to circumvent because it's in hardware.

Those user hostile features are what drive me to piracy. No way I'll pay money to have the privilege of installing spyware just so I can stream low-quality video to whatever device the provider deems worthy at that particular moment.

I'll just go on 1337x and in 2 minutes I have an high quality mkv that I can play anywhere I want. I'd happily pay 5-10$ a pop for this, and for indie movies I do make the effort of seeing if there's a way of paying to watch it somewhere, even if I just pay and don't watch it there, and watch the pirated rip anyway.

What a way to justify a crime. "I don't like how they act, so I don't comply with their rules".

You pirate because you have no respect for law, because you are a entitled child or because you don't have enough money. Piracy isn't plain theft, but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners. It's close, isn't it?

Would you sneak into a amusement park? Not pay for dinner if you found it not to your liking or if the brand don't meet your standards?

The reason you think piracy is ok is because you don't associate the crime with the victim.

No, it isn't close. The reason none of those things are comparable is because the service provider has lost something in the transaction in your example. Sneaking into an amusement park is theft of services, not paying for dinner after you consumed it is plain old theft. In both of those cases, the seller's resources were consumed. They have lost resources or effort.

With digital items it isn't like that. I can make infinite copies at no harm, real or imagined, to the seller. What might make this more clear is the distinction between downloading a movie illicitly versus watching a friend's legit purchased copy with them. In both of these cases, the maker of the content was not compensated for a watch.

The reason I think piracy (defined as personal copyright infringement) is okay is because:

1. It is generally a victimless "crime" (and even this is a misnomer, the act of downloading a movie is a civil, not criminal matter. It has more in common with driving over the speed limit than it does stealing.), and as so is morally neutral.

2. Statistics show that habitual pirates tend to be habitual purchasers as well, further complicating any concept of harm.

3. Copyright is a government granted monopoly, not some natural right, and its continued abuse and deadweight on our culture is not something that should be respected.

4. Even if the previous 3 points were all invalid, why should I have any respect for an entity that has none for me? Slavish adherence to the law is mere obedience, it is not noble or useful on its own.

You realize the endgame for the MPAA is for all TVs to have mandatory cameras with face id to identify the people watching and automatically charge each person per view.

There already are unenforced (currently unenforceable) maximums on the number of friends you are allowed to enjoy something together with. Beyond that you would need a broadcast license.

There is no limit for the greed of the copyright cartel.

The reason people think piracy is ok is because there is no victim being deprived of property.

But more than that, you're not even technically correct. piracy is copyright infringement, which is not criminal.

> The reason you think piracy is ok is because you don't associate the crime with the victim.

piracy is a victimless crime. you were not going to buy the license anyway, so its not a lost digital sale for the creator. additionally digital copies cost exactly nothing to make so nobody lost anything in the pirated transaction.

I would just as easily pirate movies as much as I would buy an xbox controller off amazon, replace it with a broken controller, and send it back saying it doesn't work.

These massive companies don't owe you anything. These companies exist purely to extract as much wealth out of you as possible while convincing you that they're the only ones that can provide that service.

It's so convenient that I can pirate videogames, movies, tv shows. These companies want you to keep paying for this mass produced content controlled and influenced by money and what "sells" based on algorithms, social media influence... These companies control and influence you (read: consumers/society) more than we think.

I'd rather see these companies go bankrupt and blown up into a billion different smaller companies than have massive conglomerates control and influence what we see.

If we were to see more originality in the higher-value sections of markets (think indie developers/filmmakers vs companies like EA, TenCent, etc.), then I'd probably pirate less things.

The hyper-optimization of art and culture by these massive companies designed solely to make profit (and the population willing to throw their cash at it for toys, theme park rides, etc.) is morally repugnant to me.

The reason you think that it is a crime is that you associate legality with morality. However there are deeply cruel and immoral things occurring entirely within the established "system" (as there have been all throughout human history), so that's a very poor compass indeed.

Wow, someone copied something. Better send out the battleships to blockade their country and bring them to their knees for this unspeakable crime against humanity.

You're damn right I have no respect for copyright law. I want to see it abolished. As far as I'm concerned, copyright infringement is civil disobedience and a moral imperative. These monopolists don't have any respect for our rights either: they systematically rob us of our fair use and public domain rights. So why should anyone give a shit about some monopolist's imaginary property?

> but it's consuming a service without paying for it to its legimate owners

The legitimate owners of information are all of us. Copyright is a special monopoly only granted to authors only because it was thought to benefit society as a whole.

I was shocked to find that this wouldn't even work on my desktop! You have to go to the browser settings and turn off hardware acceleration. If you rent an HD movie from Prime Video, you get a notice saying that your screen has to be compliant with some specific standard, and part of the standard is essentially baked-in DRM that prevents taking screenshots of the content. The device belongs to me, the content was streamed to me, the device has no business preventing me from taking a screenshot or recording video. Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.

Just wait till they make impossible to take a photo with your phone of your desktop screen.

Like they already made it impossible to make color photocopies of some content? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

"Why Rosyna Can't Take A Movie Screenshot" :

https://web.archive.org/web/20170617174641/https://www.alexr...

And that's why it's important to boycott devices and software that allow DRM : Intel and Ryzen AMD CPUs, Windows 11 (requires a DRM chip), maybe Chrome/ium if it doesn't allow to easily disable DRM support, Steam...

Boycotton all recent x86 CPUs is probably not reasonable for most people. More actionable is to make sure you control the software (most importantly, the OS) that runs on those CPUs so that their user-hostile features are not used for DRM.

You're right, not for most people. But we aren't most people here, and can stick with older AMD for desktops, as well as should be heavily investigating the alternatives like RISC-V (and also the "true" Linux, non-Android smartphone alternatives for somewhat related reasons).

That's why I encourage everyone with a desktop system to run their HDMI outputs through a capture card as well as the monitors.

You will own nothing and be happy.

It is baked into Windows since Vista. They had to add it in order to license HDMI and this has led to the need to digitally sign drivers - they had to be able to revoke your driver if it turns out that you were doing something the movie and record industry didn't want you to do.

> Yet here we are, apparently DRM is baked into all of our screens now.

This situation sucks. It's as if movie and tv studios (including Netflix, apparently) said "we want you to implement a bunch of intrusive, complicated, wasteful technology that will punish paying users while having little to no effect on pirates" and all the tech companies said "great idea, let's do it!"

I suppose the (self-correcting) endgame is when DRM makes paid media so inconvenient that it drives the masses to piracy.

It's already happening. You cannot get better than 720p on most services on linux, while pirated content is available in 4k

It is yourphone. As such, it has drm capable hardware, which let's you stream Netflix.

Think of the alternative: you don't have protection. Who would license their media to Netflix?

Who wouldn't license their media to Netflix in a world without DRM? What are they going to do? Make a $100 million dollar movie and then only release it in theaters, just out of spite? That'd be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Scanning and making copies of portions of a book used to be encouraged. In fact, it's how you collected information for book reports and research. It wasn't uncommon, for example, for me to print out entire journal articles or scan entire chapters at the University library. Now, they'd probably shoot my dog.

I tried prime video once and the way it locked down my computer to guarantee so-called "rights" was stupid. I tried Netflix, same thing. I'm slowly but surely trending back to unabashed piracy because it's the only way I can own anything anymore - and that's sad. I will happily spend hard earned money as long as I can own something. At the very least I'd happily donate to my local library if they didn't spend time enforcing the will of some faceless multinational publisher.

Shockingly, as I've gotten older I seem to own less and every year the apes we elect take more of my rights away.

> Because it's a library

Unfortunately digital libraries seem to be stuck with ebooks that often carry greater restrictions than physical books while costing more.

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

Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.

Saying anyone is "responsible" for a suicide is disingenuous

People are absolutely, 100% responsible for his death.

A young person near the beginning of their career got sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, for downloading some PDFs of scientific articles.

It's not like someone asked him to delete the PDFs and he killed himself in protest. His life was ruined to make an example out of him.

Well that is just objectively false. The man was never "sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines". It is blatantly false.

It is objectively false, but the spirit of your comment is grossly incorrect as well. He wasn't sentenced, but the "13 federal crimes" was a plea bargain offered by the prosecution. He killed himself beforehand.

FWIW, I actually have a close friend who ended up in North Kern for a couple years because of a plea deal fiasco. For most of us who never directly interact with the criminal courts, navigating such curcumstances is complelty bonkers and stressful, as I'm sure it was for Swartz.

Over zealous prosecution can make one’s life a living hell which certainly didn’t help.

Add to that a young man who might have had some depression issues (I’m not sure) and you have a heartbreaking tragedy.

From the Wikipedia:

Days before Swartz's funeral, Lawrence Lessig eulogized his friend and sometime-client in an essay, "Prosecutor as Bully." He decried the disproportionality of Swartz's prosecution and said, "The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon'. For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

It’s heartbreaking even years on.

Carmen Ortiz shares the blame. Heymann is no longer an AUSA and his career has stalled, to say the least. He will be forever remembered linked with Swartz. Karma is a cold goddess.

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.

If they store on IPFS (someone else said they did), then the answer is yes. Grab a subset of the content and mirror it to your device. Keep said device online.

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/

I haven't been able to figure out how to access the IPFS versions of the archive. They technically have a version of their site hosted through IPFS (https://www-dweb-cors.dev.archive.org/web), but when searching for a specific url like nytimes.com, it just redirects to the standard archive.org url.

You could use a laser to burn bubbles into a Qwartz crystal, for longer lasting digital media.

Or printing it on paper...oh wait that's a book ;)

BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive#Storage_a...

Use fb2, it was designed for archival purposes.

Check out Arweave. It's not quite as tested as something like BitTorrent but 'perpetual endowments' in theory make data on Arweave persist "forever"

Well, nftstorage seems to be free somehow in perpetuity. Something about extra filecoin for those who store the massive 40GB files that can be uploaded there… can someone elaborate on the tokenomics of that?

That kinda misses the point. The issue is that it requires active effort to keep it alive for more than a few years. While a physical book needs to be actively destroyed to completely disapper.

Many countries have their own digital archives, generally as part of their government's archives (so not just digital), I have worked on tools for sending data to the Danish Digital archive and was interviewing for a job there one time but I messed up the interview because I'm a dork.

They even have archives of all Danish (.dk) websites to some degree. Though it is not generally accessible like the Internet archive is

There are of course naughty book services using bittorrent and the like that store a lot of stuff without worrying about the copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis is popular.

> Physical 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.

If you dispense with the notion that publishers control that data, it actually becomes incredibly easy to achieve all of this and more. Worried about data loss? Make more digital copies, spread them on more media. Worried about shifting formats? Convert to plaintext, mobi, ePub or PDF - those will be supported in open source software indefinitely. Still worried about files trapped in proprietary formats that you don’t know how to convert? Fire up a VM.

As long as you can get files from under online DRM, the files are safer than ever.

> why is there no other major service like the Internet Archive?

Agreed. But also since publishing is so cheap, an enourmous amount of garbage is published every year. I don’t care much if a reality celeb memoirs book vanishes from existence. Or that Python 2 handbook from 5y ago.

The books that changed my life are sitting in my shelf and will be offered to my kids one day.

Plain text files haven't changed that much in the past few decades. We could (should?) transform at least text into plain files (instead of stupid epub/mobi/etc), and that might conserve them for ages

An epub is a .zip containing HTML, I'm pretty happy with it as a long term format.

The licensing that libraries are forced to use in order to support lending digital books only allows them to "loan" the digital book a certain number of times. Depending on publisher, it could be 50-200 loans and then the license goes poof - time to buy a new copy of the digital book to lend out.

Yes, paper books can get destroyed. I remember spilling gravy all over one library book. That was an expensive book to replace. Plus I ruined all that gravy.

> Does the Internet Archive store redundant copies in many locations? Does it use long-term physical formats?

I'm sure they do. Personally, I'd really like to know what some "best practices" there are in doing this. Other than the digital preservation group at the Library of Congress, I'm a newbie at some of this. And no one else has thought about it.

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/index.html

The state agency I work for has to keep records forever. And they have to be readable forever. You can't have the statutes become unreadable because digital files get bit rot, or folks decide that they don't want to support older versions.

> 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.

This is pure hyperbole. The one and only challenge is rent-seeking. There already are lots of ebooks from decades before in PDF.

>Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well.

No, it worked terribly because they hadn't been stored well and were covered in mold (even the ones from only 70 years ago) or otherwise falling apart. I couldn't search them for specific phrases I remembered my grandfather reading me as a child, and I didn't have the physical space of my own to store them all either anyway. Even making a stab at indexing them all was enormously labor intensive. I was the only one in the family interested in even trying. It really sucked.

>Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience.

Yes, it was excellent, since naturally it was DRM-free or I wouldn't have paid for it. I have digital stuff from the 80s, still perfectly preserved, that I can call up as I wish, when I wish, anywhere I wish anywhere in the world.

I'm 100% onboard with the correct argument that modern copyright and DRM go against the core bargain of IP (societal agreement for public benefit) and could use major reform. But I don't think this piece does a very good job of making that argument, the entire comparison and pretending that books don't require any sort of preservation and so on really distracts from the core issues.

> It really sucked.

Huh, I have a number of books that have been in my family for a long time, reading them is awesome. I never got to meet my grandfather, so reading the same copy of Huck Finn he did, or referencing the same dictionary he used is about as close as I can come.

That said my dad's collection of fiction ebooks will carry a lot of the same value, if only because there is _so much_ fiction out there.

It's not hard to store books correctly, though. My father collected around 30,000 books during his lifetime. (He was a professor at a higher education facility for librarians.) Most of them are from 20th Century but many also from 19th Century and a few of them are up to several hundred years old. They're all perfectly readable. The only issue is dust.

It pains me a lot that the collection will eventually have to be sold at large by the meter and his library will disappear because nobody in my family has the space for so many books.

Sounds like it is actually hard to store books correctly.

I couldn't even be bothered to bring my couple of hundred children's books when I moved from my parents house, let alone 30 000.

It's hard to get the storage space if you don't have it, but it's not hard to store them. You put them on shelves in a dry room and they will last hundreds of years. That was my point.

You seem to be comparing opposite extremes: physical books stored carelessly (in a well-heated and ventilated house, mold shouldn't be a problem) with digital books stored very carefully (you were careful about DRM-free formats, etc.; and if you have stuff from the 80s, you doubtlessly have made backups and transferred it from device to device several times. I have some digital stuff of mine from the 80s and 90s, but I've also lost a lot, in spite of being conscious of the importance of backups).

On average I think what the post says stands. Assuming some minimal, but not very careful upkeep, physical books easily last for 100 years, digital material for much less.

By the way, an anecdote: some time ago, I found a bookshelf in an old house of a branch of my family, which contained books dating more than 100 years back (some were from the 19th century). The house had been abandoned for many years, so the books had been exposed to the elements. Most of the books were softcover, and they crumbled on touch, some of them almost literally crumbled to dust. But the few hardcover ones endured, with moisture stains on the cover but I still have them and they are perfectly readable.

Before that, I usually preferred to buy softcover books because they are lighter, more comfortable to read, cheaper and take less space. Since that day, if I really like a book (or think I'm going to like it, due to author, etc.) I always try to get it in hardcover.

I learned this from a bibliophile minister many years ago: Any book worth reading is worth keeping. Any book worth keeping is worth having in hardback, if at all possible. Buy hardbacks (used if possible) and keep them. Bookcases aren't really that expensive. (Toss the occasional purchases not worth keeping, and don't worry about them.)

Oh, and do whatever it takes to keep mold out of your library. Moldy books that you decide to keep, not replace, belong only in sealed plastic boxes treated with borax, sodium carbonate, and/or chlorine dioxide, and preferably stored outside the house!)

Building a library is like planting trees - you don't do it so much for yourself as you do for those who will come after you. I have a digital library, too, but I don't expect it to be usable at all in a century...

DRM-laden digital books should be seen like the extra cheap paperbacks which fall apart sitting untouched on the shelf after a couple of years. Extremely different than the well-bound books one might think of when handling a 100 year old book.

Non-DRM'd ebooks in formats which are open, easily parseable, and that people care to archive should be fine for a long time. Some people here are talking about a decade as if we won't be able to parse epubs or text files in 10 years. I've got documents >30 years old already which are still easily parsed, and I don't imagine I'll have problems rendering them in another 30 years.

I'll be utterly amazed if we can't render a basic HTML document, text-focused PDF, or hell even just ASCII text in the year 2032. I also have little doubt I'll still technically be able to load my DVDs or Blu-Rays of that data in 2032 and copy it into the holographic crystal storage devices that'll come out just before that.

Is there a non-DRM format + an e-reader combo that allows for bookmarks, text selection, dictionary search? Ideally I would prefer to keep my Kindle but would really love to buy and own non-DRM books.

PDFA? I wouldn’t call it e-reader friendly exactly, but it is pretty universal.

You can use Calibre to convert your ebooks to MOBI/AZW3, which Kindle accepts, and if you put your Kindle in airplane mode (so it stops getting OTA updates) and wait log enough it'll probably get a jailbreak at some point. At which point you can install KOReader for superior PDF/DjVu reading experience. Last jailbreak covers Kindle software <= 5.14.2; so Kindle Voyage and earlier all should be supported. (See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346037 HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31220553)

This looks very promising. In addition to using KOReader I will be able to customize the lock screen and remove Amazon's upsells. I guess the only downside is that I won't be able to use WiFi or buy e-books from Amazon.

Also, Koreader runs on many brands of ereaders, so it may be worth exploring if you're interested. Kobo readers can read non-DRM epubs out of the box and can also run Koreader. Check out the MobileRead forums. Here's the one for Kindles: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=140

Kobo reader with Plato installed

Just the default OS already fits the bill.

Kindle accepts DRM-free epubs (as of fairly recently). I just email epubs to my Kindle and it works fantastically

Likebook mars, I got it in the 2018 for about 200$ and still using it today, is basically android with an e-ink display, so you can pretty much do anything with epub and pdf.

I don't buy drm crap, genesis all the way, I don't give a fuck, someone needs to come up with a better business model.

https://likebook.aliexpress.com/store/3333002

Looks like they have newer and probably better versions now.

I got a Kobo and it does bookmarks, text selection and dictionary search fine. I shop from a variety of places, but only buy DRM-free EPUB books (https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free/ for example)

I use Calibre to organise the books (and convert formats if necessary) and push them to the device.

I backup the entire collection using a USB backup drive irregularly (once a month or so). I'm experimenting with Syncthing to backup to a rented baremetal server. So far so good.

I love my ReMarkable. It does everything you listed except dictionary search. It also supports adding blank pages for notes which is super handy.

A dictionary is a feature I'd love to see added.

Onyx BOOX fits this description.

Its bookreader, Neoreader, is quite good.

The devices themselves are Android tablets, with an e-ink display. You can install and use any other Android ebook software, including among those, Koboreader, PocketBook, and FBReader.

My preference among those is actually Onyx's reader, at least on their own devices.

A related thing Brewster didn't mention: When libraries "buy" ebooks from publishers, what they're actually buying is a license to lend the ebook a fixed number of times. For example, after a library lends a HarperCollins ebook 26 times, it disappears from the library's virtual shelf until it's purchased again. A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out.

The above is from a fascinating Planet Money podcast on the relationship between ebook publishers and libraries. Transcript at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1135639385. I'd encourage listening to the whole thing.

> A hardcover physical book by comparison will typically last for 30 - 100 checkouts before it becomes too worn out.

Is this the real range? Intuitively, it seems low, but I have no idea. I remember those "Due date" tables in books from my childhood, with what must have been at least a couple of dozen rows...

Hm, I worked at a national library during my university years, for some extra cash and free access to the more silent part of the building.

State/National libraries in Europe often work on a "required (free) copy" aspect: publishers are required to provide the national library with a free copy of any book they publish. This makes them huge, but it also makes them have all kinds of books of different quality, both content-wise and built-quality-wise.

Most books are never checked out. Those that are get checked out rarely (unless the book is incredibly influential or some professor makes them required reading for their course). 30-100 checkouts may translate to 20-60 years of being in library circulation. But those are mostly spent sitting on a dry shelf, when no damage to the book occurs during normal operation (e.g. no fire / no water damage).

30-100 checkouts, each for two weeks (with the option to extend another two week) spells 1-6 years the book will live with other people - and here is where things happen. Books are transported FROM the library to houses and flats (often in containers that are not very good for the purpose, think backpacks, canvas bags - often leading to shear to the pages and stress on the binding). They are put in environmental conditions that differ vastly (extreme cold in winter. High humidity). Individual pages are being turned and worked on, creating stress on the binding. People have coffee cups that fall, and pet cats that urinate. Pages sometimes rip. People also have kids with crayons. They themselves have text markers and pencils. They may overstretch the binding, to "make the book lay flat", or read in bed, or in the bathtub. And eventually, they bring the book back.

Of course, the lady who takes the book in will do a quick check on whether the book is in an acceptable state - but she has no idea how it looked when we lent it out. In the bad cases (again: cats urinate), the book is immediately discarded and replaced with a new copy if possible. For less bad cases, damage still creeps in and accumulates. And eventually, glue will give in, pages will become loose, the book will fall apart.

Compare that to the privately-owned book, which is often bought, read once or twice, and lives on a shelf for the rest of it's existence. That one also gets damages, but they don't count up that much.

National and University libraries often have contract or in-house bookbinders who will repair a damaged book, which means removing the cover, and rebinding the book into a "library binding" - that often comes with a more sturdy cover or - with softcover books - a thick plastic film over the cover. Many libraries also clip the edges of softcover book to make them rounder, which increases longevity. But ultimately, there is no more thing to fix.

I think 30 checkouts is a good estimate for most softcover books in public libraries, 100 being on the high-end, high-maintenance, highly-invested national library end.

I think this context is important, thank you for providing it.

If i were to summarize succinctly I would say the lifetime of a book in a library is akin to the lifetime of a car at a rental car company. The natural wear and tear on it is far greater than one that is owned by a single, private owner, and so the expected lifetime becomes much shorter.

Great comparison. Individuals treat their possessions much better than they treat others.

Those date due cards have fewer than 20 lines, if I recall correctly. Either way, it really depends on the book. People can put library books through the ringer sometimes, but books are pretty durable. I'd say our collection loses less than 5% of its items to damage. We discard things for the more nebulous "condition" more often, but generally that's paired with some other criteria like not circulating or being out of date.

On the Media just had a quite good episode on libraries, including both physical and digital formats, and the Internet Archive / Open Library lawsuit:

<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...>

EPUB, the current standard, is a zip containing UTF-8 HTML files.

Zip, UTF-8 and HTML are all ~30 year old standards. They're not going anywhere. It's just that we haven't had the chance to see how long they'll last.

As for the processing and reprocessing... We can't really do anything with printed books at scale without lots of manual labor. E-books open up that possibility. That's supposed to be a bad thing?

Printed books only keep if nobody opens them. Books that have been read often start crumbling. You have to reprint them, or keep a pristine, untouched copy, to ensure they last.

This is nostalgia, not science.

I have digital books from 12 years ago on my hard drive (I switched to digital 12 years ago and got rid of all my dead trees about 10 years ago). I don't see any reason why they won't still be available and readable in another 20 years, or 50 for that matter.

I used to have about 500 physical books, which took up a dozen or more book boxes and were back-breaking to move (I move a lot - every year on average). Every time they got moved they got damaged, and in one place the only storage area for them was damp, so they started getting moldy.

I have probably 2000 books stored on a couple of backup drives (duplicated). I can move them (and my e-reader) in my pocket.

I did lose a few in the early days because I stupidly went with Kindle and Amazon's DRM crap. But I managed to convert most of them to EPUB and now I only buy DRM-free books.

What ereader do you use that lets you read PDFs and EPUBs (presumably those formats) easily? I've heard Kindles aren't very accepting of that and would love to have a good alternative.

I use the ReMarkable 2 for reading. It supports PDFs and EPUBs and the experience is pretty great. I can download a PDF to my phone and push it to the tablet via their cloud sync service. From my understanding, under the hood, the EPUB is converted to a PDF before getting displayed.

You could try a Kobo e-reader, they do EPUB well and will open PDFs. I haven't tried PDFs lately because it's generally a poor experience trying to use a 6 or 8 inch screen to peer at a page designed for 13 inches ...

Check out some talk here, for instance: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=350162

yeah, I have a Kobo for EPUB and use my Remarkable for PDFs

I used to work in a fine & rare book room at a library. The kind of thing behind a lock & key, climate controlled, you need to apply for permission to look at anything and you're monitored while you do it.

The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library.

Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/ and see the entire British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts...something I wouldn't actually ever be allowed to do with the physical books.

But the post is pretty misleading it says

> 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.

But every library I've been at also has active maintenance for their physical books! They control the humidity, they check for water leaks, they look for pests. Nobody is throwing 100+ year old books into an aluminium shed.

Also, I now live in a country where I don't speak the local language especially fluently, so reading books published here is less fun. Importing physical books in my native language is extremely expensive, since books aren't especially light. Shipping is often close to the price of the book itself. And delivery usually takes weeks, anyway.

Digital books actually are available to most of the world in a way that physical books aren't.

> Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable

The ones that made it, obviously. Uncountable have been lost.

The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the information. If you find a thumbdrive with the same flyer as a pdf from a hundred years ago it will take a team of experts with specialized (or at this point very old) hardware to figure out the contents.

Video is even worse: a film roll that you can look at with your bare eyes vs some realplayer codec nobody can decode. This is why the library of congress lasers video onto analog film for archival. Reading an analog film is a question of blasting light through the transported film. Reading the equivalent realplayer file involves a little bit more in terms of hardware, OS and software (and this is just one codec I picked randomly).

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.)

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...

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. :)

This is a really weird article for me. Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside. That's about it.

These three technologies are some of the oldest and most robust we have when it comes to digital media at large. Being concerned about reading and displaying HTML pages in a zip file in a decade is absurd. They're both already over 30 years old themselves.

DRM, yes. DRM is a complete and utter pox on the digital media world. Almost as bad as trade-bound paperbacks which tend to fall apart after (sometimes during, grrr) a single read. Preserving trade paperbacks, however, takes more effort than removing ebook DRM, and both procedures are well documented with broadly available tools.

If you don't copy those files to new media, the piece of hardware itself that they reside on may be unusable. How easily can you read some HTML sitting on a 500 megabyte IDE drive from 1995, versus a book printed in 1995? If you come across such an object, you don't even know what is on it, and whether it is worth it to delve into it.

Hence my comment about needing a backup strategy.

If I go to a library to read a trade paperback from 1995, it's going to have been re-bound. And that's if the paper has survived. Trade-bound paperback books - which are usually price equivalent to ebooks - require intervention to remain usable for more than a few years.

As for my own collection, I have no books from 1995 left. They've mostly fallen apart or been replaced with ebooks (which are still in great condition).

What do you do to your books?? Chew on them while reading?

I've read and bought paperbacks more than 30 years old. Yeah, I imagine a popular book in a library that's constantly checked out wears out faster, but every 27 year old trade you have is ruined? Seriously?

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.

> 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 shafted - humanity at large is not.

> 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 hard drive? If somebody knew about it and cared enough, they might subsume its contents into their collection; and then the information would be safe for another… few decades? To quote Randall Munroe (https://xkcd.com/1909/ title text):

> I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

Historically, yes. Today? No. The internet has, in many ways, supplanted it. And where Libraries are hobbled by following the laws, the internet community has found ways around this particular damage.

And that's cool.

Now then, should Libraries be getting shafted like this? Fuck no. Can any actions I take - short of running for office and making my way up to the federal government in charge of interstate commerce - effect that? Also, sadly, no. I will continue to support librarians seeking change while facing reality.

> The internet has, in many ways, supplanted it.

The internet is big and sprawling. It's easy to prune, by accident or malice. Think of how much of the web goes through Cloudflare! Think of how much we rely on the Internet Archive; if that went down, where would we be? Libraries, on the other hand, are decentralised, redundant, curated, indexed, and maintained against both bitrot and link rot.

We could make the internet like this. In fact, there are organisations that do so! But there's a reason so many of those organisations call themselves libraries.

Great point about if the internet archive went down.

Every single one of us on this site unless in poverty should consider donating to the IA.

I’ve just changed my monthly donation from Wikipedia to IA.

Supporting the Internet Archive is very much worth doing – but we also need a parallel effort to archive the Internet Archive. There are other ways for it to go down than just "we ran out of money". (Then again, I don't know that a parallel effort exists; Archive Team were doing one a few years back, but I think that's stopped. So donating to IA is still your best bet, here.)

The internet is insanely prone to losing stuff. What percentage of the first 10,000 YouTube videos from 2005 do you think are still accessible? With copyright and account issues etc issues I would be surprised if it broke 20% and that’s for a website that’s still around.

You can find old stuff due to internet archive and that’s about it. Making the internet basically a giant single point of failure in practice.

Okay but the internet’s library of books specifically is libgen, and that is mirrored to a high degree of redundancy.

"Lib" in "LibGen" stands for "library" so "Libraries are how humanity at large preserves documents" holds.

I remember an old webpage, the Spanish speaking clone for Slashdot, Barrapunto. They turned down the servers because they had no visits compared to Menéame, a Reddit clone for Spaniards.

Now you just have a few pieces at the Wayback Machine and that's it.

Now, tell me the digital wankers how much the digital preservation is compared to the books. Even if they used NNTP, I think not the whole archive would be preserved, just ask Jason Scott.

And I love computers, I use OpenBSD and CWM on a netbook. But current media preservation efforts are ridiculous compared to a simple book from the 70's.

> With copyright and account issues etc issues I would be surprised if it broke 20% and that’s for a website that’s still around.

On YouTube there are around 20 different labels claiming to own the copyright to a recording of the Red Army Choir singing the Soviet national anthem more than 50 years ago.

UMG has already decided you're not allowed to embed it on some other sites. Additionally, due to licensing issues, music "owned" by certain labels hasn't been/is not available in the certain countries.

Horses were how humanity at large moves from point A to B.

> 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."

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity

The prior version is still available, though? And the caveat "the wishes that Aaron had in 2003 do not necessarily correspond with those that he had in 2013" is a far cry from "they didn't really mean it", especially when the old version is still available (encoded as data on the existing page).

I guess I'm seeing it more as a will where you state what you want to have happen after you die. So they are saying that what he wrote in 2003, he didn't mean in 2013. I'll agree it is a far cry in wording, but seems similar in intent.

Maybe they are saying that he forgot he had published that page. Maybe there was something he wrote or told someone that contradicted what he had published. All we have to go off of was his digital will for his hard drives.

Well, I think libraries getting shafted is humanity at large getting shafted. We've gone so far into monetization and privatization that academic knowledge is now gate kept, bartered and sold - I know that a century ago there would be other gate keeping issues around gender and skin color but while we've made good progress on those fronts we've also allowed both research and literature to become much more commoditized and that is bad for society as a whole.

> I think libraries getting shafted is humanity at large getting shafted.

I agree, mostly. But humanity is, thankfully, routing around that damage while the librarians and politicians fight that battle.

>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.

I thought modern books were made with acid-free paper? I know this is a huge problem for books made in, for instance, the 1970s. Is it only the nicer books that are made with acid-free paper?

Sure. Nicer - more expensive - books. Not those whose costs on par with ebooks typically.

Most paper used commercially is acid free, due to the manufacturing process.

I dunno if books use some other, cheaper paper, but it seems unlikely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper

My 10 year old paperbacks are turning yellow, so I guess not.

> Libraries are getting shafted - humanity at large is not.

I'm picturing someone in the crowd saying this while the Library of Alexandria burns.

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. :)

Alexandria wasn't the only library in its day, obviously.

Sometimes you "only" lose redundancy. But occasionally a lost library (or digital archive) contains unique content, so statistically the survival rate still trends toward zero.

How is knowledge lost? "Slowly at first, then all at once."

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.

> if there is no electricity in the world

Then humanity will have bigger problems, such as survival. Our world isn't made for survival without electricity.

My impression is that trade paperbacks really suck. Frequently the bindings crack when you open them for the first time. Mass-market paperbacks are not great but they have some minimum level of quality that is not certain in trade paperbacks.

I believe you have that backwards. Mass-market paperbacks are the bottom of the barrel, trade paperbacks are the better version.

No, I mean what I say. Mass market paperbacks are at a low standard but it is a standard. They are great to put in a backpack because of small size.

A good trade paperback is better than any mass market paperback but trade paperbacks come in various sizes and designs and many of them have serious defects when manufactured.

Ah, I see where the size standardization could be valuable. I was thinking only of quality, and everything I've read (and I don't mean I just went to wikipedia ;-), though they do actually agree) suggested that a trade paperback was closer to a paper bound version of the original hardback, up to and including the size and everything, and built consistently to a higher standard than a mass market version.

Some of them are good but some of them split at the back with the slightest bit of handling. Self-published trade paperbacks are particularly bad.

As a category I don’t like them though I have plenty of them. My favorite kind of sci-fi book to collect these days are small hardcovers but for nonfiction I take what I can get.

> but libraries cannot

Why don't they try it and find out? Seems like if anyone should have the legal right to do so from purchased books it should be them.

Internet Archive is trying something similar in court right now with their "controlled digital lending" concept. The ReDigi case was a true shame, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be willing to propose other concepts and try to legalize some case here.

> The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable.

Some can, most can’t. I’ve got a Bantam paperback copy of Moby Dick from 1985. It’s pretty much on its last legs. The pages are disintegrating and turning golden yellow, but the binding is still intact. Not sure if it will last another 63 years or so.

You'll have to treat this as a bread crumb, lacking sources as I do, but I believe that the nadir of printing quality was in the mid 1900s, when rapidly decaying mass paperbacks were on the market. I think that particular strain of bad quality left the market.

OTOH, I have a full set of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that is entirely readable and mostly in good condition, with nothing except gentle handling, regular dusting, and infrequent treatment of the leather binding to prevent red rot (because I don't read them frequently enough to prevent the condition with oil from my skin).

Edit: it wasn't hard to find a page discussing the phenomenon of acidic paperbacks: https://library.uoregon.edu/catdept/presbind/brittle

So it's possible to preserve them, it's just difficult. The article should really say "it's easier to maintain written information than digital"

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?

They shut down the Physical Science Library and the Engineering Library around the time I left CUL and put many of the science books (Q’s) in the math library and put many of the engineering books in Uris library which is split alphabetically by LC call numbers with Olin, the rest of the books went to the library Annex. A tunnel from Olin goes to the Kroc library which specializes in Asia and rare manuscripts.

There is a very good service to request books out of the annex and deliver them to a service point but people are more inclined to order books from AMZN rather than pull books from the annex or use a an express service like Borrow Direct that lets Cornellians get books from other Ivys in a few days.

There is still the fine arts library, the music library, the Africana library, Mann library at the ag school, the industrial labor relations library and the vet library. Those last three are in the state schools so any New Yorker can get a free library card for them. They closed down the Nestle library at the hotel school and consolidated that with the library at the b-school when they merged management and hotel.

There are still plenty of books, but people come to use the computers and there is intense demand for study and breakout space on central campus which competes with everything else.

If you have a Cornell netid you can access electronic resources from anywhere but not if you are a general public member. Back when I was involved in digital library stuff I worked on numerous projects that were free to access and my colleagues worked on even more such as the global performing arts database, images of the fantastic and the Ruleaux collection of gear contraptions that is on display at the engineering school but has interactive models of everything. They still do the arXiv preprint server but the funding climate got hostile circa 2005 when the library was in general contraction.

More than just DRM, random bit flips are a problem too. One that's been thought about by places like the Shoah Foundation.

Hence my suggestion of a good backup strategy. Which should ideally include data integrity measures such as checksums and/or integrity-aware storage mediums.

You're backup's only good if you can successfully restore it.

> The point is that the paperback can sit on a shelf for 100 years be readable.

Physically? Maybe.

But another factor is that human languages will naturally evolve to the point where future generations won't be able to read the words we're writing now without some kind of translation service. Even if it hasn't evolved enough to be classified as an entirely new language, it can change enough to be extremely difficult to decipher. This also requires a migration plan or historians to update the book for the modern language.

If you've ever picked up a very old book, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Even if it's still physically readable, you struggle to make sense of vocabulary and style in popular use at the time of publication.

Spaniard here. Save from lots of medieval jargon and lots of footnotes, Don Quixote is not rocket science.

Also, you know, we have dictionaries.

What's curious to me is that some languages, and writing systems, preserve better than others.

Latin, having become a dead language used principally by the Church and for a time science / natural philosophy, remains highly-readable across centuries so long as you read Latin. Similarly for classical Greek.

I'm given to understand that Arabic, itself significantly preserved in the Quaran as a literal verbatim transmission from the 7th century.

Written Chinese, zhōngwén, or 中文, is logosyllabic, where symbols represent the concepts rather than the phonetic representation of a syllable. It is not only generally readable across millennia, but even across largely mutually-unintelligible dialects of Chinese, or other languages (Korean and Japanese, for example).

Contrast written English which becomes highly idiosyncratic even only a couple of centuries ago (long-S, nonuniform spellings, highly stylised and formalised expressions), and both difficult to read and understand (verbally) from as few as five centuries ago.

Shakespeare, for example: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04>

Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>

Beowulf (c. 700--1000 AD): <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M>

Numerous of the modern languages of Europe (Spanish, English, French, German) date only to about 900--1,000 CE or so, and the forms spoken then would be difficult or impossible for most moderns to understand. Written forms ... often didn't exist at all (government and business being transacted in Latin, Greek, or Arabic throughout much the region).

An awful lot of print media from the 19th century is gone forever simply because nobody wanted to pay the storage costs.

It's not really about physical or ebook though. Both require a plan. The physical book requires a shelf and some climate control. The ebook needs to be DRM free and stored on a 'digital shelf'.

In a 100 years if we can't unzip a file and read text files, then we have likely lost many of the physical books also.

Physical books also have a unique issue of storage space and hard to replicate.

The article isn't clear, but in the conclusion, the author is asking for libraries to have the legal right to remove ebook DRM, and to make copies of ebooks in the course of routine maintenance.

IMO, the article's title should say, "DRMed ebooks wear out faster than physical books."

And that's clearly correct: digital data that you don't make copies of is quite physically fragile, and even if the physical media survives, it may be difficult or impossible to read it. (Reading data off an old IDE hard drive or Jazz drive, for example.)

> trade-bound paperbacks which tend to fall apart after (sometimes during, grrr) a single read

I'm sorry for probabbly a stupid question, but what is "trade-bound paperbacks"? I have tried to google it but I can't figure out which binding method is meant here..? Cheap glued paperback books? Sewn books? Something else? :/

Effectively hot glue bound paperbacks filled with low quality, poorly printed pages.

EDIT: I have probably confused Mass Market paperbacks with Trade paperbacks. The former is the main target of my ire, the latter is purportedly of higher quality in general.

Thank you!

> Ebooks are zip files with HTML pages (that is, text files) and images inside

There is almost no consumer storage medium that will last as long as a printed book. The files that will (probably) be easy to read in 50 years won't be readable on the hard-drive/CD-ROM/etc where they are stored. A printed book likely would be able to still be read

I totally get the point of the article, not only in books but in other media as well.

My CD collection is sitting next to me since forever and will continue to be there for the foreseeable future.

Guess what happened to the very carefully curated playlists I had on Grooveshark?

I've also lost dozens of songs from Spotify as they've been removed.

I have a huge list of music videos that I like on YouTube (~900), every month or so I find a few of them gone, I don't even know which ones they are as they only say "deleted video" or whatever.

PDF is also future-proof. At least, it can be. A PDF file is just a collection of pages described in the Postscript language. The page "object" is then compressed and some metadata is built around it to produce the PDF. There are tools which will extract the pages in their (plain text) Postscript form.

I consider my extensive library of physical books ‘nuclear powered reading devices’ - with that mindset they are actually very lightweight. The occasional move was always a great workout and the motivation to find a permanent home and build it out as a dynastic seat for the family and a bunker for civilization quite motivating. Electronic reading materials on the other hand are the … great for immediate and temporary research.

As a much younger person I used to dream of a day I would be able to hold a whole library in the palm of my hand. That dream was technically realized a long time ago ( a lot of useful books and papers are in epub and pdf formats ). But now that I am older and recognize certain dangers coming from DRM corners that is already all too present in gaming, my dream changing to something akin of my own personal physical library. I am not there yet. I need to be able to justify its own substantial room, but.. the more I think about it, the more I think about it is a worthwhile goal. It actually may be a good thing for the little one as well ( come to think of it, my parents' shelves were creaking under all those books; maybe there is something about recreating the imprint of your parents after all ).

I absolutely agree that for immediate research nothing beats electronic version short of a personal librarian.

The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books over the same period of time and worrying of humidity, acidity of paper, insects, mold, etc. And not to mention how super-expensive the paper-books restoration is, if (or better once when) they get damaged by time.

Digital data doesn't wear out, but it also doesn't degrade gracefully. Usually if a printed page starts to degrade there is at least the opportunity for someone to notice and take corrective action before the content is lost completely (scanning, processing and re-printing, perhaps).

Digital data tends to go from "fine" to "gone" with no middle ground.

That's what backups and RAID arrays are for. We certainly know by now how to build a redundancy that will guaranty the data safety. For most of the libraries it's really a budget problem - they've been given huge expensive buildings with controlled air conditions for storing paper books and that's sort of taken for granted, but then governments take cuts on providing them with proper IT infrastructure and knowledgeable staff for maintaining the digital data copies.

> That's what backups and RAID arrays are for.

the point is exactly that: if you have to rely on very complex setups to keep the data fresh, it means that the data is not safe.

can you imagine an hard disk surviving from the ancient Egypt to us?

Wasn't the point of the original comment that the setup to keep paper safe is also very complex?

Another question I wonder about: How hard is noticing the failures?

The cold hard truth here is that curating information is actually a very difficult problem - but paper records will survive longer than digital records if no-one's actively looking after them.

It's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to be actively looked after too. There is a fire protection, regular deratization and disinsection, if roof starts leaking it has to be fixed. If you just leave a book in the middle of a field unprotected it won't last a year. When libraries are left without funds their books get destroyed fairly quickly, I've seen that first hand in my home country.

Digital data requires some maintenance, but with cloud services that's offloaded to service providers. I haven't logged in into Glacier or the related AWS account in years, and yet it still backups my hdd regularly. Now, if a comet strikes the Earth and destroys all the civilization, yes, paper books will be a lot more useful than HDDs or dead cloud servers, but in more realistic scenarios data copies give you more flexibility. Just look at Ukraine, they moved all their official digital archives out of the country at the very beginning of the war. You couldn't ever pull it off with paper archives, it would take months and cost a fortune.

yes, it's hard, but papyrus kept inside a very strong, possibly waterproof, possibly not affected by rust (alluminium, stainless steel etc), metal box will last much longer than hard drives kept inside the same strong metal box.

true, but we could always print encoded digital data to that papyrus and call it a data-storage method :)

And now you need a parser and a machine :)

Bit rot: bonjour

Well the thing about digital data is that it's all represented in an uneven compressed way. Take your average piece of paper with text on it, it's essentially a 2D array of white and black dots. Remove half of all black dots and you can still mostly see what the text was.

Same is true with raw digital representations. Take on the other hand a jpeg which is a bunch of coefficients for sine waves, where every tiny change ripples out to ruin the entire thing. Even the basic 3 byte RGB per pixel representation is already compressed with only 8 bits being used to save 256 values. Flip the MSB and your value is already completely screwed.

An equal encoding to real paper would be using 256 bits to represent each colour, summing up the bits to get integer values. That way you can flip 20 bits and you'll still easily tell what the colour was, without any extra processing.

This of course comes at an exponential increase in storage requirements, plus we can be smarter than just using brute force. Taking a compressed representation and then adding on a few layers of error correction would likely be far more reliable while preserving most of the spatial efficiency. Of course then you need the software for unpacking and correcting to survive as well...

This completely ignores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code Those have been known for a long time and they are used in practice for both transmission and long-term storage.

Big storage arrays come with health metrics and auto-rebalancing around broken drives.

The idea that digital storage media degrades without "opportunity for someone to notice" is outright false.

Devices themselves can fail too, not just media.

Sure? We were talking about data though.

xkcd as relevant as ever: https://xkcd.com/1683/

> The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out"

it depends.

once a broken copy is out for whatever reason, you have a broken copy.

also most of the formats used today to archive digital media are lossy (mpeg4, h264, jpeg etc)

> but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books

if we discount the electric bill.

> Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve

not really.

I used to own a huge collection of DVDs

they're as digital data as it gets, but no one owns a DVD player nowadays and many of them degraded to the point that even an high quality reader cannot read them properly.

problem is you don't get a blurry image like with analog media, you just get broken and/or unreadable data, so basically that data is lost forever.

> also most of the formats used today to archive digital media are lossy (mpeg4, h264, jpeg etc)

"Lossy" doesn't mean it wears out. If you are a digital media librarian, you will use MPEG and put it in a container with error-correction codes and store multiple copies.

"Lossy" refers to the encoding between the full data you got from your scanner/digital encoder and the final file. It doesn't mean that meaningful information is lost from the original analog artifact and it doesn't mean it's not great for long-term preservation.

I wonder how this difference plays out if we are looking at a timespan of centuries instead of decades. Multiple generations of computers or various kinds of computing and reading technology would have to be stored and maintained along with the digital books that depend on them. And those are physical devices that degrade in many ways and require a power source to be used.

However, this might be a non-issue if we find ways to emulate the functionality of those devices authentically and integrate it into ever-evolving hardware, even if it turns out to be drastically different from what it was before. It is important to consider that the difference in appearance of even a single character between the real device and its emulation could significantly change a book in form and even in content.

Last year I decided to exit the Kindle ecosystem after buying quite a few books in it, and cracking the DRM was a pretty near thing. I was lucky to have an older Kindle device sitting around that didn't support Amazon's latest DRM. It seems like they may be winning the arms race.

As an individual with a few hundred ebooks rather than an institution with millions of them, I'm a lot less concerned about losing my un-DRM'd files and/or the ability to read them, but I very nearly lost my entire ebook library just because I fell into Kindle's convenience trap. I've decided now to only buy ebooks that don't have DRM.

IMHO, there is effectively no moral or ethical difference between cracking the DRM on a book you've purchased and downloading a copy of the same book from Library Genesis. And the latter is usually more convenient, in my experience.

This is why I love buying eBooks from Baen.com directly.

Edit: fixed. Stupid autocorrect

That is a placeholder site?

It was supposed to be the publisher, Baen, but I didn't catch my autocorrect. Fixed.

The newer kindle stuff is crack able too just a little bit more painful

Many of the books I read as a kid would never have been read if they weren't a physical chunk of dead wood in front of my face, sitting on a book shelf.

Now, as a full-ass adult with young kids, I usually buy books from Kindle. It's far more convenient to use the Kindle app on my phone.

But there's a voice in the back of my head wondering if I'm doing my kids a disservice. They don't see me holding a big chunk of dead tree and reading. They just see be looking at my phone.

I also feel like Kindle is setting up a situation where my kids won't have the joy of discovering a book, or author, serendipitously. When the books are just sitting there on a shelf (they were in my bedroom as a kid, basically just as overflow because we had too many in the house), it's easy to get bored and pick up a book.

But I wonder if kids even get bored now. They have phones! If they're feeling the slightest bit bored, out comes the phone. (That's how I am at least, a full-fledged adult who didn't have a phone growing up).

Maybe the idea of discovering a good book out of boredom is dead.

Sounds like you already know you're doing your kids a disservice.

I have this exact worry as a dad of a seven day old.

During pregnancy, my wife and I read various new parent books out loud to each other. The plan is to continue that with baby. Maybe she’ll associate the Kindle with reading, but my dad collects books, so I grew up absolutely surrounded by them. If he just had a big kindle library, not sure it would have had an effect

Consider taking your kid to the library often, pretty much as soon as they can walk. The library near us even had a good collection of board books. My kid loves going to the library, playing with some of the toys, looking at the small aquarium, and browsing all the books to pick out the three to take home for the week. He's under 5 and has already checked out about 200 books!

Be sure to pick up at least one for yourself while you're there to set the example during the week!

This is awesome advice!

And it turns out the library is less than a mile away from me. How cool!

Learn a trick from the kids and hide your phone in a book ;p Works until they ask why you never turn the page

Seems like you’re overthinking it to me. If you want your kids to read books, take them the library or a bookstore. They’re bound to find something they like with enough exposure. That’s got to have a bigger impact than whether they see you reading a physical book.

The libraries are getting rid of books. Especially bound journals. My alma mater has a fabulous reading room, and just enough shelving still in the building to partition the study cubbies. It's more about aesthetic than knowledge.

University libraries have notoriously poor childrens sections.

Unless you go to a college or university with a strong tradition of teachers' education programs. My alma mater has a terrific "children's literature room" in the library. Heavily used by Education major and Literature majors alike.

I only read on my kindle and yet I have a room full of shelves overflowing with physical books. Most of the justification for those books and shelves is so my kids have a place to wander into and browse around if they want something new to read.

Alas, I have yet to get them to show any interest in browsing the shelves. My daughter reads all the time but isn't interested in "old stuff". I'm holding out hope that she'll get to it when she's older. I recently told her that as far as I'm concerned there are no age limits for books and she can read anything she wants, that seems to have made her a little more curious.

It's my quiet little sadness. My love of Tolkien and Holmes and golden age mysteries and sci-fi is all due to the books scattered throughout home. I'd like to share those with her but I know that I can't push it.

Perhaps if your kids saw you actually reading from the shelves they'd be a bit more curious?

You could read to them, and have them also read to you. Or, you could do family book club, where each of you takes turns picking the thing you all read, then talk about it.

> I recently told her that as far as I'm concerned there are no age limits for books and she can read anything she wants

Maybe that's the problem. If you tell her that she is not allowed to read books from one part of the shelf, that will make her more curious about them ;)

I’m helping to raise my grandson, who will turn three next month. I read only digital books myself, but neither my daughter nor I have any intention of exposing him to digital books any time soon. He loves having stories read to him from physical picture books, and he spends a lot of time flipping through his favorite books on his own. My daughter also takes him to the library and explores books together with him there.

On the other hand, he and I listen to recorded music together a lot. I don’t have music on physical media any more, so he is coming to associate recorded music with album cover images and song names on playlists on my iPhone. For some reason that doesn’t bother me so much.

>I also feel like Kindle is setting up a situation where my kids won't have the joy of discovering a book, or author, serendipitously. When the books are just sitting there on a shelf (they were in my bedroom as a kid, basically just as overflow because we had too many in the house), it's easy to get bored and pick up a book.

All the ebooks in the library (actually, all of the several library systems I have access to) are just sitting there in libby, searchable and filterable by multiple criteria.

In other words, completely invisible.

No, it's all the physical books in the library that are completely invisible. Because I'm not at the library.

My primary concern is the curation. E-book platforms and their algorithms are just showing different things. Libraries and book stores had limitations in this way too, but there was more variety in inventory.

The biggest issues are often DRM. Most ebook readers will lock out books if you cannot constantly ask a DRM server for permission.

A great example is when Microsoft shut down their e-book stores, and the supporting DRM infrastructure.

The books stopped working.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367

Then there was that one time in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted Orwell titles including, ironically, 1984.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-sued-for-kindle-deletion...

There was also the more recent incident where Amazon censored a book on transgenderism. You can argue this book has dangerous takes, but there is no excuse to delete any book. It was published and relevant for someone studying these issues. Even books by horrible people like Mein Kampf must be preserved for researchers.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/09/based-on-false-assump...

Other than rare exceptions like NoStarchPress, Ebooks on most platforms are not yours. You will not be able to loan them to a friend, pass them down to family, or resell them. They can also be remotely deleted or edited, and there are powerful book censorship political movements that want to legally mandate exactly that.

The CCP already makes use of this power, such as their edits to Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/12/edward-snowd...

I know it is a pain, but if your only digital book purchase option is a DRM eBook, the ethical thing to do is buy a paper copy.

Every DRM eBook purchase is a wallet vote that you find this situation acceptable.

I'm less bothered by a bookstore ceasing to carry a title than I am by them deactivating modifying books after purchase.

Every purchased book should be an unmodifiable snapshot, and any good faith updates should only replace a purchase of desired by the owner.

Owner being a stretch of a term, as we know.

I’ve definitely had a better time with maintaining my collection of digital books through more than one move to different countries. I’ve kept three or four of my most cherished books, but my digital collection are independent of location.

I’ve always made a habit of trying to get digital copies of any book that I’ve felt was worth buying. DRM is a completely different story, giving books a shelf life which is limited to the lifespan of the retailer and often less.

The issue here is with DRM and having to move across storage media. I still have ebooks as text files from 20 years ago that I got off the Gutenberg project, and tons of EPUBs which are guaranteed to be readable since they are just zipped up HTML/XHTML files and not proprietary. For that matter I have Pascal code from high school in the early 90s sitting around on floppy drives and then later hard drives.

Yep, the Shakespeare text files I downloaded in the 1990s are still perfectly readable on basically any tech device, and have traveled across floppy discs, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, etc. They've been read on laptops, Palm PDA, PlayStation Portable, Windows Mobile Phone, and Android.

This is exactly what happened to ancient civilizations. They digitized everything in the cloud and when it crashed all that was left was the pyramids.

Unironic spirit science enjoyer?

Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one.

Every hoop is taken to make them like real books whether it makes sense or not, except for the time when you actually want to lend or give them to someone else. Then it gets complicated, depends on the vendor, or is simply impossible.

I have no need for that.

Imagine 200 years in the future, all license servers are disabled and we cannot read our own (digital) books anymore.

There are tons of DRM-free ebooks out there, including some from major publishing houses.

Digital books are fine. You can get many of them without DRM.

DRM sucks. Period. But as of today, it can be removed after purchase, which means its longevity will depend on backup strategies, not licensing servers.

Can that change? Sure. But it's not the case today, and we don't see it on the horizon.

> Digital books are a scam.

Not if you like carrying your whole library around with you everywhere. Try doing that with physical books.

Digital books under DRM fit what you're saying, but not all digital books are under DRM.

> Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one.

It seems like less of a scam and more of a technology constrained by publishers and authors. Lots of people borrow digital books from libraries, for example, without ever buying them.

I totally agree that digital media isn't anywhere near as permanent as many people think. Here today, gone tomorrow.

But I've moved all my reading over to Kindle, even so. Because my old eyes can't handle paperbacks anymore. And reading glasses make me so very ill. That's a personal problem, yes, but it is 100% of why I buy eBooks now and why I'm glad they're an option.

I guess I could back up the Kindle books, right? They all claim to have no DRM, at the beginning of each book.

Calibre + DeDRM plugin can make your purchases yours. There are also sites that host pirated books.

In 2013 or 14 when I decided to get an ereader, I went from Nook to Kobo because Nook books weren't crackable, and then from Kobo to Kindle because I liked the form factor and fonts better.

The moment I can't strip DRM from Amazon books is the day I pirate everything, and will purchase deadtree books to give to the library.

I don't quite get why they have to keep updating formats. Or why there's OCR involved in the first place. Unless they're talking about scanned books specifically.

At any rate, I can't imagine a future where there's a trove of digital works from 100 years ago, but gosh darn it we just don't have the programs to interpret them anymore. No, there's going to be the interest in preserving it and they'll find a way. The cost per work will be minimal; they just have to revive each kind of software once, assuming they preserve the binaries or specs. Or just have one emulator for an old system that runs all of it. Or worst case reverse engineer the formats (again, once per format not per work). Is there a single case of digital material from let's say the 60s that we can't interpret anymore?

However it makes sense to me that DRM and physical upkeep of the drives are real blockers.

Not if they are stored in the cloud, where the bits are constantly being shuffled around various media. It is never the case that a bit stays on the same sector of the same media indefinitely.

A personal library is effed, tho, because some flash fails if the blocks are not cycled. E.g., multi-level cell flash requires at least a refresh, of I think, 36 months (don't quote me)? Basically: the blocks need to be copied and erased periodically (this isn't wear leveling it is something else and I'm now out of my depth). Probably not an issue with lower density, thicker oxide single-bit-cell flash.

I still keep my favorite books in paper format. All of my digital books are loans from my library. If I really like it, I buy a physical copy.

As for libraries and DRM, well, that's a horse of a different color.

> Not if they are stored in the cloud

myspace was a cloud and lost all music.

I get your point, but books have proven to stand the test of time. We just don't know yet for digital media. I mean, very concretely, are amazon's ebooks going to be functional 200 years from now?

Amazon's ebooks or the database that holds them?

Two different things.

I believe every book amazon has in their database will never be lost, at least until WW3. They won't rot. They won't be eaten by worms. Acidic ink won't deteriorate the cellulose. We won't need to have gigantic buildings to house them all.

Meanwhile the world's cloud storage will continue to expand exponentially, and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again.

Way better than what happened when the library of alexandria was razed and the intellectual progress of the human race was set back probably several centuries.

I'm bullish on the cloud, if you didn't notice. :)

> the database that holds them?

But that's completely useless if there's not the software and hardware infrastructure to make the contents of that database readable and searchable. That will be really tough to do.

> and the vast databases of books will be duplicated over and over and over again.

That doesn't happen automatically. Instead of librarians, it will be sys-admins scp-ing shit all the time. And they will totally accidentally delete entire archives at some point. Or forget, and the actual storage medium will degrade.

> I'm bullish on the cloud, if you didn't notice. :)

hehe :)

Every point you make is completely valid. The debate over file formats, and efforts to preserve file formats algorithmically (ON PAPER LOLOLOL) is a crisis historians are raising red flags about all over the place.

To give you an example, a good friend of mine did her PhD on two 16th century French philosophers' correspondence. It was a very comprehensive analysis of all of their exchanged letters, diaries, and journals. She's in a complete panic about the fact that today, all correspondence is done via email, which is protected with passwords; and once people die their passwords go with them unless they make arrangements. Maybe this is OK with a few big brains that the world knows about, but what about all the quiet geniuses that haven't been discovered? Historians will never have access to these lost works. Of course there are analogies to the analog world, but the point is: digital media is causing a type of dark age right under our noses.

What if we had a world where digital books were just .txt files? E-book readers can format the book with any font, margins, or layout they want, but the book itself is just a plain text file. Is such a world possible?

I believe that simple text files can bring books to life regardless of the technology used. Even if all e-readers are gone, you can still use Vim or Notepad to read books. Even if the editor went away, I could code a small editor to convert the bytes in the file to characters on the screen.

That's pretty much what epub files are. You can unzip them and then read the html they contain. You can also use something to strip the html tags and only plain text will remain.

Exactly. And some modern books are taking full advantage of that fact and including javascript for interactivity. Though I'm not really a fan of this direction, some of the childrens books I've worked with have been pretty cool.

Also note that while EPUBs are zips, the first few bytes are not compressed. Doesn't matter when unzipping, but if you want to make changes and re-zip you have to account for it.

A few books need images. For instance, to show up some weird figures in mistery books.

Then there are various typographical and layout features – at a very minimum cursive, bold and possibly underlines should be not that uncommon. Quite a few books use footnotes, which are a bit of a paint to represent in a plain text format that's lacking the ability to explicitly link footnote symbols with their corresponding texts. (So you either need to introduce hard pagination, or convert them to endnotes, neither of which is really satisfactory.)

Sometimes the pagination is explicitly played with, so even if your digital book doesn't use hard pagination, it'd still be useful to at least being able to force a new screen page.

Font sizes occasionally get used for creative effects or to otherwise convey meaning, and the same goes for font selection itself. Sometimes even colour is used.

And some books get quite creative in with playing with layout and typography effects. The Raw Shark Texts had some ASCII-art style pages, but utilising a proportional font (!) [1], and House of Leaves went totally bonkers in its use of creative typography (https://www.google.com/search?q=House+of+Leaves+typography&t...).

[1] Even if those were based on a fixed-width font, you still need a way of indicating to the e-book reader software "Hey, here's some ASCII art, please don't reflow the text here and don't put a page break in the middle of the art, either". With a proportional font you either need to make sure the exact same font you used for layouting also gets used for display, or just give up and include that text as an image (and an appropriate alt-text, especially if the text for the ASCII-art isn't just random gibberish, but actually meaningful text, too).

I don't know about this. There are a lot of considerations and trade offs, and simplifying the difference it too much usually a sign that someone doesn't understand the problem or is biased towards a position and wants you to be also.

Paper books have a fantastic UX. A book comes with all the information you want and also the renderer, and the interface is so intuitive that anyone that has even a vague understanding of what writing is can tell exactly what it is and how it is used, no tutorial necessary.

They're huge though, humongous, and they degrade. What we do with electronic books is re-use the renderer and only store the data separately, and this means that we don't have to instantiate the renderer with every set of data, this saves tremendous amounts of resources and space. Imagine every book you could ever want to read on one piece of paper, that's the limit of where this electronic book thing can go.

But the hardware is not passive, so using it consumes resources, and non passive things tend to degrade faster, and formats degrade (for some reason, I think financial reasons, can we settle on a format already? Let's do epub), storage hardware degrades...

I personally like electronic books. If we can come up with some type of cheap, small, long lasting storage hardware, like microSD cards but much, much longer lasting, settle on a format that can store basically any writing and drawing you could want (gzipped LaTeX and PNG anyone?) and reading devices that consume miniscule amounts of power, have no moving parts, are cheap and render well, I think we have a winning combination.

This is a great example of how people in tech often get wrapped up in theory and just don’t junderstand how things work in practical reality. Yes, DRM sucks in theory, but in reality this is all rarely a problem.

I got the original kindle a little over 15 years ago, and I can still open the books I bought back then on my new Kindle and read them just fine. And in another 15 years, I will probably still be able to read those books just fine on whatever Kindle I have at that point.

Yes, I am aware that that may not be true, and I may have to re-purchase these books again at some point, though it seems unlikely. But in the meantime I get the benefit of buying them for cheaper, not having to devote a bunch of real estate to hundreds of books, and being able to text search since most of the books I want to open again after a long period of time or some sort of reference book.

Yes, these likely won’t outlive me. But if you’ve ever known anyone who died that had a lot of books it’s usually not a treasure trove but rather a bunch of crap that has to be shuffled off to good will.

I’m perfectly happy with this trade off. And that’s not even counting the environmental impact.

> DRM sucks in theory, but in reality this is all rarely a problem.

> And in another 15 years, I will probably still be able to read those books

I bet the non-DRM books you bought on your kindle can also be opened 15 years later.

I'm willing to bet that .epubs will still be readable by the brain-computer interface all humans will be implanted with at birth in 100 years.

And there will be some trashy harlequin romance novel hipster fan club in 2122.

Code written in 1972 is emulate-able and readable today so we're halfway to the 100 year benchmark the article sets in its first sentence.

I have numerous books that are more than 100 years old. I am afraid to read them because they are fragile.

I am not afraid to emulate Magnavox Odyssey ROMs from 1972, and won't ever be.

I dont trust any of my kindle books to last more than a couple of years without the kindle calling home to Amazon.

I've got mixed feedback on this. I had a house fire a few years back where all my paper literature was soaked, and stayed in water for days to weeks. Books, and especially my comic book collection consisting of Sandman and other very collectible treasures, were transmuted to a soupy, unreadable mess. It was a very emotional time salvaging what little I could of these gifts from friends and family. Interestingly the 5.25" and 3.5" floppies from 1990 and prior were in water tight containers, but I knew from previous attempts to recover data from them that I'd be wasting my time trying to get ancient BBS text files from them. Digital media will expire, but I've got IDE hard drives from 30 years ago that have fared pretty well, and thankfully I had the foresight to duplicate the magnetic media that has a known shelf life to media that might survive a bit longer. And data grows in size and scale, so a 20MB hard drive from the 80s is pretty easy to preserve as long as you're organized, and plan, and don't procrastinate too long. But thinking about it - like life, isn't data meant to expire? Maybe your descendants will appreciate a few pictures of you, and some journal entries or your great novel draft. But I have no interest even in my mom's or Hemingway's kindergarten buddies. And especially if there are published books on a shelf, they're almost always replaceable. Think of who will be cleaning out your house when you die while you curate your data, and try to preserve what's of greatest worth to you and that audience.

And finally, last time I visited my father he showed me a 6" thick bible that had been in the family since the early 1800s, with beautiful fonts, colored illustrations, and the first few blank pages filled with marriage and birth records. There are some books that can't be replaced or duplicated, and should be cherished like a child.

Look, I got an ebook for free from a publishing company (that wants me to adopt it for my course). Of course, you can't just download it: you have to sign up to their own website, where there is a dreadful reader.

What I mean by dreadful is: the PDF page does not feel my screen, therefore I have to scroll down. This is fine. Except that scrolling down does not show me the next pages, so reading is: scroll down, then click on "next page", then scroll down, then click on "next page", etc. etc.. Each page takes about 2 seconds to load.

In order to understand whether I'm interested in an academic book, I have to flick through it.

I got tired even before going through the front matter.

So for what concerns me, this ebook is already "worn out".

Most of the arguments against digital books, or files generally, seem to assume no one ever does the work to update the files. Bitrot, unsupported formats, etc.

This seems to be quickly followed by some pretty clear survivorship bias argument about paper. A touch of sun, a dab of moisture, poor quality materials, the family pet, fire, and a paper book is toast.

I have files, ebooks, images, documents dating back to the 1990s because they're important and I do the work every so often to refresh them and keep them stored safely. Same sort of work people do for paper books in places like libraries (personal or otherwise).

Neither seems to be more or less durable. Ones, shorter existence than the other doesn't lend aid to proof for either side of the argument.

Click-bait title. It's about devices, not the actual digitized book. I have .pdf files from 90's when I started to learn assembler, they still apply (for basic and medium) today and I can read them just fine on my Foxit reader.

To be fair, there are probably other files from that time which you can't read anymore easily.

to be fair there are books from hundreds of years ago written in dead languages which you can't read anymore easily.

as for file formats, pretty sure you can find readers in some internet archive + operating systems which you can just as easily get/create and emulator for.

I have almost a thousand epubs mirrored on my NAS (and backed up elsewhere). The device I read them on changes periodically, but the actual ebooks don’t wear out, are easy to transport, and get much more use than my physical library. I still love paper books and would never part with mine, but they are more like mementos or even artwork to me now.

My paper books are heavy, get dusty, almost died in a flood once, can tear or be stained, are a fire risk, and would be very difficult to replace if anything happened to them.

Digital preservation has its challenges, too, but acting as steward for epubs has been much easier than for paper books (for me, anyway).

When I was younger (!) and I had time, I used Calibre to unlock my e-books to be sure I will be able to read it (only for archiving purpose).

Now I prefer sellers who provide me pdf books.

For this reason I prefer to buy technical books from O'Reilly or Packt: they cost more of the same book on Amazon, but I get multiple unlocked formats, and I can print some pages if I need to.

It is okey for me to pay a bit more to get a future-proof format like a pdf one.

PDF seems the only format which is a bit more durable nowadays.

The 7-bit ASCII is probably the most "future proof" format we have: even a Commodore PET (1980) should be compatible with 7bit-ASCII as far as I know.

There are great initiatives out there to prevent this from happening. The best one I know of is https://standardebooks.org. Highly recommended!

This is why I care about getting egoods (books, movies, etc) in a format that I fully control. I still listen to >decade old audiobooks that are simple mp3 files, moving them to my latest device is a piece of cake.

This makes sense (ish) but I also think it's not an apples to apples comparison. Reprocessing into newer formats makes the digital copies more useful than physical books, not as useful. Adding metadata makes them more useful, not as useful. Backing up onto newer mediums, and just new drives, sure, but I'd love to know why backing up to something like AWS Glacier wouldn't be viable, and much cheaper than having a huge building and employing lots of people to run it and look after physical books.

(I love physical books, incidentally. Just don't love the comparison here.)

All my books are on PC for more than 20 years and I do not notice any wear. Probably because I did not read the article.

On a serious note my personal hard drive is mirrored on 3 computers and backed up off-site as well

Better use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage :

"Discs using this technology could be capable of storing up to 360 terabytes worth of data for billions of years."

Had this same thought the other day. I got Lost Men In London (by Olaf Stapledon) from the public library the other day and kept wondering why the paper used for the pages was so thick compared to most books you buy nowadays.

I flipped back to the first few pages and saw that book was printer in 1934. I was amazed to realize the book was nearly 90 years old and held up really well. Sure the cover was worn and paged yellowed with the time, but it was in pretty great condition for something that old

Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine. On the other hand my paperback copy of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality (2004) is falling to bits with chunks of pages departing from the spine.

> Even my very tattered vellum-bound copy of the writings of Seneca (in latin) dated 1643 (the year Isaac Newton was born) which I picked up for a few pence years ago is just about readable with the pages firmly attached to the spine.

You either got very lucky or that thing is not actually from 1643.

That book is probably worth tens of thousands of dollars if it's genuine.

Extremely unlikely, though :-)

https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...

I’m kinda ok with this. Books I suspect I’ll only read once I’m ok to buy digitally. Books that I think my kids might read, that I might read again, I buy as paper

They’re cheap though. I’ve accumulated quite a collection via kindle daily 0.99 sales. Takes a Bit of patience but they do have quality in there occasionally

personally, at a time in my life when i'm relatively unsettled and moving a lot, my digital books have lasted a lot longer than my physical books.

maybe some day i'll have the luxury of storing a whole bunch of books, but they've always been one of the first things to to to the thrift store in a move. i've got my hardcover omnibus of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and a kindle.

I think cloud providers should offer an eternal storage option, for example 10gb for one time payment of $100 sounds reasonable.

Can't wait to buy a house to actually own physical books - until then kindle is the best approach!

Sure, if the "book" is a one-to-one representation of a physical book. It's not, though.

Makes sense. The print is way finer.

Everything digital just feels like modern day "content". Long live the physical I say.

It's almost as it the more refined the technology, the lesser the shelf life.

Is it possible to build a computer that would last a century with light use?

https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

Used books from the post amazon days will be increasingly, investably rare.

Another thing i haven't seen mentioned is the typeface. Old books can be hard to read if they are set in Fraktur. With an eBook you can just change the font at-will.

My eBook reader is also waterproof so i can read in the bathtub without worries.

Text files and static HTML, on the other hand, live on forever

But they can be replicated much easier and much faster

I'm glad we can have both types :)

I still can open 20 years ol PDF

Planet Money did an episode on the "e-Book Wars" between libraries and publishers a week ago: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...

I learned a few things about digital library books that made me sad:

* Publishers only allow a certain number of "rentals" of digital library books, after which the eBook license expires.

* Publishers also put an expiration date on the license, so after maybe two years, the eBook license expires even if nobody borrows the book.

* Publishers have repeatedly put hard limits on the abilities for libraries to purchase eBook licenses, for example allowing only one copy per library for new releases.

* Publishers raised the prices of library eBooks to be far higher than a physical book. A $15 physical book might cost $60 as an eBook to a library.

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.

The funny thing is that I found a DRM-free copy of the book you mentioned on the internet in less than a minute. PDF or ePub, your pick; probably converted from the same source.

Whatever these publishers are trying to do, they're only hurting their honest customers. It's trivial to find popular eBooks online regardless of library licenses and DRM usage yet honest people's lives are made so incredibly difficult for no good reason.

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.

The episode is much more fair to the publishers.

They specifically call out the Libby app as the turning point. Once it became super accessible for people to get ebooks through libraries, it started really putting the squeeze on publishers and authors.

In the episode they talk about how publishers started seeing the curve go parabolic and were basically forced into panic action to stay solvent. The money disappears on that side of the equation and full time authors are downgraded to working authors, and working authors are pushed out entirely.

On the other side though, what they've created is a system of winners and losers. Libraries have limited budgets and have to be choosy about what ebooks they're getting now. So fewer authors get a larger slice of pie. I do think that generally lines up with the demand for books now...but it means that it will be harder for new authors to break through.

It's really fascinating to me that, like they point out in the episode, everyone involved (authors, publishers, librarians) are passionate about books and getting people to read. They just need the economics to all work out, and that's where it gets super contrived.

Very complex issue and highly recommend the Planet Money episode.

Agree with what you said. Some other points, it's not all publishers. The big 4/5 are this way, but there are a ton of publishers who license much more liberally to libraries. Some will sell their entire catalog for a fixed yearly subscription w/o waits and some will even sell parts of the catalog perpetually. It's a win-win since publishers get a nice chunk of money and libraries get much better licensing terms.

Another challenge you don't mention is patrons. They want the latest James Patterson novel, and nothing else. The library, smaller publishers, and less known authors don't have the marketing budgets to get patrons interested. There is so much content now that new, independent authors don't often even want money, they just want someone, anyone to read their book.

Maybe unpopular opinion, but I think libraries should give up on best sellers or at a minimum embargo them for 12+ months. They'll end up with better terms from the big 4/5, and can be a discovery place for new authors in addition to/rather than Amazon KDP where many end up now.

Oh, and I haven't even touched the existential threat from Amazon. They just released their entire music catalog for prime subscribers. There will come a point when they do the same for books.

>Maybe unpopular opinion, but I think libraries should give up on best sellers or at a minimum embargo them for 12+ months. They'll end up with better terms from the big 4/5, and can be a discovery place for new authors in addition to/rather than Amazon KDP where many end up now.

I'm 100% in agreement of this for ebooks given how disgusting DRM practices are.

Yep, those are some ridiculous restrictions when the library could (and should) just buy a retail copy and lend it out how they wish.

I 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.

There are still countries where the Apple TV app hasn't even been released. Summing up the Wikipedia numbers, about 100 countries have access to this app. Even in Europe, Apple TV+ isn't available everywhere (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411). In countries like Albania they don't even seem to make iTunes Movies available.

According to this community post (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253966277) that implies that DRM'd content is not available in those countries, and that you'll need to download your movies and for them to work depending on the country you're visiting.

If you're coming over for a temporary visit, setting up a VPN on your home network may be a good idea. Many American services are not available in other countries, even if you're a paying customer.

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.

Your best bet is to do like many.. Pirate the content and pay for your 'digital content' to support the actors.

It seems almost every "cloud" based system has a built-in time bomb.

I'm now getting notices that Amazon is closing some of its services.

Once things are no longer profitable, or technology shifts your stuff is quickly abandoned.

Microsoft Groove Music anyone?

I bought an ebook from google play once, found out it was some DRM crap instead of just a file, so I pirated it.

I'm at the stage of my life now where I can buy stuff, don't punish me for it.

If your goals are 1) pay for it 2) have the convenience of no DRM, then it sounds like doing it this way worked out fine. Except maybe that pirating as a second step is slightly less convenient than downloading directly from the same place you bought it.

One good thing about technical ebooks is that they know their audience can just pirate it if they want, so they don't bother with DRM. Was happy to pay for my digital copy of "Practical Object Oriented Design".

I generally buy books that came out recently (but pirate 10+ year old books) and the first thing I do to a new book is crack the DRM so I can just save an EPUB that I can read where I want to read it, when I want to read it.

Authors that published 10+ years ago don't have bills to pay? This is a weird moral distinction to me.

If anything they could depend even more on these individual purchases.

Larry Correia has a great article[0] about where his money comes from. His backlist (previously published books) are his bread and butter.

[0] https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya...

They can work again... like everybody

I don't get paychecks from work I did 20 years ago. Why should anyone else?

Moreover, the copyright term used to be 20 years way back in the 1700s-1800s. If 20 years was good enough back then (before overnight international shipping was possible), it's good enough now.

Your first paragraph had me thinking differently, but the second drifts off.

The second is questioning the validity of current copyright terms. The argument for authors continuing to receive royalty payments many years after publishing something is based on copyright law, however current copyright law is the author's entire life plus 70 years (IIRC), which is ludicrous. Even in the age of sailboats this was considered ridiculously excessive and unnecessary.

So look at the reverse: why is even 20 years necessary? For software, that's ridiculously long. If it weren't for pirates, we wouldn't have a lot of older software (like old DOS games) any more because of these copyright terms.

I agree that modern IP protection lasts far, far longer in practical terms now than originally, even before accounting for actual extensions in wall clock time. It's pretty wild how long they are.

It's a moral distinction that the US constitution agrees with, as it says:

"The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

With emphasis on "limited times". The original period was 14 years. The current standard of author's lifetime plus 70 years is technically a limit, but seems against the intent of the law.

This is what you say here, but let's see if this accurately reflects your reality.

Do you live in a house? Do the people who built it receive regular payments from you?

They build houses and are paid for their work. If they want to keep being paid, they need to keep building houses.

What about the roads you use, do those who built them continue to be paid for their work decades later?

What is "Weird" about your thinking is that somehow because they wrote a book 10+ years ago you feel they should still be paid for it? If they want to be paid today, they should publish another book.

How come you are OK having people pay for books they wrote 10+ years ago but you dont pay others for work they did decades ago?

Houses are built and sold on a different model. If we equate authors with a construction company, respectively all the different tradesmen involved in building construction, the one big difference is that from the construction company's point of view houses aren't build speculatively.

A construction company builds a house because a clearly defined entity commissions it to do so, so setting up a one-and-done-style transaction (I pay you for your whole effort in constructing the house and that's that) is only natural, and while it's not cheap, people are also willing to pay that kind of price because once built a house will last decades and also because you have to have some kind of shelter. (Though the existence of renting shows that other economical models for financing housing are possible, too).

Books on the other hand are a different matter. Writing a book usually takes on the order of months to years, but few people are willing to individually pay a writer just in order to be able to read a single book. Paying a writer's cost of living for a year or so might be only an order of magnitude or two cheaper than building a house, but compared to a house the value you get out of a typical book is definitively several orders of magnitude lower than the value you get out of a house.

In order for books to be viable, their cost of production needs to be split up among many people, and what's worse, that set of people isn't really known in advance. So the model we've arrived at is that somebody (either a publishing house, but often actually the author him- or herself) fronts that cost and then expects to make it back bit by bit through individual sales, which means that people wanting to read that book are definitively expected to pay their fair share.

And because the whole thing still is somewhat of a speculative endeavour (a book might be genuinely bad or otherwise unpopular, or just have bad luck/timing and therefore not become popular), it also means that some books will still not make back their cost of production, which conversely also means that, other, more popular books will earn healthy profits – but if you just cut out the profits from the popular works, it might mean the averages on which the whole model is based might no longer work out.

(Yes, for popular authors with a reputation to uphold things like preorders, Kickstarter, etc. can work out, too, but you somehow need to be able to get to that point of popularity in the first place)

As for roads – the relationship between road construction companies and whoever commissions that road is the same as with building houses – a clearly defined buyer, who can afford paying the price of a once-and-done transaction because the road will deliver enough value.

If we're looking at the relationship between whoever commissioned that road and the actual end users on the other hand, there are actually some similarities to the models used for books there: The set of expected users of that road isn't clearly defined, yet the costs need to be split up among them. Most of the time that issue is side-stepped by simply paying for roads out of general (or occasionally special) taxation, but other times you get things like toll roads, were road users are very well expected to pay for them for a long time, possibly even after the original construction costs have long been paid off, and maybe more than would just be required for ongoing maintenance.

If possible, consider buying from DRM-free bookshops instead. Libreture maintains a list of them [1].

[1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/

Great list! I have bought from InformIt which is on there, can confirm DRM free.

We are woefully unready to adopt a paperless existence.

I buy the book on Kindle, then I remove the protection and save it as a PDF. Let's see how long that lasts...

Piracy is yet again the better choice.

Terrible example, digital media can last far longer, under the same circumstances.

Have a USB drive Hard Drive, or USB? Plug them in 10 to 15 years later, chances are, they will have far less damage than a book in all those years.

It's an unfair comparison.

I have some books on CD-ROM. They have no damage, true...but good luck finding a computer with a CD-ROM drive now.

CDs are also at risk of disc rot, which might be a non issue for hundreds of years or fail within 20 depending on the CD and storage.

From a Library of congress study: "The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer."

https://cdm.link/2017/02/a-generation-of-cds-is-already-rott...

- Assuming the hardware does not change

- Assuming the software does not change

- Assuming the usb device is stored securely and lightly used.

Bit rot is real

Need to store virtual machines with both the operating system and the reader/converter software included. There are lots of bits that can rot...

No, you don't lol. You do realize both the algorithm to decompress the media, and the media as well can be stored alongside, right? Including. any instructions to actually use that media.

Sure, but rewriting software in order to access books is a lot of extra work. I just store the VM containing the necessary tools and make sure it still executes in the new HW+os when they are upgraded.

Formats change. Could you use some disk image formats from old Mac emulators made for the Amiga?

Assuming the book is kept under good conditions, in a humid controller room, with nobody touching it?

Your point is moot. there's a reason we moved to digital media, and why nobody keeps paper copies of everything, aside for last-resort scenarios (which once again includes physical media that nobody ever touches)

Your books will be readable in 20 years. Not so with a USB drive.

If USB sticks are as unreliable as some SD cards, chances are they break after a few years, too.

I have a game that was distributed via an USB stick, and on the rare occasion that I had to reinstall that game, I've always needed to restore a backup copy back onto the USB stick, because the files on the stick themselves were damaged (the USB stick itself is required as some sort of copy protection dongle for the installer).

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