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Comment by sbf501 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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