Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
With digital obsolesence, it's not so much that the format becomes unreadable and the medium it is stored on becomes unreadable. I can open an old trunk and pull out a century-old book and still read it. If I pull out an 20 year old piece of digital storage, I might not even be able to find something to load it on.
I was skeptical of the Little Free Libraries, I thought people would just take the books, smash or otherwise vandalize them. But they aren't. When I need to haul out a box full of books, I take them to a friend's Little Free Library. People are very supportive of these, they are nice additions to neighborhoods. Many people decorate them to match their own house.
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That is why I like calibre so much. I have my collection of books in one place with tags etc that are saved into the metadata of the book. An epub is just a specially formatted html file with css encased in a zip file. I can always get back to the plain text format.
With all the books in the calibre library I can zip or rar it into one large file which I then store / backup on a usb drive. When I get a new computer with a new form of drive I will then copy those files onto the new system and whatever new format of portable storage there is.
With portable 2 and 4 terabyte hard drives it is easy to have backups of the library on multiple devices. My tablet had a 32 gig sd card for my books and while I don't have "off site" storage, well, if it was a paper library I had, fire would destroy it also.