Seriously thoughtful eBooks: a danger to posterity?

[HarryT]

Apologies - I misremembered. Paper first reached Europe in the 10th century, brought by the Moors to Spain.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Was electricity invented after the 10th century then?

Was electricity invented?

[HarryT]

Electricity is, of course, a natural phenomenon, but the man-made generation of electricity was certainly an "invention".

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Was electricity invented after the 10th century then?

No. The electricity was invented before 10th century. The oldest DOCUMENTED battery in the world is about 2000 yers old.
No kidding,
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_11.htm

And, of course, a link to the wikipedia article can not be missing from my post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_battery

[wodin]

Originally Posted by wodin

Excuse me for my naiveté, but don’t you need electricity to produce paper?

So, to rephrase my original post.

Excuse me for my naiveté, but don’t you need commercial electrical power generation capabilities in order to produce paper on the scale necessary to print a best seller, or even a newspaper with a commercially viable distribution?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by wodin

Excuse me for my naiveté, but don’t you need commercial electrical power generation capabilities in order to produce paper on the scale necessary to print a best seller, or even a newspaper with a commercially viable distribution?

Yes, and you need alot of water to make paper as well as a bunch of other chemicals. While paper is a greener product when disposing of that styrofoam it is not very green to make.

BOb

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Over

Do we loose all books? If an alien race visited our extinct world 2000 years from now... Won't they find any written material about us past a certain date? Will the year we enter in a full ebook format society be known as... The dark age? If I do a trip to a place without electricity, will that equate to no reading possibility?

This is a premise in Charles Stross' Glasshouse were future humans have a black hole in their knowledge about human hostory because of DRM. For the time period were DRM did not was used they have full knowledge since it is easy to preserve data electronically by format shifting it regularly.

[Xenophon]

I would rate non-DRM eBooks as less of a thread to posterity than pulp paper (not acid-free, that is). But, of course, you need electricity and a fairly high tech level to use/decode eBooks.

Paper books printed on archival-grade paper last amazingly well with only modest care requirements. But books on pulp paper will be gone gone gone in well under a century.

Xenophon

[LazyScot]

Originally Posted by wodin

So, to rephrase my original post.

Excuse me for my naiveté, but don’t you need commercial electrical power generation capabilities in order to produce paper on the scale necessary to print a best seller, or even a newspaper with a commercially viable distribution?

If I remember correctly, the best paper in the late 1700's was made from/with French rags. This caused problems with a little revolution making it un-patrotic to use (and dashed difficult to obtain) high quality paper. At that time they were just starting up newspapers (both sensible and the engraved equivalent of the gutter press as well), and had a thriving print industry. Whilst the volumes were not in the millions of, say, JK Rowling, they could produce 1000's of copies. That's as many as a lot of books get today, and they didn't have a commercial electrical power structure -- in fact a number of the books printed were talking about the first european discoveries of electricity.