Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I think part of the reason why there are restrictions of various sorts on ebooks is that unlike pbooks they don't age.
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30 years ago punch-cards and paper punch ribbons were popular.
Imagine a nice 8 inch floppy disk here with a book saved in a format that was popular 30 years ago. I doubt it will even be ASCII text (it might be in EBCDIC, but I do not know what version ;-) ). How do I open it?
Imagine a well preserved 200MB backup tape. Where do I get tape drive that would read 20 years old tapes?
Recently I had to open an old backup for industrial automation system from a 100MB IOmega zip drive. The only reason I was able to open it is that I am a packrat and I anticipated such situation so I salvaged an old zip drive from a trash when my coworkers were moving to a new office. I also have Jazz drive and Superdisk drive. You do not want to know how my coworkers joked about my boxes of "old junk".
You have obviously never tried to open a file older than a few years. 15 years from now you won't be able to open .lit or .mobi file.
Also bear in mind that the majority of e-books ... aehm ... "sold" today, are in fact licensed to you for limited time and limited number of devices. When they switch off DRM server and your old device dies you won't be able to red ... aehm ... "your" books.
At work I sometimes have to work with old data and old computers (industrial automation). Believe me, 15 years from now not a single computer that is used today will be in use. A new fancy e-ink reader has a lifetime of perhaps 5 years. After that you won't be able to purchase batteries, spare parts or support for it. There will be better and not-quite-100%-backward-compatible devices with better parameters for fraction of price.
On the other hand I have collection of paper books from my grandfather.