Oh Scientific American, you are not the first to have realised this. But rather than just writing an article in which they freak out about the idea of technological advancements, Project Gutenberg actually came up with a
solution:
Quote:
Today, Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world. This has been so for over thirty years, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. We've seen formats and extended character sets come and go; plain text stays with us. We can still read Shakespeare's First Folios, the original Gutenberg Bible, the Domesday Book, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone (though we may have trouble with the language!), but we can't read many files made in various formats on computer media just 20 years ago.
We're trying to build an archive that will last not only decades, but centuries.
The point of putting works in the PG archive is that they are copied to many, many public sites and individual computers all over the world. No single disaster can destroy them; no single government can suppress them. Long after we're all dead and gone, when the very concept of an ISP is as quaint as gas streetlamps, when HTML reads like Middle English, those texts will still be safe, copied, and available to our descendants.
[...edit...]
We also encourage other open formats based on plain text, like HTML and XML, and even occasionally not-so-open ones when simple formatting isn't enough, but plain text is the only format we're sure of in a rapidly-changing technological landscape.
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See, everything will be OK. Take a deep breath and calm down, Scientific American.
Edit: On reading the original article more carefully, it seems the author is talking about
the current DRM-obsessed ebook market, rather than making a general statement that ebooks are inherently incapable of being valid longterm storage format. Fair enough, I'll agree with him on that!