Quote:
Originally Posted by whitearrow
IMO the whole argument of "this digital medium won't be any good someday, then you'll be screwed" is a red herring. The VHS player, the zip disk, the Flintstone floppy -- none of them disappeared overnight, and when they were on their way out, there was always some fairly simple way to transfer your data. I bought a DVD recorder to transfer my homemade video tapes, and if I didn't want to buy one, there was a service that could do it at a reasonable price. Yes, the medium itself may change, but the data doesn't just go *poof* overnight and disappear. There is almost always an option to future-proof your data.
WRT ebooks, even now, DRM can be stripped from most formats with fairly trivial effort. I find it difficult to believe that when it comes time to replace .mobi or .epub with whatever's next that there won't be a pretty simple way to do it.
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When VHS went out, I didn't notice any movies disappearing.
On the other hand, I don't think any of us will live to see books disappear.