Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Those of you who think the effort is negligible to maintain digital files don't know what you're facing. See http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/52.html for notes on on-going research because of just how fragile our storage mediums continue to be. |
You are confusing the problems of maintenance of the physical media (which is what the paper you mention is about) with the longevity of the data itself. This has two parts - preservation of the actual bytes, and preservation of the understanding of the format (e.g.epub). The ease of copying of digital data renders the former quite easy (barring armageddon/end-of-technological-society type scenarios). With regard to the latter, I'd assert that it's very unlikely that any currently widely used format will be forgotten. Even if you are concerned about that possibility, just keep archive copies of your books in HTML or plain text when appropriate. You could even keep a copy of the spec of the format in your archive, perhaps together with some relevant source code.
/JB