MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Professore Umberto Eco calls us eReaders "Taliban" in interview

Richey79 · 12-24-2010, 10:59 AM

There's a huge amount of anxiety about the long-term archival durability of digital media. As someone who still mixes film photography with digital, I'm particularly interested in this issue. I find it far easier to manage film and negatives than .RAW files and .PNGs on DVDs and in the cloud.

Still, other than the physical aspect of this problem (and I have CDs from 15 years ago that I can still read fine - they've simply been stored in a dark, dry place), I think the worry that we won't be able to read these formats in the future is a fairly spurious one. DISCLAIMER: this statement comes from someone who keeps important files on two seperate external hard drives, a thumb drive, uploaded to the cloud, a second computer and burnt onto DVD. I've thought about storing some of the DVDs in a seperate building, in case of fire.

I decided to set myself a challenge, to test whether the file formats we use today will be readable in the future.

So, I thought up and found online a number of different old formats, searching for format names rather than ways of reading them, so that the test is somewhat more fair. I then tried to find a company who would provide me with the means of reading that format that I could use immediately if I chose. Here are the results:

Okay, let's start with something fairly simple. Betamax cassettes, obsolete for twenty years: http://dv2anything.com/vhs-betamaxprocessing.html

How about files produced by Mass-11 word processing software from 1985? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/116257

Let's try something a bit older: the 16mm film format from the 1920s. Got an old reel in the attic you need developing? http://www.bayeux.co.uk/?gclid=CI6f5...FY4f4QodHDp_pQ
Want to buy some fresh stock? http://www.widescreen-centre.co.uk/C...6_mm_Film.html

Have a need for colodion film processing, a tech developed in 1850? Need the chemicals? http://www.apug.org/forums/forum42/2...n-suplier.html Want someone else to process it for you? http://www.silverprint.co.uk/darkroom.asp

And back to computing for a final example. Need to decipher some Hollerith's Tabulating Cards, used by IBMs from 1924? http://www.cardamation.com/page6.html

All of these examples took seconds to find conversion/developing solutions. Perhaps files from a less well-known device - such as a PDA from 1997 - might be somewhat harder to convert, but I'm sure that someone with a bit of knowledge of .xml etc. could do it very easily. Now that the cloud is upon us (although it has problems that mean it will never be entirely trusted for many files) and we are well into the age of the on-line torrent, I think it's easier to find many kinds of document than it ever has been before. Texts are also more secure, since they tend to exist on many people's computers at the same time.

Of course, personal correspondence is what will suffer in terms of being retained for posterity. My generation may well be the last to find boxes of Grandma's precious letters in the attic, which is a shame and could be mourned as an act of cultural vandalism, except noone is responsible for it: it's simply inexorable progress.

We live in the age of information. We are deluged by it. But that which finds us has not been filtered for quality nearly as carefully as it was in previous ages and much of it is junk.

A man who was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder spent all his time downloading documents from the internet (sounds normal to me, LOL), because he wanted to collect them for himself before they disappeared. Of course, the irony is that any document of value never becomes unavailable from the internet.

I think we collectively suffer from a minor form of this delusion. Faced with so much information, we - particularly those of us who remember when you had to go out of your way to collect the texts you liked - panic and try to archive as much as possible. Stop worrying. Now Eco's library of 30,000 books (he hasn't read) is available to all of us. To not have got round to reading yet.

12-24-2010, 10:59 AM	#41
Richey79 mrkrgnao Posts: 241 Karma: 237248 Join Date: May 2010 Device: PRS650, K3 Wireless, Galaxy S3, iPad 3.	There's a huge amount of anxiety about the long-term archival durability of digital media. As someone who still mixes film photography with digital, I'm particularly interested in this issue. I find it far easier to manage film and negatives than .RAW files and .PNGs on DVDs and in the cloud. Still, other than the physical aspect of this problem (and I have CDs from 15 years ago that I can still read fine - they've simply been stored in a dark, dry place), I think the worry that we won't be able to read these formats in the future is a fairly spurious one. DISCLAIMER: this statement comes from someone who keeps important files on two seperate external hard drives, a thumb drive, uploaded to the cloud, a second computer and burnt onto DVD. I've thought about storing some of the DVDs in a seperate building, in case of fire. I decided to set myself a challenge, to test whether the file formats we use today will be readable in the future. So, I thought up and found online a number of different old formats, searching for format names rather than ways of reading them, so that the test is somewhat more fair. I then tried to find a company who would provide me with the means of reading that format that I could use immediately if I chose. Here are the results: Okay, let's start with something fairly simple. Betamax cassettes, obsolete for twenty years: http://dv2anything.com/vhs-betamaxprocessing.html How about files produced by Mass-11 word processing software from 1985? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/116257 Let's try something a bit older: the 16mm film format from the 1920s. Got an old reel in the attic you need developing? http://www.bayeux.co.uk/?gclid=CI6f5...FY4f4QodHDp_pQ Want to buy some fresh stock? http://www.widescreen-centre.co.uk/C...6_mm_Film.html Have a need for colodion film processing, a tech developed in 1850? Need the chemicals? http://www.apug.org/forums/forum42/2...n-suplier.html Want someone else to process it for you? http://www.silverprint.co.uk/darkroom.asp And back to computing for a final example. Need to decipher some Hollerith's Tabulating Cards, used by IBMs from 1924? http://www.cardamation.com/page6.html All of these examples took seconds to find conversion/developing solutions. Perhaps files from a less well-known device - such as a PDA from 1997 - might be somewhat harder to convert, but I'm sure that someone with a bit of knowledge of .xml etc. could do it very easily. Now that the cloud is upon us (although it has problems that mean it will never be entirely trusted for many files) and we are well into the age of the on-line torrent, I think it's easier to find many kinds of document than it ever has been before. Texts are also more secure, since they tend to exist on many people's computers at the same time. Of course, personal correspondence is what will suffer in terms of being retained for posterity. My generation may well be the last to find boxes of Grandma's precious letters in the attic, which is a shame and could be mourned as an act of cultural vandalism, except noone is responsible for it: it's simply inexorable progress. We live in the age of information. We are deluged by it. But that which finds us has not been filtered for quality nearly as carefully as it was in previous ages and much of it is junk. A man who was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder spent all his time downloading documents from the internet (sounds normal to me, LOL), because he wanted to collect them for himself before they disappeared. Of course, the irony is that any document of value never becomes unavailable from the internet. I think we collectively suffer from a minor form of this delusion. Faced with so much information, we - particularly those of us who remember when you had to go out of your way to collect the texts you liked - panic and try to archive as much as possible. Stop worrying. Now Eco's library of 30,000 books (he hasn't read) is available to all of us. To not have got round to reading yet.