Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey
Agreed. I think your odds of using a 15-year old paperback book is easier than getting a word processor file open from the 90s. I just engaged in this recently , trying to get a ton of files open from a Pentium 60mhz computer. Win 3.1 files (originally sourced in some sort of DOS word processor). Getting it to open and convert without losing a large hunk of the file took me hours of tinkering. Even getting the files off of the 100mb HDD was difficult. The HDD would not work on a modern IDE or USB adapter. Ended up with file copying operations in DOS via floppy and shuttling via a USB floppy drive.
I still didn't convert them all. I gave my dad step-by-step instructions, the original files on a usb stick, and left it up to him. I don't have the hours it would take to open-convert-save every one of those files to turn them into relatively modern Word docs.
I imagine we'll see more of these problems in the future. At work we had some powerpoint files and such from Office 98 that cannot be opened under XP/Office 2003. Never did figure out how to open and convert them. I anticipate 16-bit files from the win98 era are the problem now...wonder how long until 32 bit files become the difficult ones.
The term generally used for this is digital obsolescence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_obsolescence |
But to be candid here, that is the fault of whoever was supposed to oversee the IT at work, assuming these were work related files. Or if your personal files, like the rest of us you were not proactive in either paying for apps which do exactly what you were needing to do only they could do it back when things were not so very out of date. Or your could now send them all through a paid conversion service. So, it's not impossible just not cheap. And I am sure there are open source dedicated file format conversion utils out there.
For ebooks thanks to Calibre we should always be able to convert to a new format as I doubt formats will be removed over time just new ones added.
So really I do not see any sort of obsolescence in modern ebook formats. I fully do expect the bulk conversion option in Calibre to work fine even if it means having to step through a couple formats to get to a newest-latest-n-greatest format. UNLESS the newest formats are proprietary and CLOSED not allowing books to be converted to the new format. Now that is a problem nobody can work around sans essentially violating copyrights and patents. But if web history has shown us anything someone is always willing to make it possible. Especially when a big corporation is stomping on the little guy.
Last, as personal libraries grow, not many people will buy readers without significant legacy support. I know I won't but then again it's pretty much a sure thing I won't have more than a 15-yr old library when I read my last book.
BTW, a file being 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit matter not one iota. It's the proprietary nature if those files are somehow encrypted. For the most part files today use a modified HTML and/or XML format and as such are just text. But nothing about the "bits" matter for the file itself, that is only about the OS. Nothing in a 256K-bit OS will stop it from reading a file created in an 8-bit application.