Has no one invented a scanner that will take a high-res scan of a book without having to cut the book up? If not, they really need to get on that before all these rare books are destroyed.
The thing that anti-digital people forget it that most of this digital media (i.e. books) is so widely distributed that even if a bunch of them were destroyed or lost, there's still a lot more out there to spread and accumulate to replace said digital files.
The only problem might come from a really obscure text, in which case the university or whatever housing it should have off-site backups and be stored in ideal conditions just like books are stored in archives. As for non-commercial items, well, that's up to the owner to print off a copy, I guess.
This is speaking as an historian who loves old books. They're not going away, but we are guaranteeing that they'll be around a lot longer now.
Last edited by MV64; 06-17-2011 at 09:17 AM.
|