Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
That still predates ebooks significantly. I'm just seeing too much faith in a media and format that has ALREADY proven to be shifting radically over less than 20 years. Don't paint me a Luddite. I'm an early adopter. But how can such predictions carry any weight for something in its infancy?
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Are you saying that the medium/format for eBooks has changed as in floppy disks, usb sticks, etc? Or do you mean Word 98, Word XP, Word 2010, etc?
Regardless of what it's stored on and the program it was created with, digital text is not going anywhere. If I wanted to, I could use emulators and converters to access stuff I wrote on the Commodore 64.
I can see what you're saying if you have a box of floppies and that's where all your writing is stored but I don't think anyone is crazy enough to rely on a box of floppies. That's like keeping your only-copy manuscripts stacked next to the fireplace. Floppies are pretty much the only semi-complicated thing I can think of regarding digital text. But I can assure you, no sane writer today is using floppies. And even if they were, functional floppies still have accessible data.
The amazing thing about digital text is that, barring a major world catastrophe (which would probably ruin a lot of paper books too), it is going to be around as long as an entity is around to read it. The posts I'm writing right now, and Youtube videos of babies laughing at cats playing the piano, are about as close to eternity as humans can get.
My purpose as a publisher is actually to save rare works that, due to copyright entrapment, are in real danger of becoming extinct. If a book has a low print run, people forget it was ever written, and it was not written before 1923 there is a reasonable chance it will disappear when the last physical copies get recycled. Sure, you can always find a print copy of Othello. But then try your hand at finding a book nobody's ever heard of.
The long-term viability of digital data is indisputable.