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Originally Posted by Penforhire
If you mean you've never had a hard drive crash, CD fail to read, or USB flash drive fail then consider yourself lucky.
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I've had many hard drive failures but I have yet to lose writing due to one. I have no faith in hardware because I used to work in the computer industry. Unfortunately, it often takes a catastrophic failure to remind the average user of the importance of backups. I was lucky in that I had to help dozens of people recover their lives. I was able to learn my lesson vicariously.
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File formats have converters but they are not always up to the task. If you mean you'll write your own conversion routines in the far future then perhaps you'll make yourself a niche in the market. Because we ALREADY see failure to convert formats perfectly.
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I think the days of incompatibility are long gone. Old DOS text files are just as readable today as they were 80's. A perfect conversion is nice but it's not required as long as all of the original content is intact. Most reprints and translations of paper material are not perfect either.
There will continue to be issues with cross-compatibility between the proprietary "working" files of an application, such as .indd and .psd, but the exports and the final product are compatible.
Paper books may be time-tested but keep in mind that the only paper books you see today are the ones that actually survived. All sorts of paper material throughout history has been lost forever.
We also have to acknowledge that paper books are not, and were never, representative of even a sliver of what humans have actually written. They represent what was
published. Pretty much every digital word written today is preserved and can be made accessible to all people. A low print-run book from sixty years ago could very well disappear. And if copies are extremely rare the book is inaccessible to all but the owners.