Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey
A good hardcover book can last 100 years. Try opening a digital text file from the late 80s or early 90s. I will again reference the 4-5 hours I spent trying to find something that would properly open my dad's stories... .doc files, but from (probably) WordStar for DOS.
I had some old powerpoint files from my company that would no longer open in Powerpoint, even Powerpoint via Office XP I installed in a virtual machine. Digital files have a high rate of obsolescence.
IMO Digital files are probably more likely to be useless in 20 years than a hardcover is. .azw and .epub files from today's ebookstores will not necessarily be openable on a modern device in 20-30 years - or it may require a large amount of processing or conversion. And that's assuming you don't have any DRM to fight. A hardcover, though, if well-treated, will surely still be usable then.
|
That's a fair point, though I believe it'll be less of an issue in future, because open formats like ePub are more common. An ePub file is a zip file containing text files (HTML, XML etc are text files). It can contain images, but if they are PNG or SVG format then they are also open standards.
The problem with your Powerpoint and .doc files is that there is nothing to tell anyone how they are formatted. With open formats, there is documentation on how to open them, and that documentation should still exist in 20 years. Worst case, you'd have to hire someone to open/convert the files for you, but in that case, the person you hire wouldn't be working on a black box, they'd be working on a documented file format.
I'm not saying that everything's rosy and there won't be any issues, but I do think that the issues will be much less significant where open file formats are concerned. One big problem in my opinion is DRM - once DRM is applied to an ePub file, it stops being an open format.
Personally, I've got a Kindle, so most of my books are in mobi format, which is a closed format. Right now, I'm not too worried because Calibre can convert them to pretty much any format I wish. As soon as Calibre loses that capability, I'll convert them all to ePub so that I have them in an open format.