Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I think, that if you're honest with yourself, you know exactly what I mean when I say that there's a difference between new and second-hand paper books which does not exist for ebooks.
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Even if there was, 90% of the difference is aesthetic, not functional. It's pretty rare that a physical book (at least a hardcover), degrades to the point of unreadability. Normally that's a spine/glue problem that can easily be fixed proactively, also. Paperbacks, I would agree - the spine gets worse over time, pages fall out, etc - they're not really designed for longevity.
Short of the rare spine problem, a hardcover book almost always remains 100% readable unless you dump a cup of coffee on it. Even then I'd bet it remains 100% readable.
The "not as good as new" only matters to collectors. To the average person, who doesn't care about the dustjacket, or slightly bumped corners, or whatever, the book is 100% the same as a new book in the same way. The text is still just text and it's still perfectly readable.
Honestly, given digital obsolescence, which I've talked about in threads like this before, I'd bet money that a digital ebook is more readable in 30 years without a lot of digital "repair", more than an ebook.
Secure e-reader format (pdb), lit format, Amazon DRM'd pdf, and others have already been obsoleted or are rapidly enroute - I'm sure in a few more years there will be no devices that can read them (none of the major devices have supported them for a couple of years already).
In 20 years you could quite likely be engaged in some crazy shenanigans to get your ebooks usable, just like the troubles I recently had converting documents from DOS/Tandy based StarOffice .doc files into MS Word .docs.