Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
It is no secret that everything is becoming digital these days. Some things are not really a problem. For example, if you buy a digital piano in 2013, you can play it basically forever, as long as it does not break down. If it does break down, you can probably replace it with an equivalent or better model, maybe even for a lower price you paid now.
Not so with eBooks, or pictures, or music. They depend on devices to be able to be used: eReaders, viewers/programs, or players. The problem is the format: you can never be sure that a format that is dominant today, will be readable tomorrow. The computer world is littered with dead formats that are out of use, and can no longer be read completely, except if you are lucky enough to have a 30 year old system around using the original software from back then.
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Rubbish. The computer world is litterd with outdated media formats - floppy disks, tapes, and such, but the files are trivial to transfer from one medium to another.
File formats, the significant ones, are well documented, and won't be going away. EPUB is basically HTML. In a pinch, once you strip off the DRM (which is not only trivial, but trivial to automate), you can actually read one in a web browser. Backwards compatibility will be built in to web browsers for a long, long time. Kindle format is, from what I understand, more complicated, but also well documented. Given the number of ebook
already out there in one of a handful of major formats, there is basically zero possiblity of there not being
any reader software available. Not if there's anyone who actually
wants to read a particlar format.