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Originally Posted by taustin
Rubbish.
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You seem to be fond of expressions like that.
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The computer world is litterd with outdated media formats - floppy disks, tapes, and such, but the files are trivial to transfer from one medium to another.
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Is it? Then please go and find me a way to transfer some files from a 5.25 inch floppy drive. And I don't mean "In 6 weeks", or "Send your disk to $Location" or something, but a way I can employ within the hour; like right now. In the very least, tomorrow.
Easy. Right. Then try it with an 8 inch disk.
And even IF you can get the files from the disk to a current medium, there is no certainty that there are any current programs, running on current computers, that can read them.
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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.
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Says you. I've seen otherwise. There are (were) *many* documents, databases, spreadsheets, and what not around that could not be reliably read, not even if current day software "supported" them. A prime example is Microsoft Works. At some point, they just stopped supporting older formats. To get an MS Works 2 file into MS Works 9, you had to go through MS Works 5, because that one was the latest to support Works 2. (I'm doing this on top of my head, so it could actually be Works 3 and 6, but you get the idea.)
As I said in other threads: with regards to DRM or formats, I don't trust anything or anyone.