Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
That makes it about...damn, not enough fingers to calculate with...180 years old or thereabouts. I doubt any given ebook will last that long
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Why not, though?
It's just data, and when formats like epub/mobi/etc are replaced with a new, more popular format, the ebooks we own will simply be converted. Plain, 7-bit text files have been around for decades and they are all accessible still.
What has changed, and will continue to change, is the type of medium the electronic texts and books are saved on, but new media don't just pop up and suddenly replace all others, so in a handful of years when regular hard drives have been fully replaced by Solid State Drives (SSD), my books just move to the new medium, just like many of my text files started their lives on 3" disks, then moved to 5.25" ones, then to 3.5" and eventually to hard drives and clouds.
I think the real difference between e-books and paper books is that in case of paper books the content is lost with the material (the medium). The material is often even what makes the books valuable. With e-books, the focus is much more (it not solely) on the content, and the content can be preserved (and converted) with ease. I was deeply upset when a water pipe burst in my house and I lost many valued (not valuable) paper books. Some I could have re-bought, many were OOP and only the used market would have offered choices. If my hard drive bites the dust? No problem, there's a couple memory cards with copies of my entire e-library, plus what can be re-downloaded from the vendors.
This gets us dangerously close to the political waters, but in my eyes, the tremendous contribution of e-books to "humankind" is that both knowledge and prose will not as easily get lost again, because neither fires nor the fangs of OOP and the claws of copyright can permanently remove access.
The only downside of e-books is the dependency on electricity, but if that became a problem, we'll presumably have bigger issues than being unable to read our e-books (and we'd burn the paper ones for warmth).
