Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
And most of the unavailable books will become available in time.
|
Not necessarily. A lot of 20th century science fiction, romance and mystery genres were only available in paperback format for decades, and were not printed on archival paper. Once those copies disintegrate, those books will be gone.
I've got a lot of books for which there is no hard cover equivalent, and the authors are either dead or not published any longer. There is no need for their works to be lost to time.
And it's not an issue of whether you or I gain something unique from a book, it's the uniqueness of each book in and of itself. There's no longer any reason to have to cull knowledge, fiction or non-fiction; the technology is there to preserve it now so that future users can pick and choose as they will, not as we dictate by what we keep and what we discard.