Quote:
Originally Posted by bobcdy
I much appreciate ebooks, but there's a problem with building a keeper library of ebooks because the formats for ebooks will evolve over time. Eventually ebooks such as epubs or mobi will become unreadable, just as material stored on 8" floppy drives of the 1970's are unreadable now except with help by tech museums that still maintain the 8" drives and interface them to newer computers. Paper books written in the 1600s are still readable today. So mama probably is right: "in 10 years, those will be gone"
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On the contrary -- floppy disks require a hardware interface not as widely available today. But EPUB is merely a renamed zipfile, and azw3/mobi have widely available open-sourced conversion utilities. They will all remain easily available, as all you need to do is hunt up the right program to unpack the contents, which are regular old plaintext html-formatted files.
Assuming of course that the zipped file becomes obsolete; otherwise you need merely right-click and select unzip; no installations required.
It's much easier for hardware to become obsolete than software, especially if it is open-source.