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.
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It's a gradual process, though. A specific format won't just suddenly disappear over night. If one format falls out of favor and a new preferred format emerges, software like Calibre will be there to convert your existing library. LIT is a good example for this.
Similarly, files from the 1970s were moved to newer systems, though that was harder due to physical hardware differences, as mentioned above. Different time, also. Today, with clouds, other forms of online storage and much better standardized media formats (even in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, disk formats weren't as unified: the main three physical formats for diskettes were 3", 3.5" and 5.25"), the chance to be unable to read or convert existing data files is probably smaller than the chance of one's house burning down (and the paper books library with it).
But this is also part of the reason why I disinfect the ebooks I buy. The data has a much higher chance to remain accessible than the DRM slime covering it.