Quote:
Originally Posted by hardcastle
The constant bleating of "OBSOLETE" is an odd one. It sounds rather like media companies trying to get people to shift to a new format on a faster time-table when the market couldn't give a dang. I don't see what eReader features could be invented to make all past eBooks obsolete. They're just text. Any device incompatible with simple text (TXT or HTML) is useless.
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Some said those VHS tapes would last forever. Where are they today?
How about those old 16 MM movie cameras, the best of the best?
Silent films were the "wave of the future" when I was a kid. Does anyone watch them today?
HTML did NOT exist in 1960 and will not exist in 2060 either.
How are your papyrus books doing today? There was once a Great Library at Alexandria in Egypt preserving thousands of them since folks said they would be invaluable forever.
Does anyone even read Egyptian hieroglyphics anymore?
Our present eBook technology is merely a waystation to the future. I am sure new technologies are right around the corner and even plain text may be gone sooner than we think.
Preserving eBooks today by stripping DRM would be like making lots of backups of those old VHS tapes which lots of folks used to do and that was illegal at the time as well. Today I can stream those movies from Netflix and saved all that labor of backing up the VHS tapes.