[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

Some said those VHS tapes would last forever. Where are they today?

On DVD. I've assisted many people in teaching them how to digitize their old movie collection; often very expensive Disney VHS tapes.

You know what? They were protected! You couldn't copy them from one recorder to another: the recorders wouldn't allow it. VHS-VHS, or VHS-DVD-recorder, both didn't work with many of those tapes. The Analog Loophole fixed that: just play the movie, and connect the VCR to a capture card on the computer. Record it, convert to DVD, burn.

Timeconsuming? Yes.
Does it work? Yes.

It's akin to scanning a paper book and then OCR-ing it.

How about those old 16 MM movie cameras, the best of the best?

Same. That stuff is now on DVD

Silent films were the "wave of the future" when I was a kid. Does anyone watch them today?

I don't know... but I sometimes watch Laurel & Hardy, and I regularly watch B/W movies from the 50's.

HTML did NOT exist in 1960 and will not exist in 2060 either.

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

Maybe you've seen my mention of the Alan Turing paper chess machine in another thread. You know what? The algorithm was designed in 1951; before any practical computers were around... and it still exists today, and it can be played against.

Want proof? Check the attached screenshot, and see the Turing algorithm from 1951 running in Fritz 11 from 2007, now, in 2014, analysing the chess starting position. There are other implementations of the same algorithm around to run in other chess interfaces, by the way.

OK, the engine is very weak, obviously, but it's still strong enough to allow it to beat beginners. No, it's not just a weak engine called Turing; it IS the old Turing algorithm.

The point: Sometimes, code (and other computer stuff) either sticks around a VERY long time, or it is ported from system to system, for whatever reason.

Our present eBook technology is merely a waystation to the future. I am sure new technologies are right around the corner...

Of course. However, stuff tends to stick around and only goes away if nobody ever uses it anymore. I expect EPUB to be readable for at least another 25 years, and if not, it can be converted to the in-vogue format of that time. EPUB will only go away after:

- nobody buys new EPUBs anymore
- nobody living HAS any EPUBs anymore

See the old Microsoft LIT format. It's dead. Not sold anymore. However, there are a lot of people who still own books in LIT format. If they don't have DRM on them, Calibre converts them perfectly to EPUB, AZW3 or MOBI. If you have DRM on them (and lost the account data that has the key), you're SOL.

There are old (1998-2006) BAEN CD's floating around, with hundreds of free books... in LIT FORMAT! As long as stuff like that is around, the format is STILL not completely dead.

Preserving eBooks today by stripping DRM would be like making lots of backups of those old VHS tapes...

Stripping DRM allows the backups to be usable. If you leave the DRM in place, you could as well NOT create a backup.

Without the DRM, I could export the EPUB book to a plain TXT file and read it that way, should I ever want to. And plain text will NEVER go away. If it does, the entire IT industry will probably fail.