[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

Old things get lost all the time. My favorite print bible in German from 1930 has decomposing pages. Every time I open it, pieces of pages decompose.

Fortunately, you can get a new copy, because someone backed it up.

I had great games for my Radio Shack TRS 80 from 1978 but they are now gone forever.

I had even greater games for DOS and they are now gone.

I used to play Mankind, a game for thousands at one time, for several years and it is now gone forever.

False. They are only gone because you got rid of them. Many people play old games on emulators. If you wanted them, they are still available.

My old Microsoft eBooks are gone forever as are my old Sony eBooks now. My old Adobe eBooks are also gone.

Again, only because you CHOSE to get rid of them.

All my parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts are also gone.

No one ever claimed you could back up people.

That is why I only read a book ONCE and never look back. Its possible I may have even read some books twice since I may have forgotten when I read it first.

That sounds like a conclusion, but it doesn't follow from anything. You've merely stated that you get rid of things, but that you get rid of things isn't a reason to get rid of things.

I never remove DRM because the license for my purchase of that eBook REQUIRED that I leave it in place. I tend to honor licenses on games and eBooks I buy.

I paid money for the book, I will continue to read it. I will not distribute that book, but I am not going to be bound by anything that gets in the way of my ability to read the books that I paid for.

Preserving software by some means is also a waste of time. Why would I still want to have a copy of MS DOS 2.2 still available?

Don't tell me how to use my time. Maybe you wouldn't, but that's not relevant. No one is claiming that you ought to have a copy of MS DOS 2.0, but just because you don't want it doesn't mean that others should not.

My old cars and TV's are also gone forever. Would I really want my old Modal A Ford back to replace my new self driving car?

If you have a Model A Ford that you don't want, plenty of people would line up at your door to purchase it from you.

That is why I only buy an eBook to READ IT and would not dream of "collecting" thousands of old eBooks. They are JUNK after I've read it. Thus, Calibre and Apprentice Alf for me are no better than a defective time machine which never can really function.

False. Just because YOU don't want them doesn't mean they are junk. And Apprentice Alf, do in fact function. That's a fact, not an opinion.

Its best to just forget the past and MOVE ON.

That's a rather bad idea, actually.

By the way, all this DRM removal going on now to store eBooks for future use may be for naught. New eReaders may be introduced at some time which will make all the old eBook files OBSOLETE since the structure of the new eBooks may be totally different.

So what if the file structure is different? That is trivial. It's easy to change a file from one format to another.

If someone had made illegal Xerox copies of print books back in 1961, they still could not be read on our eReaders of today.

False. You could scan the Xeroxed copies.

Removing DRM now for eBooks may be going down the same hopeless road as was taken by those who sought to make illegal hand copies of papyrus books which are all OBSOLETE today.

You realize we can still read many of these books which were written on papyrus? The only reason we can read them today is because people copied them by hand, generation after generation. We don't have all of them, not everything was preserved. But that's argue against backing up books, it's a strong argument in favor of backing up books. Earlier you mentioned the Bible: the only reason you have that is because it was hand-copied for many centuries.

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

Actually, no one said they would last forever. Estimates of how long videotapes will last are around 10-20 years, but it depends on the care it gets. A cartoon that is watched over and over again may not last long, on the other hand, my parents have videotapes from 30 years ago that haven't been played much and still play quite well.

If you continue to copy videotapes onto videotapes, the quality will degrade, however, it is very easy to make a digital recording of a videotape, and that digital copy can be copied forever without degrading.

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

It is trivial to make digital copies of them.

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

Highly unlikely. We've had talking movies since 1927. It's possible that you are old enough for talking movies to be the wave of the future, but not for silent movies to be the wave of the future. And yes, people do still watch silent movies.

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

But in 2060, it will be possible to read HTML, or at least convert it to whatever is used.

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.

We can still read them, only because they were preserved. It's a shame that more weren't preserved, because they were invaluable.

Does anyone even read Egyptian hieroglyphics anymore?

Some people do. Are you suggesting we should dispose of Egyptian hieroglyphics as trash?

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.

It is unlikely that plain text is going away. You can add sound and animation to a book, but that's called a movie. But even if plain text does go away, it still doesn't mean that the plain text files of the past have no use.

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.

There are many movies that are not available on Netflix, thus it is false that you can get all of those movies on Netflix. You do realize you can watch those movies on Netflix only because they are backed up?