Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
Harry, I understand what you're saying, but I still save all of my books as plain text files (as well as mobi and sometimes epub). My reasoning is that plain text with no tags or anything else...
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Well... it's possible to run a lot of 20 year old software, down to stuff created for Windows NT 3.1 (1993) on a 64-bit installation of Windows 8.1, which was released in 2013. If you need even older software, you can use DOSBox, or even a virtual machine to run software back to 1975 or so, also on Windows 8.1.
That is 40 (!) year old software that can be run *now*, often without having access to the source code.
Now, enter EPUB2, which is an format with an open specification, and calibre implements reading and writing it, and is able to convert almost any format in existence to it. Calibre is open source as well, so all code is available.
Even if calibre ceases to be developed for whatever reason, someone will at least lift the EPUB2 read/write routines out of it (at minimum), porting them to another programming language if necessary, so EPUB2 files can be read, and thus subsequently written into a newer format.
As EPUB2 is still in full swing at this time, it being only 7 years old or so, with millions and millions (billions?) of e-books sold in it, I expect it to be fully supported for at least another 10-15 years. I'll be in my late forties at that time.
Assuming the EPUB2 read routine survives another 30-40 years after that, I assume someone will write an accompanying routine to write into a new relevant format; if not open source, it will be in a paid program.
I've started a topic about this in the past actually, but I've become convinced that if I keep good, clean EPUB2 books, I'll be safe for the next 40 to 50 years or so, at the very least being able to convert to newer formats.
(I feel the same about FLAC: that music file format is almost perfect. It has had an update in 2012 to fix a tiny bug which sometimes prevented it to convert 4+ GB files on Windows, but it essentially has not changed since 2007. If another lossless format comes into vogue, converting to it from FLAC will be possible.)