Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinBurke
1.) Ebooks are eternal
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My earliest ebooks, from around 1982 or so, are plain text files stored on 8" floppy disks. Hardly eternal. Yes I could locate and obtain the equipment somehow to retrieve them but I think that illustrates why they aren't eternal.
Actually I think I really do have them in other formats somewhere because I think I recall copying them over as media changed but I'm not sure of that and if I didn't they'd be very difficult to get to today and in 15 years would be impossible.
About 4 or 5 years ago I threw away about 25 or 30 Zip disks. Remember those? I don't think I cared about their contents or even knew what was on them but my guess is there were a lot of early ebooks. I did a bit of looking to see if I could find an easy way to access those. I found some fairly expensive possibilities from unreliable sellers on ebay but that was it.
Nothing in digital format is eternal. Offhand I'd say paper has a good chance of lasting longer unless the digital stuff is meticulously cared for.
I think "eternal" realistically might typially mean a few hundred years in terms of objects and a decade or two in terms of digital stuff.
Barry