Quote:
Originally Posted by Donnageddon
Given the eventual (and sometimes rapid) obsolescence of computing hardware and software, I think it would always be important to keep paper copies of books around and safely stored. Or else books could be lost forever with all the knowledge and historical value they possess.
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The solution to that is not paper. It is to stick with open formats and realize that we don't need to change file formats only because technology got better. Changing formats should be done only when absolutely needed and, if possible, keeping some kind of backward compatibility.
Music has wav (and flac). For books, looks like epub is the future dominant and open format. We should encourage its use. For print ready books we can use PDF.
Another plague is DRM. I don't use DRMed files because I want to be able to open my music, books or whatever media in 20 years, after the company savers go down.
Obs: Talking about file formats. When I as 17 (I am now 36), I wrote some, few, poems using word (old DOS days). After 5 years I could not open the file anymore (for what ever reason, the new word version did not open it and I had a paper copy so I just retyped them in pure txt files). After that I learned my lesson. Now everything I write is in latex (which is basically a text file with markups). I can still open (and compile) the reports I wrote during college 16 years ago.