Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
And as I have learned from other earlier threads, from professionals in the industry, anything older than five years old (today) is likely not existing in electronic format, nor was it saved after publication. Publishers are (apparently) notoriously conservative.
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Conservative or lackadaisical? It all depends on the publisher, and the software they used to create the document. After many years of writing papers, I've learned to always print out a copy on acid free paper, using ink and not laserjets. Then I back up the document on an optical disc, a gold-layered cd-r, and dvd-ram. Here's is a good article on the longevity of digital media:
http://www.jts2004.org/english/paper...FinalPaper.doc
In spite of this, I'm sure I'll have problems retrieving the file one day, because it may have been edited in Word Perfect, Framemaker, or some other program that has since fallen out of favor. (At least I should thank the legal profession for keeping Word Perfect alive.) This, I call the Tower of Babel dilemma. As software and operating systems get upgraded, you run the risk of losing backward compatibility. Call this the Fickle Computer problem.
One good thing about the eBook revolution is epub. Hope this standard lasts a long time. But, maybe this is wishful thinking. Someone always has to reinvent the wheel, don't they?