Professore Umberto Eco calls us eReaders "Taliban" in interview

[whitearrow]

IMO the whole argument of "this digital medium won't be any good someday, then you'll be screwed" is a red herring. The VHS player, the zip disk, the Flintstone floppy -- none of them disappeared overnight, and when they were on their way out, there was always some fairly simple way to transfer your data. I bought a DVD recorder to transfer my homemade video tapes, and if I didn't want to buy one, there was a service that could do it at a reasonable price. Yes, the medium itself may change, but the data doesn't just go *poof* overnight and disappear. There is almost always an option to future-proof your data.

WRT ebooks, even now, DRM can be stripped from most formats with fairly trivial effort. I find it difficult to believe that when it comes time to replace .mobi or .epub with whatever's next that there won't be a pretty simple way to do it.

[Penforhire]

But you have to make a continuous effort to update your media. Otherwise you'll be hunting e-bay trying to find an 8" floppy drive (and an OS driver), lol.

Regular books? Not so much effort required, just acid-free printing/paper and good storage.

[Joebill]

Books didn't exist 2000 years ago in any quantity. Scrolls on velum or papyrus were available only for the rich or governments.

As for humanity keep printing books, in Ghost in the Shell, last episode of the 1st Gig, Arimaki, the leader of the anti-terrorism unit states that books are printed only out of habit. Evidently by 2030 everyone will download books to their internal e-brains and read books that way.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

But you have to make a continuous effort to update your media. Otherwise you'll be hunting e-bay trying to find an 8" floppy drive (and an OS driver), lol.

Regular books? Not so much effort required, just acid-free printing/paper and good storage.

You mean you only need a dust free, air conditioned and humidity controlled storage facility? And special gloves and lights for handling them? And a way to keep the small rodents and insects out, of course.

This "digital media will be obsolete" is just silly scare tactics to get you to buy paperbooks. Backing up doesn't take much effort for such small file sizes.

[jehane]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You mean you only need a dust free, air conditioned and humidity controlled storage facility? And special gloves and lights for handling them? And a way to keep the small rodents and insects out, of course.

Don't forget it needs to be fire-proof and watertight as well. Just ask the librarians of Alexandria. And of course all the books will be printed on archival-quality paper.

I think the distinction has to be made between personal libraries - I mean the average reader's personal collection, not the millionaire collectors with libraries of first editions - and archival libraries. Is there really a need to worry about whether your (my) collection of midlist and self-pub genre fiction is still accessible 2000 years into the future? Books that are considered important to preserve will be preserved - let's face it, there's an awful lot of reading material out there and most of it will not stand the test of time. How many books from just 100 years ago are still being read today?

Even if publishing eventually moves to be largely electronic, that doesn't mean that paper will not exist. I think Print on Demand will have a much bigger role in the future, and there will always be people who, for whatever reason, will print out their books. If anything, I think that electronic versions make archiving even easier - easier to store, easier to make multiple backups stored in various media at various locations, easier to convert when the technology moves on, easier to maintain integrity of the document. The only time paper is superior to electronic versions is if we lost access to electricity for an extended period. If that happened, I think we'll have more to worry about than the loss of some books. So the idea that information is somehow safer on paper than electronic is, IMO, absurd.

[Fastolfe]

Digital records do disappear and it's a serious problem, because we produce so much of them, and they fade so quickly, that there isn't enough manpower to actively preserve them.

It's so bad that people experience data loss in their lifetime. Case in point, I had backed up photos of my late grandfather, and wav records of his voice in the mid 90s on a CD, and I thought I had copies on the hard-drives that I regularly refresh, but I didn't. I found that CD: it is now yellow, delaminated, brittle and unreadable. When I realized I didn't have any other backup, it came as a bit of a shock, as I realized the only images of my grandfather I'll ever see again are in my head, and I'll never hear his voice again.

Note that it's not just digital media: early movies, shot on celluloid film, are quickly disappearing too because the films themselves are disintegrating. So are argentic photos and - guess what - books and newspapers printed on acidic paper, which are the overwhelming majority of books out there. Yes, regular books start to yellow within 50 years, and are pretty much unrecoverable and lost after 100 to 150 years, even if they're stored carefully. Keeping them longer requires special archival-grade, acid-free paper.

So, the sad fact is, our society, with all its powers and riches, will leave fewer traces of itself for future historians than earlier ones that used clay tablets, cave paintings and earthenware frescoes to express themselves. In a thousand years, I believe the only testimonies of our civilization will be a bunch of slowly decaying radioactive storage sites, and whatever didn't turn back to dust in our dump pits, like glass. But whatever literary, visual or musical art we'll have produced will be long gone and forgotten.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Fastolfe

Digital records do disappear and it's a serious problem, because we produce so much of them, and they fade so quickly, that there isn't enough manpower to actively preserve them.

It's so bad that people experience data loss in their lifetime. Case in point, I had backed up photos of my late grandfather, and wav records of his voice in the mid 90s on a CD, and I thought I had copies on the hard-drives that I regularly refresh, but I didn't. I found that CD: it is now yellow, delaminated, brittle and unreadable. When I realized I didn't have any other backup, it came as a bit of a shock, as I realized the only images of my grandfather I'll ever see again are in my head, and I'll never hear his voice again.

Note that it's not just digital media: early movies, shot on celluloid film, are quickly disappearing too because the films themselves are disintegrating. So are argentic photos and - guess what - books and newspapers printed on acidic paper, which are the overwhelming majority of books out there. Yes, regular books start to yellow within 50 years, and are pretty much unrecoverable and lost after 100 to 150 years, even if they're stored carefully. Keeping them longer requires special archival-grade, acid-free paper.

So, the sad fact is, our society, with all its powers and riches, will leave fewer traces of itself for future historians than earlier ones that used clay tablets, cave paintings and earthenware frescoes to express themselves. In a thousand years, I believe the only testimonies of our civilization will be a bunch of slowly decaying radioactive storage sites, and whatever didn't turn back to dust in our dump pits, like glass. But whatever literary, visual or musical art we'll have produced will be long gone and forgotten.

For personal use digital records had there problems in the past. But the same thing happened to my regular photos, they faded, the colors are wrong. And we live in a time when storage is becoming incredibly cheap, we can even save numerous copies to guard against any accidents -- including in the cloud. It will be no problem to move everything to new storage medias when the need arises. And things will be like new. You can even find copies of those old newspaper clips online, even though you never stored them. No, digital is not the enemy.

[jbjb]

Concern over the lifetime of media is misplaced - it's a problem of the past, IMHO. With large hard disks, cloud storage and other modern solutions, there isn't really any need (except perhaps occasionally for video data) to write to DVDs or any other future-obsolescent medium.

What matters now is the lifetime of the *data*, not the *medium*. Yes, people will need a good backup strategy, and will need to migrate their data from one medium to the next - but data will generally be held in a small set of "live" places (as opposed to piles of archived disks in a cupboard), which can be easily migrated all at the same time. This is a problem that is easy to solve, and generally people have had to, or will have to, solve it anyway even in the absence of ebooks - so much of modern life involves digital data.

The danger of obsolescence of data *formats* is also over-stated, IMHO. With a bit of googling around you can find convertors etc. for pretty much any old format (word processor, spreadsheet etc.) you care to name. The internet makes it very difficult for such things to be forgotten.

/JB

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'd like someone who can do a real translation to let us know if he was calling all ebook readers "Taliban," or if that referred specifically to the iPad. (It's possible that the difference is unclear in the original, but it's also possible that the meaning just doesn't auto-translate well.)

He has a point, in that e-texts remove the personal qualities we associate with books; it's something the publishing industries are going to need to deal with in a few years--can I hand my favorite series off to my kids? Will they remember them as fondly as I remember my shelves of paperbacks?

However, these concerns aren't directly relevant to ebooks' production and marketing--when cars started to replace horses, plenty of people were unhappy that they'd lose the organic connection to travel, but it didn't stop cars from dominating the marketplace eventually.

That's the point.
When it's a matter of going from here to there, cars win over horses.
But there are still lots of people who enjoy horse riding just for the fun of it. There are lots of Horse Whisperers who actually love horses as living beings.

What Eco says is that there will always be people who love books. And no electronic device can replace a paper edition for them. E-readers are very good, even better than print, as a mean to get information in the written form, but e-editions won't likely be cult objects in the time being.

Except for a few e-Talibans....

[luqmaninbmore]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You mean you only need a dust free, air conditioned and humidity controlled storage facility? And special gloves and lights for handling them? And a way to keep the small rodents and insects out, of course.

This "digital media will be obsolete" is just silly scare tactics to get you to buy paperbooks. Backing up doesn't take much effort for such small file sizes.

No it's not. You are ignoring the factor of the time scale. Yes, if you don't take all the precautions you mention they won't last a thousand years. With only minor precautions, however, they will last a human lifetime (I have plenty of books from the 40's and before; no special effort was made to preserve them, as far as I can tell). The same is not true for electronic media which, besides being vulnerable to many of the things you've mentioned (floods, fires, etc.) degrade more quickly than books do or become obsolete. I have many books from my childhood which are in perfectly good order. The electronic files from that same time period are gone. There is of course the other issue of requiring a specialized reading device which, if it is lost, stolen, or destroyed, will deprive you of access to your e-library until another is purchased. And these devices are a hell of a lot more fragile than paper books.

Not to mention when the great EMP of doom comes...

[luqmaninbmore]

I would also say that, after examining the posts on this thread, we have concrete examples of the fragility of digital storage media but only theoretical defenses of its robustness. I think that lends credence to Eco's statements on this matter, especially when human error is taken into account ("I was sure I backed it up but I didn't" "What's a backup?" etc.).

[doreenjoy]

Considering the cheap quality of most paper books being produced today, very few of them will last more than a few decades. Books I bought 10 years ago are already unreadable.

[Kali Yuga]

There is no particular guarantee of anything being truly "permanent."

Paper can last a long time, but only if properly prepared and stored. AFAIK most paperbacks are not printed on acid-free / lingin-free paper, and will eventually deteriorate. Paper books and records can also be thrown away, fall apart, or otherwise fall into disuse over time.

With digital, the data is easier to migrate. However the substrates (CDs, DVDs, hard drives etc) are not yet anywhere near as stable as high-quality papers. More importantly, these items require multiple hardware and software intermediaries, which may be extremely difficult to decode 100 or 200 years from now. The data can also wind up getting neglected.

However, it's also worth noting that with billions more people in the world than in the past, and with such higher literacy rates, if we stuck to paper we will drown in it in the near future -- meaning more will be disposed as we run out of storage space. It will be nearly impossible for future researchers to dive into paper records and resources anywhere near as effectively as they will into digital records, due to sheer volume if nothing else.


I'm going to hazard a guess that Eco is suggesting that some of the tech fanatics are looking forward to the end of the paper book. I for one have little problem with a future with less paper use, mostly for environmental reasons and due to the difficulties of preserving and searching the massive volume of papers. But since the goal is to preserve the information rather than the physical form, I don't think the idea of a "digital Taliban" is warranted.

Does that mean I need to dress like a traditional Afghani now?

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

IMO the whole argument of "this digital medium won't be any good someday, then you'll be screwed" is a red herring. The VHS player, the zip disk, the Flintstone floppy -- none of them disappeared overnight, and when they were on their way out, there was always some fairly simple way to transfer your data. I bought a DVD recorder to transfer my homemade video tapes, and if I didn't want to buy one, there was a service that could do it at a reasonable price. Yes, the medium itself may change, but the data doesn't just go *poof* overnight and disappear. There is almost always an option to future-proof your data.

WRT ebooks, even now, DRM can be stripped from most formats with fairly trivial effort. I find it difficult to believe that when it comes time to replace .mobi or .epub with whatever's next that there won't be a pretty simple way to do it.

When VHS went out, I didn't notice any movies disappearing.

On the other hand, I don't think any of us will live to see books disappear.

[CommonReader]

You are not going to find the handwritten notes of your deceased father in an ebook, neither will you have entrance tickets to the performance of the Paris Opera you visited with your then girl friend twenty years ago tumbling out of an ebook. Therefore there is less emotional attachment to an ebook than to a "real" physical book.
However, provided that it has been widely distributed the chance of survival is most likely better for an ebook than for a paper book, unless human civilization is hit by something of apocalyptic dimensions. These books will also be much more accessible. I don't buy into that argument that they will be inaccessible because of an obsolete file format. Just because we can't read the files of some unique program running on a mainframe from 1970 any more doesn't mean that we won't be able to read hugely popular and widely distributed files like jpeg, pdf or epub in a hundred years time.
Moreover, with ebooks you do not have to abandon your books just because your personal circumstances change drastically (being drafted into the army, long treatment in hospital, old peoples' home etc.).