Internet Archive preserves paper books

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by khalleron

I, personally, haven't found any 'totally unreadable' epubs on Google, but I've found lots on Internet Archive, to the degree that I don't even look there anymore.

When I was looking at the Internet Archive as an image source for proofreading, I found the quality of scanning to be pretty poor. A significant amount of the books I looked at had either pages missing part of the text due to bad alignment on the scanner, or pages just missing entirely.

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

They were scanned in as black and white only, with high contrast (to filter out marks in the paper, etc), which is great for text but horrible for anything else.

That is stupid. This isn't preserving books, it's - I don't know what it is. Stupid at least.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

If the books are properly translated to a digital archive, there is no need to keep the printed original to reference. Since redundant copies and archiving is much easier with a digital source (as long as you're proactive about backing up and updating archives), and available worldwide afterward, I can't see the value of taking up huge amounts of atmosphere-controlled space and literally tons of paper locked away for future "accessing" by a few lucky scholars.

[Penforhire]

So you disagree with my negative take on the long term viability of ANY current digital medium and format? I sort of hope you are right.

But in my day job I'm being paid, partly, to clean up an existing digital mess and we're only, what, 20-something years into popular digital mediums and formats.

[elcreative]

Never mind, thank god others do... try some research on long term archiving, say that done by financial institutions for example... at least one organisation doesn't trust any archival method that hasn't been proved to be viable for at least a hundred years... and that's real years.

You stick with your digital only but others will retain alternative archival methods as well... and watch out for EMP and/or serious hacking, oxidisation of CD and DVD materials, magnetic print through, head crashes and...

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

If the books are properly translated to a digital archive, there is no need to keep the printed original to reference. Since redundant copies and archiving is much easier with a digital source (as long as you're proactive about backing up and updating archives), and available worldwide afterward, I can't see the value of taking up huge amounts of atmosphere-controlled space and literally tons of paper locked away for future "accessing" by a few lucky scholars.

[elcreative]

+10... check on BBC Domesday Project for recent recovery of access...

Originally Posted by Penforhire

So you disagree with my negative take on the long term viability of ANY current digital medium and format? I sort of hope you are right.

But in my day job I'm being paid, partly, to clean up an existing digital mess and we're only, what, 20-something years into popular digital mediums and formats.

[MV64]

Has no one invented a scanner that will take a high-res scan of a book without having to cut the book up? If not, they really need to get on that before all these rare books are destroyed.

The thing that anti-digital people forget it that most of this digital media (i.e. books) is so widely distributed that even if a bunch of them were destroyed or lost, there's still a lot more out there to spread and accumulate to replace said digital files.

The only problem might come from a really obscure text, in which case the university or whatever housing it should have off-site backups and be stored in ideal conditions just like books are stored in archives. As for non-commercial items, well, that's up to the owner to print off a copy, I guess.

This is speaking as an historian who loves old books. They're not going away, but we are guaranteeing that they'll be around a lot longer now.

[Penforhire]

So you're saying P2P networks ensure continuation of data? One issue there is corruption and versioning. Which file is the correct file, as they get altered, corrupted, and edited down the road? No, I'm not forgetting this aspect of electronic storage.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

So you're saying P2P networks ensure continuation of data? One issue there is corruption and versioning. Which file is the correct file, as they get altered, corrupted, and edited down the road? No, I'm not forgetting this aspect of electronic storage.

If it's archival material... you're not supposed to edit it.

And as for checking copy, if you have at least 3 copies of the file, they can be checked against each other for anomalies and self-corrected. The more copies to check against, the more errors get fixed.

The thing to remember is that digital archiving works best when it is proactively checked and updated. If properly maintained and updated, they are faster and more efficient to access and reference than any print-based archive. If you plan to wait a thousand years to dig up old untouched hard drives and read them... well, yeah, you'll probably be SOL.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

When I was looking at the Internet Archive as an image source for proofreading, I found the quality of scanning to be pretty poor. A significant amount of the books I looked at had either pages missing part of the text due to bad alignment on the scanner, or pages just missing entirely.

Internet Archive is a superb resource for page scans for proof-reading against; it's my primary source for proofing sources. Their OCR'd ePubs are axwaste of time - it's the scanned PDFs that are the valuable resource. I must have been fortunate: I haven't yet found one with missing pages.