Professore Umberto Eco calls us eReaders "Taliban" in interview

[luqmaninbmore]

Originally Posted by 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.

Yikes. Who were the publishers? I would like to avoid them in the future.

[PressEnter]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

I get his point on the unproved longevity of digital mediums. On the other hand, fires and floods ruined many traditional books so nothing is perfect. Unless he is calling for stone tablets, lol.

Old curmudgeon is old.

Let's also not forget that books rot. How old, yellowed and crumbling are those books in the basement?

[luqmaninbmore]

Originally Posted by PressEnter

Let's also not forget that books rot. How old, yellowed and crumbling are those books in the basement?

In my basement, not very. I can still easily read the books I read as child which were stored in my parents basement. The text files I used to read ( I was a young ebook fanatic) from that era are gone.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

In my basement, not very. I can still easily read the books I read as child which were stored in my parents basement. The text files I used to read ( I was a young ebook fanatic) from that era are gone.

That may work in Baltimore. But in a hot, humid climate they pages will stick together, you have to fend of pests year round, and the books will start to rot very soon.

[WillAdams]

I have at home, a pair of books which belonged to my great-grandfather --- a two volume edition of Flavius Josephus' _Treasures and Antiquities of the Jews_ --- while the binding is in rough shape, it's still readable.

Granted, not many books are published these days printed on cotton (or hemp) paper w/ a sewn binding, but books can last a _very_ long time in comparison to electronics.

William

[luqmaninbmore]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

That may work in Baltimore. But in a hot, humid climate they pages will stick together, you have to fend of pests year round, and the books will start to rot very soon.

Baltimore gets hot and extremely humid during the summer and the end of spring. We also have a number of pests to deal with, including bed bugs and, especially, stink bugs. Hot humid climates aren't exactly great for electronics either. Also, eink technology and rechargeable batteries do not do well in the sub-freezing temperatures we get during the winter, while paper books are unaffected.

On another note, my daughter found my Pocketbook 360, may it rest in peace. Apparently, my two year old somehow got his hands on it, smashed the screen in with a yellow brick, and hid it behind the bookshelf. There are bits of yellow coloring stuck to the screen, which is noticeably dented inward. That's what I get for not putting the cover back on. RIP.

[Penforhire]

Those of you who think the effort is negligible to maintain digital files don't know what you're facing. See http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/52.html for notes on on-going research because of just how fragile our storage mediums continue to be.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

I have at home, a pair of books which belonged to my great-grandfather --- a two volume edition of Flavius Josephus' _Treasures and Antiquities of the Jews_ --- while the binding is in rough shape, it's still readable.

Granted, not many books are published these days printed on cotton (or hemp) paper w/ a sewn binding, but books can last a _very_ long time in comparison to electronics.

William

When I was in grad school, one of the books I read for my master's reading list was printed in the 1690's. By which I mean that the *actual physical book* that I checked out from the library was printed in the 1690's - it had been rebound with a library binding, but was otherwise the same book printed 300 years ago. It was also in the normal stacks, where anyone could check it out and take it home; they have since moved it to permanent reserve. As this was before the days of acid-containing paper, it was as readable as any modern book.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

Hot humid climates aren't exactly great for electronics either. Also, eink technology and rechargeable batteries do not do well in the sub-freezing temperatures we get during the winter, while paper books are unaffected.

That's not particularly relevant to the longevity of the data, which isn't tied to the lifetime of any particular piece of hardware.

/JB

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Those of you who think the effort is negligible to maintain digital files don't know what you're facing. See http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/52.html for notes on on-going research because of just how fragile our storage mediums continue to be.

You are confusing the problems of maintenance of the physical media (which is what the paper you mention is about) with the longevity of the data itself. This has two parts - preservation of the actual bytes, and preservation of the understanding of the format (e.g.epub). The ease of copying of digital data renders the former quite easy (barring armageddon/end-of-technological-society type scenarios). With regard to the latter, I'd assert that it's very unlikely that any currently widely used format will be forgotten. Even if you are concerned about that possibility, just keep archive copies of your books in HTML or plain text when appropriate. You could even keep a copy of the spec of the format in your archive, perhaps together with some relevant source code.

/JB

[Richey79]

There's a huge amount of anxiety about the long-term archival durability of digital media. As someone who still mixes film photography with digital, I'm particularly interested in this issue. I find it far easier to manage film and negatives than .RAW files and .PNGs on DVDs and in the cloud.

Still, other than the physical aspect of this problem (and I have CDs from 15 years ago that I can still read fine - they've simply been stored in a dark, dry place), I think the worry that we won't be able to read these formats in the future is a fairly spurious one. DISCLAIMER: this statement comes from someone who keeps important files on two seperate external hard drives, a thumb drive, uploaded to the cloud, a second computer and burnt onto DVD. I've thought about storing some of the DVDs in a seperate building, in case of fire.

I decided to set myself a challenge, to test whether the file formats we use today will be readable in the future.

So, I thought up and found online a number of different old formats, searching for format names rather than ways of reading them, so that the test is somewhat more fair. I then tried to find a company who would provide me with the means of reading that format that I could use immediately if I chose. Here are the results:

Okay, let's start with something fairly simple. Betamax cassettes, obsolete for twenty years: http://dv2anything.com/vhs-betamaxprocessing.html

How about files produced by Mass-11 word processing software from 1985? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/116257

Let's try something a bit older: the 16mm film format from the 1920s. Got an old reel in the attic you need developing? http://www.bayeux.co.uk/?gclid=CI6f5...FY4f4QodHDp_pQ
Want to buy some fresh stock? http://www.widescreen-centre.co.uk/C...6_mm_Film.html

Have a need for colodion film processing, a tech developed in 1850? Need the chemicals? http://www.apug.org/forums/forum42/2...n-suplier.html Want someone else to process it for you? http://www.silverprint.co.uk/darkroom.asp

And back to computing for a final example. Need to decipher some Hollerith's Tabulating Cards, used by IBMs from 1924? http://www.cardamation.com/page6.html

All of these examples took seconds to find conversion/developing solutions. Perhaps files from a less well-known device - such as a PDA from 1997 - might be somewhat harder to convert, but I'm sure that someone with a bit of knowledge of .xml etc. could do it very easily. Now that the cloud is upon us (although it has problems that mean it will never be entirely trusted for many files) and we are well into the age of the on-line torrent, I think it's easier to find many kinds of document than it ever has been before. Texts are also more secure, since they tend to exist on many people's computers at the same time.

Of course, personal correspondence is what will suffer in terms of being retained for posterity. My generation may well be the last to find boxes of Grandma's precious letters in the attic, which is a shame and could be mourned as an act of cultural vandalism, except noone is responsible for it: it's simply inexorable progress.

We live in the age of information. We are deluged by it. But that which finds us has not been filtered for quality nearly as carefully as it was in previous ages and much of it is junk.

A man who was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder spent all his time downloading documents from the internet (sounds normal to me, LOL), because he wanted to collect them for himself before they disappeared. Of course, the irony is that any document of value never becomes unavailable from the internet.

I think we collectively suffer from a minor form of this delusion. Faced with so much information, we - particularly those of us who remember when you had to go out of your way to collect the texts you liked - panic and try to archive as much as possible. Stop worrying. Now Eco's library of 30,000 books (he hasn't read) is available to all of us. To not have got round to reading yet.

[Penforhire]

jb, I said "storage medium" in my link message, so I do mean the physical media, in addition to the data itself.

Even only considering the medium, did you ever have to transfer files from thousands of floppy disks to CD's? I did. The days of 1.44 MB floppies coincided in my family with photo files that just about filled one floppy per image. That effort was considerable, and none of my current PC's even has a floppy drive of any sort. When I later went from CD's to DVD's the effort was much less, but still an effort.

I also do not agree with your assertion that any widely used digital format will remain legible. I face this problem at work, where formerly VERY-popular-format CAD data off Sun and other Linux workstations (e.g. Microstation, Anvil) is barely translatable into our current formats (Pro-E and AutoCAD). Each translation requires manual error checking. It is easy enough for me to imagine document formats becoming so disused that a similar circumstance will arise. I had to make a related choice in scanning our older hand-drawn documents (our products and equipment goes back over 60 years), a project taking a full-time employee over two years. Right now I'm scanning those into PDF format (really just an envelope around TIFF data) but we may need to be nimble in the future to format-shift those as needed.

Time will tell which of us is correct but I suggest being diligent in preserving digital data, which has an unproven (and partly negative) track record versus the printed word.

[Richey79]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

I did. The days of 1.44 MB floppies coincided in my family with photo files that just about filled one floppy per image. That effort was considerable...

No offense meant, but did this not make you stop and think whether digital cameras were really more practical than film at this time? Making a presumption about image quality, I can't imagine that data transfer was the biggest problem with this setup.

We're at a different stage with data files now. The tech is rather more mature: a portable harddrive with 2,000 MB storage is reasonably priced. That's a big enough difference that it ceases to be merely quanitative, and qualitatively changes the way people use the tech. I'd even suggest we're getting to a stage where the mass of people will demand backwards compatibility with new word / image processing software, and software companies will likely fail without providing this.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Richey79

We're at a different stage with data files now. The tech is rather more mature....

But not necessarily durable. Acid-free paper will almost certainly be readable 1000 years from now. Hard drives? CD's? Not so much.

Digital still has many challenges, such as:
• Media durability is still relatively short
• Transferring that data requires that it's all consolidated into a small number of locations (which seems unlikely)
• Data can easily be overlooked or neglected
• Intermediaries (hardware and software) are always required
• Databases in particular can be heavily dependent on a complex intermediary infrastructure
• Not all formats are open or convertible, especially databases
• There is no guarantee that individuals or even organizations will have an effective backup method, let alone file transfer method
• So much data is getting generated now, that finding something can present a major challenge in the near future

Digital has numerous advantages, especially for research. But it's hardly the case that archiving this information is a snap.

Originally Posted by Ritchey79

I decided to set myself a challenge, to test whether the file formats we use today will be readable in the future....

And that proves, what?

How much will DV2Anything charge for the conversion? Beta is a magnetic medium, and the tapes degrade; what happens to tapes that aren't converted in time? Or RAW files (a proprietary format) 150 years from now?

Ever try converting one database into another? Or a relational database into a flat file?

How do you recommend we back up the information on Facebook or Twitter? Or in password-protected email accounts? If you're an archivist working on someone who passed away in 1950, you'll have at least some of their correspondence. If they pass away in 2010, you might get everything -- or nothing, if they strongly encrypted their data and gave no one the password.


We don't need to cower in fear over this. But the reality is that concern over the longevity of data is unquestionably warranted, especially for professional archivists and researchers.

[citac]

Originally Posted by jehane

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.

I haven't read the entire thread so apologies for barging in, but this line caught my eye. WRT loss of electricity, when we were left without electricity in Bosnia during the war years, once we burned through anything made out of wood that wasn't essential, we started burning our books to keep warm and to cook whatever food we could find. In spite of having a rather large library, we soon ran out of those too.