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[Thomas Shey]

My books take care of themselves*.

The reason I feel I can talk about this with some authority is I'm an ex-library assistant with a partial focus on preservation and restoration.

So I feel pretty confident to say "They really don't." Ink fades, paper decays, and depending on the initial type of both, some of it can do so well within a human lifespan. I own paperbacks I would actually be hesitant to read in their physical form these days because I suspect they'd fall apart, and some of the pages might crack and strip.

The difference between physical and digital products here is, basically, two fold:

1. Usually if examined, the degree to which physical books and other media are decaying can be observed piecemeal. This can be done to some degree with digital material, but requires more effort, and its less conditional (in other words you can do more things to avoid some damage to physical products because its easier (though not always easy) to manage humidity, heat, insect and bacterial incursion and so on that cosmic rays and magnetic fields)

2. That said, preventing or even to some degree reversing the result is far more of a chore with physical products. Once a physical product starts to go, you need a number of pretty specialized tools to try and preserve and reverse the damage, or getting a whole new copy (assuming, and this is a very big assumption, its even available; things go out of print all the time). If you stay on top of copying and format shifting digital products (especially if you take the care to do duplicate storage) there is actually no reason you can't stay on top of this largely indefinitely at relatively minimal cost.

The problem in the past was that storage media went through a fairly rapid serious of changes that required a great degree of staying on top of them when the changeover was going on, and the software to read said was often complicated enough that even moving it over to a new format could be a big challenge. Neither of those has been true for some years now, and there's no particular reason to expect that to change; the last big changeover in data storage was moving from conventional hard drives to solid state ones, and that happened over a period (and was approached cautiously because of some of the issues with the earlier solid state drives). Data storage is a relatively mature technology now, and while there will probably be new forms of it at some point, you aren't liable to hit things like the floppy/floppy/CD/DVD cycle speed again. In addition, much digital material has not expanded in its data size (in a few cases its shrunk) while storage has expanded considerably. So its much more practical to keep multiple backups of material, and if you have the resources and transmission speed, keep some online and thus (which vulnerable to its own issues) not vulnerable to issues of damage to where you've stored your own.

If data can't do the same then why do I want to trust it? Further, when that data isn't even stored on a machine or media I own or control but is on a machine or media someone else owns or controls (i.e. "the cloud") I'm also expected to trust that owner to keep that storage going and the media available for me to access whenever I want.

While I say what I do above, noted I do not keep anything I value in the cloud. I have the material stored usually in two different hard drives in two different rooms of my house, plus the actual devices its on in a third. This is not prohibitively time consuming to set up.

And yet digital is hailed as the answer to everything.

* - barring calamaties like fire or flood, which hammer physical and digital media equally.

For most people's general purposes and for their own personally-owned media (literature, movies, music, etc.), having something last as long as they live is probably enough. A reliable 100-year lifespan and you're good for most non-archival and-or non-professional things anyone would want; and we can leave it to the professional archivists to preserve historical records etc. in perpetuity.

But that's the gig: its doesn't last reliably that long. Not for any of those. Among other things there's simple wear and tear of use, and that can be particularly severe with non-digital audio music and video recordings. Those are media of their own that interact with a player in physical ways, and those interactions are not intrinsically kind.

If something doesn't reliably last 20 years, however, that's nowhere near good enough. And expecting people to put effort - or worse, money - into ongoing upkeep of something that really should be buy once and forget (like a typical book) isn't good enough either.

This is one of my really big complaints with so-called technological advances: the end consumer is far too often expected to either buy the same media again or pay to have it transferred, every time a technology is declared obsolete.

As I noted, it requires a little up front cost to be able to do proper backups or conversion, but the rate has not been excessive for some time, and its not that difficult to learn how to do it yourself if you care. Hasn't been for some time now. And I'll flat out say that I think the functional lifespan of digital movies and audio is superior to any non-digital form, and keeping those preserved requires every bit as much effort if not more. Books are a little more complicated, but see my note at the start.

 

[Thomas Shey]

At least we don’t use cds anymore. I can’t think of all the games or music cds I bought again due to damaging the disk. Mostly games I guess because at that time you usually burned your own music cds instead of buying them.

The only reason this was as big an issue as it was was because companies seriously wanted to discourage you from copying their material. If you didn't care what they thought and were willing to look around, there have been ways to back up games for a long time too--they're just illegal even if you're only doing it to save the material.

 

[Yaarel]

Most of what I'm talking about could be done with a typical home PC and the right software. This seriously is not as difficult as it used to be.

What it does require is some time on someone's part. And that's always been true. Ask any professional preservationist how hard it is to find intact copies of books less than a hundred years old in many cases.

If someone is not willing to do the work to do preservation, you lose things. That's true about digital material, paper or clay tablets. The tradeoff as you move toward the modern period is that things are more brittle but also easier to save en masse.

There was a dead space when digital formats and storage were changing fast enough it required considerable extra work to save things. We're well past that, and it really has reached the point where if you lose material that's in existence now (and not on 20-30 year old media, which is a sign someone has been lax before), its because no one thought it was worth the effort to save it. If that's offensive, its no less true.

Consider how many people rely on smart phones with info on clouds. Or how many preserve info on a blog or other website. Much of it can vanish without notice.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Consider how many people rely on smart phones with info on clouds. Or how many preserve info on a blog or other website. Much of it can vanish without notice.

That's their choice however, as encouraged by people who sell the cloud services or access to the blog. Backups can be done offline if you care.

Its like objecting because people in dry environments store their record books outside, since it preserves well, but the first time the wrong situation occurs its gone: its understandable how people fall into it, but in the end, they do have other options. They just choose not to do them for convenience or other reasons.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Consider how many people rely on smart phones with info on clouds. Or how many preserve info on a blog or other website. Much of it can vanish without notice.

We're going to be a cultural void from the point of view of the future. Between digital formatting and DRM from companies that cease to exist, there's going to be very little footprint.

Then FutureTok will start asserting the 2010's to the War Wars period never happened or if it did, we threw our garbage out the windows and never bathed. That people were just going to the bathroom in the middle of the White House ballroom and we forgot how to write and draw.

 

[Yaarel]

We're going to be a cultural void from the point of view of the future. Between digital formatting and DRM from companies that cease to exist, there's going to be very little footprint.

Then FutureTok will start asserting the 2010's to the War Wars period never happened or if it did, we threw our garbage out the windows and never bathed. That people were just going to the bathroom in the middle of the White House ballroom and we forgot how to write and draw.

It is hard to predict the future when a single computer will soon enough be more intelligent than the entire human species combined.

But the vanishing of information that we take for granted today is a concern.

 

[Yaarel]

Hmmm. This computer information stuff is highly important.

But it seems to be quite off-topic for this thread?

 

[Vaalingrade]

It is hard to predict the future when a single computer will soon enough be more intelligent than the entire human species combined.

I shall need to file suit for attempted murder because I almost died laughing.

Aping human speech patterns and being able to play an eminently solvable game are not intelligence.

The computer we're 'afraid' of can't even be trusted to actually look up legal documents instead of making them up. Because it's just mimicking what it's ready, not comprehending what it's being asked.

 

[Yaarel]

I shall need to file suit for attempted murder because I almost died laughing.

Aping human speech patterns and being able to play an eminently solvable game are not intelligence.

The computer we're 'afraid' of can't even be trusted to actually look up legal documents instead of making them up. Because it's just mimicking what it's ready, not comprehending what it's being asked.

AI apes human speech in 2023, yes, including translating reasonably between languages, as predicted over a decade ago. The same predictions include passing the Turing Test around 2025, surpassing human intelligence around 2045 (the socalled singularity), and surpassing the computational of the entire human species combined by the end of this century.

 

[FrogReaver]

AI apes human speech in 2023, yes, including translating reasonably between languages, as predicted over a decade ago. The same predictions include passing the Turing Test around 2025, surpassing human intelligence around 2045, and surpassing the computational of the entire human species combined by the end of this century.

I’ve yet to have a good experience with ai helpbots, whether chat based or verbal. Until I experience better I say it’s about as overhyped as self driving cars.