Been saying it for years...

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've already lost electronic data by force of software or hardware obsolescence twice since the 1980s. My books are still good, though.

 

[Fast Learner]

Impermanence is certainly a potential downside of electronic data, and yes, data formats become outdated, but a potential apocalypse is, imo, a bad basis for decisionmaking. Our entire food supply system would also vanish in an instant, frex, but we don't redesign it so it's less efficient in the name of surviving potential catastrophe.

 

[Umbran]

another hundred years from now, after Google has scanned all the paper books and they've been recycled for toilet paper, and after the great cataclysm, , some guy will come out from his cave and tell his fellow cavemen, "hey, let's go to the ruins, and see if we can find knowledge that can help us rebuild our society."

We're talking mostly about fiction here. Having an extra copy of The Hunger Games around after the zombies wander through is not going to help rebuild society.

 

[renau1g]

Says you. It may show them how their tribe can dominate other tribes and create a capital city where the others work for them and they watch kids kill each other (or something, I don't know I haven't read that book).

 

[Umbran]

Says you. It may show them how their tribe can dominate other tribes and create a capital city where the others work for them and they watch kids kill each other (or something, I don't know I haven't read that book).

You must be using some definition of the word "helping" of which I was previously unaware.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

We're talking mostly about fiction here. Having an extra copy of The Hunger Games around after the zombies wander through is not going to help rebuild society.

What about the collected Wraethu stories?

(*ducks*)

On the other end of the sci-fi genreverse, Nightfall by Asimov illuminates there is one thing that books simply excel at that eReaders will probably never match: they can be burned for light & heat!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Really, though- I do like digital formats for IP in general, even if I don't use much myself. Part of that is the obsolescence thing- twice in 30 years is damned annoying. It may not sound like much, but when you lose years of data due to upgrading your systems & software, it can be extremely frustrating. And in only a few cases did I have printouts to reconstruct what I lost.

The commercial stuff was bad enough. I could usually buy new versions that got me some or most of my data back, but that wasn't universally true, even within the same company's line of products.* What I couldn't recover myself, I had to pay a professional data recovery service THOUSANDS of dollars to retrieve...and even they couldn't get it all. Some of it was reduced to scrambled garbage. (in fairness, there were some complicating issues on top of the upgrade, including an unsupervised cousin of mine miraculously downloading a Mac virus shortly post-Katrina...I have allowed him to reach adulthood.)

But when you add in all the personal stuff I lost- poems, short stories, RPG campaign notes & PCs...contact info for friends & family, THAT hurt. And I couldn't justify paying the DR company to retrieve it either.




* Actually, just realized its THREE times in 30+ years. We just upgraded our main Mac's OS to the latest & greatest, and didn't know that our Quicken would no longer run on that machine. That was a big surprise when it came time to run the paychecks. And Intuit's current product does not read Quicken files. Our only saving grace was that we had an older laptop sitting around that still ran the older OS, letting us keep going while we are transitioning to our accountant's web-based accounting software.