Buh Bye, Encyclopedia Britannica

[JesseScottOwen]

The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print. It's the end of an era. I remember being a kid, writing reports from encyclopedias. It felt like you really earned your grade. I haven't earned a grade since I was 9.

Any thoughts? What will be the next thing to go?

[Hawknc]

A relevant source. Did anyone not see this coming? It's certainly not the end for Britannica - they have, sensibly, diversified and gone digital - but it was never going to compete with devices that could access all that information and fit in your pocket.

[zmic]

A couple of months ago at an auction I had the opportunity to buy a complete 1970 edition with all the year books for 5 euro, and I didn't do it. I'm still kicking myself. I had to vent this. Thank you for listening.

[Diadem]

Wow. This is entirely expected, and also somewhat sad.

Books, real, printed, books, have a certain grandeur that digital media just does not have. Perhaps they will, one day, when they've been around as long as paper has. But right now they don't. I will miss this grandeur of books.

I have a dream. One day, if I ever become rich, I will buy a mansion. One wing of this mansion will be the library. The library will be huge, and dimly lit. The ceiling will be at least 4 meters high, with row after row of oaken bookcases reaching all the way up. Corridors between the bookcases will be narrow, with small, steep, ladders to reach the top shelves. On the floor will be a thick layer of dust, the ceiling and book cases full of spider webs. The library has but one side room, filled with 2 luxury lounge chairs and a huge open fireplace. That room shall have no book cases, but one wall will have the wine and whiskey cabinet. The other walls, naturally, paintings.

I am the first to admit that a single e-book reader is more practical and a lot cheaper. But it most definitely lacks the grandeur of my vision.

[sourmìlk]

I don't really understand this love of physical books. They degrade, they aren't permanent, they cannot easily be shared and distributed. The only time I'm sad when a book is lost is if that book's information hasn't been stored elsewhere. I like the medium that does the most justice to the information contained within, the medium that is permanent, versatile, and easily distributed: cloud storage.

[Iulus Cofield]

permanent

I miss geocities and the defunct ezboards of my youth.

[sourmìlk]

I suppose it isn't necessarily permanent, but unlike with physical books, it very easily can be. Also I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere a cached copy of that is stored.

[Iulus Cofield]

If anyone has a cached copy of my horribly written Pokemon fanfiction, I would be very grateful.

[sourmìlk]

Send me a copy too, please.

[Diadem]

Even low quality, badly stored, books will last a couple of decades. Books printed on high quality paper last hundreds of years. Stored well, they last pretty much forever. Digital media typically degrade after a couple of years. If you still have hardware that can even make an attempt at reading it, which you typically won't. Books are insanely more durable than digital media.

But that's not relevant for my point anyway.

A book has grandeur. When I am holding a book, I am not just holding a book. I'm holding a mirror to the soul, a whetstone of the mind. I'm holding a tradition hundreds, nay, thousands of years old, that has brought humanity ... everything. All knowledge, all wisdom, all science, throughout the ages, was entrusted to paper, preserved on paper, passed on by paper.

A DVD, meanwhile, is just a plastic disc with one reflective surface. It has no soul. I'm not saying that that won't ever change. Perhaps it already has for people younger than me.

And yes, I am a hopeless romantic

[sourmìlk]

Even low quality, badly stored, books will last a couple of decades. Books printed on high quality paper last hundreds of years. Stored well, they last pretty much forever. Digital media typically degrade after a couple of years. If you still have hardware that can even make an attempt at reading it, which you typically won't. Books are insanely more durable than digital media.

The permanence of cloud storage doesn't come from the permanence of the server racks it's stored on, but from its distribution. The server has a copy, the off-site backup has a copy, google has a copy, users have copies, etc.

[Steax]

Even low quality, badly stored, books will last a couple of decades. Books printed on high quality paper last hundreds of years. Stored well, they last pretty much forever. Digital media typically degrade after a couple of years. If you still have hardware that can even make an attempt at reading it, which you typically won't. Books are insanely more durable than digital media.

The permanence of cloud storage doesn't come from the permanence of the server racks it's stored on, but from its distribution. The server has a copy, the off-site backup has a copy, google has a copy, users have copies, etc.

Cloud storage... has nothing to do with that, because it's not well-defined. For the most part, "cloud storage" either means "somewhere in the net" or "stored on a few of our servers somewhere".

Real books have one thing digital books never will: independence on other resources. You can't read a digital book without electricity. Cloud storage relies on that company doing the "cloud storage". If you store it yourself, you're relying on other people supplying the hardware. And even reading it on a tablet/screen relies on the company that makes the device not screwing up.

A book basically has zero chance of screwing up, and duplicating them is cheap. The only way a book gets destroyed is if it gets physically destroyed, which is all in your hands. Which is why important material is all kept physically: you can take a glance at it and say "oh, it's good." We don't want to wake up one day and realize that someone's servers running someone's OS on someone's network on someone's system had a bug, and sorry, we lost a whole bunch of files. Sorry.

(It's a serious argument why I think everything important still needs to have a paper equivalent. You basically cannot screw up a book, provided you take good care of them.)

--

Also, I despise the "digital is easier to share" thing. It's not. You can always hand over a physical book, or copy it through dozens of means (reading it aloud, handwriting on paper, digital copying, photographs - it goes from modern to ancient). Digital book compatibility determines on the platform, how they communicate, the formats, the file storage, and if the devices even allow it. It's not that easy. You could say "keep everything a PDF", but as digital books become more complex with video and interactive elements, they're becoming more and more complex to the point that a single book is unreadable on other devices.

[sourmìlk]

And you can't screw up filesystem storage, so long as you take good care of it. I'll admit that one copy of a book is more permanent than one copy of a file. But I can easily make billions of copies of that file and distribute them everywhere twice. Whereas books will eventually run out after they've stopped being printed, I can keep distributing files indefinitely at absolutely no cost.

[Steax]

And how many files do you know of are copied billions of times and stored everywhere twice? Do you want to rely on cloud storage companies and hope they're doing their job right? And there's clearly a cost to servers. A filesystem storage has a lifespan, it must be updated, protected, and backups be continuously made. It takes active work. That's not even considering the possibility of digital attacks.

You can... actually print more books, even if they've stopped being printed. AFAIK that's fair for personal consumption as long as you use it for personal use. Then you wait for it to enter public domain and you can make as many copies as you want.

You're free to use the cloud for relatively disposable data, or ones you won't care about in a few dozen years. But if you really want to keep something permanent without relying on other people not screwing up, use a book.

[sourmìlk]

And how many files do you know of are copied billions of times and stored everywhere twice?

I can think of at least 200 off the top of my head.

Do you want to rely on cloud storage companies and hope they're doing their job right? And there's clearly a cost to servers. A filesystem storage has a lifespan, it must be updated, protected, and backups be continuously made. It takes active work. That's not even considering the possibility of digital attacks.

I didn't say that cloud storage was infallible. Just that it's very hard to permanently erase data on the internet.

You can... actually print more books, even if they've stopped being printed. AFAIK that's fair for personal consumption as long as you use it for personal use. Then you wait for it to enter public domain and you can make as many copies as you want.

Which is very expensive. You need a press, tons of ink, etc. I only need ctrl-c and ctrl-v. I use it 33 times, I have over 4 billion copies of a file.0

You're free to use the cloud for relatively disposable data, or ones you won't care about in a few dozen years. But if you really want to keep something permanent without relying on other people not screwing up, use a book.

Or, better yet, keep a copy locally and on the cloud. That way two people have to screw up, whereas with a book it's only one.

[Ghostbear]

Don't forget that formats change, are replaced or abandoned over the years. How long will it be until the average computer is no longer able to read a CD? If you aren't careful (and it's rare for people to be careful enough), you'll find, 100 years from now, that the books people stored digitally are impossible to read. Even if the format is documented properly, it could still be a lot of work to adapt that to contemporary computer systems. Just look at how many different ebook formats are listed on wikipedia. What are the chances that all of those, and every new format made in the future, will be readable without difficulty in 50 years?

Also, on the note of copying files indefinitely; consumer computers almost all lack ECC for the memory. Add in bit rot for various storage devices, and over the course of decades you have a very real chance of some irrecoverable error creeping its way in. It still won't be that common, all things considered (otherwise ECC RAM would be more common outside of servers), and many potential errors will be insignificant, but even when you store things properly, keep everything documented and so on, you could just as easily end up with a worthless dump of numbers at the end. That can happen with books as well of course- fire, water leaks, bug infestations- but those have the benefit of being readily apparent once discovered.

No way of storing things is infallible.

[elasto]

This is a really puzzling argument you're making Steax. I guess it's theoretically possible that an open-source, DRM-free book you've got stored on your computer, in your online cloud storage service, and freely pirated on bittorrent networks could become unavailable or become unreadable, but it's surely much more likely that something could prevent you having access to your paper book (you have a fire, someone borrows it and never returns it, you lose it when moving house, you are simply away from your home - at work or on holiday etc). Overall, taking everything into consideration, a DRM-stripped, pirated book shared on bittorrent is way way more more reliable than a single, fragile paper book. It's also way more convenient too - being able to carry thousands of books on a single device and being able to search through them all for a phrase is just way more convenient than the paper based alternatives.

I mean, yes, if it's the apocalypse and noone has access to electricity any more I guess you have a point, but if that happens for any extended period maybe people will be burning the books for warmth or forgetting how to read too.

Don't forget that formats change, are replaced or abandoned over the years. How long will it be until the average computer is no longer able to read a CD? If you aren't careful (and it's rare for people to be careful enough), you'll find, 100 years from now, that the books people stored digitally are impossible to read.

That's one reason why the efforts of companies like Google and various governments to digitally store all books ever written is important. Sure, people may have to buy a new copy of a book because the 100 year old copy on a memory stick is unreadable on the edevice of 2100, but that's a slightly different argument. That's an argument for making sure you strip the DRM from everything you buy and keep it up to date as the technologies change over the decades.

Over 100 years? Yeah, in some senses a paper book is a better bet - assuming you have the resources to ensure the book is protected from damage (although I still maintain that it requires less effort to keep your digital copy safe and readable than it would a book). But over millennia? What proportion of books from 2000 or 3000 years ago have survived? And what proportion of the books written today will still be accessible in 2000 or 3000 years time? I bet a way way higher proportion of them (assuming we're still around and we still have need for them...)

[Steax]

I can think of at least 200 off the top of my head.

Care to elaborate?

I won't argue about how practical/easy it is to get data online. I'm arguing about its safety.

This is a really puzzling argument you're making Steax. I guess it's theoretically possible that an open-source, DRM-free book you've got stored on your computer, in your online cloud storage service, and freely pirated on bittorrent networks could become unavailable or become unreadable, but it's surely much more likely that something could prevent you having access to your book (you have a fire, someone steals the book, you are simply away from your home - at work or on holiday etc). Overall, taking everything into consideration, a DRM-stripped, pirated book shared on bittorrent is way way more more reliable than a single, fragile paper book. It's also way more convenient too - being able to carry thousands of books on a single device and being able to search through them all for a phrase is just way more convenient than the paper based alternatives.

I mean, yes, if it's the apocalypse and noone has access to electricity any more I guess you have a point, but if that happens for any extended period maybe people will be burning the books for warmth or forgetting how to read too.

Don't forget that formats change, are replaced or abandoned over the years. How long will it be until the average computer is no longer able to read a CD? If you aren't careful (and it's rare for people to be careful enough), you'll find, 100 years from now, that the books people stored digitally are impossible to read.

That's one reason why the efforts of companies like Google and various governments to digitally store all books ever written is important. Sure, people may have to buy a new copy of a book because the 100 year old copy on a memory stick is unreadable on the edevice of 2100, but that's a slightly different argument. That's an argument for making sure you strip the DRM from everything you buy and keep it up to date as the technologies change over the decades.

Over 100 years? Yeah, in some senses a paper book is a better bet - assuming you have the resources to ensure the book is protected from damage (although I still maintain that it requires less effort to keep your digital copy safe and readable than it would a book). But over millennia? What proportion of books from 2000 or 3000 years ago have survived? And what proportion of the books written today will still be accessible in 2000 or 3000 years time? I bet a way way higher proportion of them (assuming we're still around and we still have need for them...)

Yes, if you compare a single copy of a book with all the people keeping them online. I agree that a no-DRM, plain book on the web is easier to keep track of, but it's not as permanent.

I was indeed, actually, thinking of situations where we lose power to electricity. If we were hit by some electromagnetic storm and pushed off electricity for a few days, how are we to contact each other when even our address books are embedded in our devices? Again, I'm not arguing about the practicality of it, but about the safety of said information.

I think another important issue is that with digital backups, you have to deliberately mean it. I still have books lying around from my childhood, but I never bothered to upload my high school photos to the "cloud" (and have serious privacy issues in doing that), and now I haven't a clue which hard drive those photos are on now.

You can't compare from 2000 or 3000 years ago, because neither medium existed as we know it. How many storage mediums from 10 years ago can we still access? As SSD media gains coverage and the internet grows, will we still be able to read from CDs and floppies?

[elasto]

Yes, if you compare a single copy of a book with all the people keeping them online. I agree that a no-DRM, plain book on the web is easier to keep track of, but it's not as permanent.

Can you expand on what you mean by 'not as permanent'? We can agree nothing is infallibly safe, but I still maintain that a digital copy, properly backed up off-site is safer than a paper copy of anything. Both will require some maintenance to keep safe and readable but a digital copy will be much less work.

I was indeed, actually, thinking of situations where we lose power to electricity. If we were hit by some electromagnetic storm and pushed off electricity for a few days, how are we to contact each other when even our address books are embedded in our devices? Again, I'm not arguing about the practicality of it, but about the safety of said information.

That's an argument for decentralised production and storage of electricity - for people who are concerned about such things to have solar panels on their roofs etc.

I think another important issue is that with digital backups, you have to deliberately mean it. I still have books lying around from my childhood, but I never bothered to upload my high school photos to the "cloud" (and have serious privacy issues in doing that), and now I haven't a clue which hard drive those photos are on now.

That's less of a problem with the advent of the cloud. Sign up to a few free services (Dropbox, SpiderOak, Wuala all offer 2GB free online backup space) and you'll never lose track of anything ever again.

Yes, if you're not disciplined, when you upgrade hdd you might not copy all photos across, but that's no different to if you move house, you lose track of where you put the photo albums. I'm the opposite to you: I keep all my photos in one folder on my computer, and simply copy the folder forwards each hdd upgrade - whereas I've moved house a dozen times since high school and have long since lost track of any physical photos I had. Both digital and physical storage can be lost if you aren't careful over time, but I still maintain that taking care of digital media is quicker and more straightforward than taking care of physical media, with less potential pitfalls. And it's not like photos and books can't be easily printed out should the need arise - whereas the opposite process is much harder and much much more time consuming.

(Why would you have privacy issues with uploading photos btw? Services like SpiderOak have end-to-end encryption with SpiderOak employees having no access to the decryption keys (they are stored client-side only). If you don't trust even that, put the photos into a TrueCrypt partition before uploading too.)

You can't compare from 2000 or 3000 years ago, because neither medium existed as we know it. How many storage mediums from 10 years ago can we still access? As SSD media gains coverage and the internet grows, will we still be able to read from CDs and floppies?

That's an argument for not storing things on CDs and floppies but more abstract forms of format (open-source, DRM-free) and media (the cloud).

[Steax]

I think my main issue is the single point of failure. Internet goes kaboom, and we're down to our local copies (which can easily turn out to be inoperable because we thought the cloud would be safe). Digital media goes kaboom, lots of important information lost. Electricity goes kaboom, we lose all human knowledge stored in them.

[sourmìlk]

I can think of at least 200 off the top of my head.

Care to elaborate?

All the files in C:\Windows\System32, for example. And any README for popular software, and the popular software itself. Or take most any non-copyrighted literary work.

Yes, if you compare a single copy of a book with all the people keeping them online. I agree that a no-DRM, plain book on the web is easier to keep track of, but it's not as permanent.

That's not true. the book you have to lose once. The online thing you have to lose everywhere.

I was indeed, actually, thinking of situations where we lose power to electricity. If we were hit by some electromagnetic storm and pushed off electricity for a few days, how are we to contact each other when even our address books are embedded in our devices? Again, I'm not arguing about the practicality of it, but about the safety of said information.

There are situations in which both storage methods fail. But whereas you'd have to have something absurdly cataclysmic like this to wipe out information on the cloud, a book only has to be lost. Why do you think there are all these non-profit services to upload books onto the web? It's certainly not because the web is less permanent and secure.

think my main issue is the single point of failure. Internet goes kaboom, and we're down to our local copies (which can easily turn out to be inoperable because we thought the cloud would be safe). Digital media goes kaboom, lots of important information lost. Electricity goes kaboom, we lose all human knowledge stored in them.

There isn't a single point of failure. Saying "Internet goes kaboom" and "electricity goes kaboom" is like saying "paper goes kaboom." There are tons of individual things that have to go very wrong for all that to happen.

[Iulus Cofield]

Yes, if you compare a single copy of a book with all the people keeping them online. I agree that a no-DRM, plain book on the web is easier to keep track of, but it's not as permanent.

That's not true. the book you have to lose once. The online thing you have to lose everywhere.

That's not an apt comparison, is it? The book has to be lost for X number of copies published, which usually numbers at 250 and often in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

I think it's also unfair to say that the internet would need to go "kaboom" to lose data stored in a cloud. Clouds aren't shared between corporations, so if a business goes under, or say, gets shut down by the US government on a whim, all copies can be permanently lost, as others have learned so painfully.

[elasto]

I think my main issue is the single point of failure. Internet goes kaboom, and we're down to our local copies (which can easily turn out to be inoperable because we thought the cloud would be safe).

If your local copies are inoperable then the copies stored on the net were useless too. I'm suggesting you store an identical open-source, DRM-free file both locally and backed up off-site. The chances of an open-source, DRM-free file becoming unreadable without you having years if not decades of advanced warning is zero.

Digital media goes kaboom, lots of important information lost.

What - you mean the internet is gone and your local media (eg laptop) is gone too? And you didn't have time to print out physical copies of vital books first (eg you aren't going to care you lost your digital copy of Dan Brown)? Well, yeah, you're in trouble then. But you probably have more to worry about if it's happened that quickly - like your skin is currently being melted off by a nuclear fireball or something.

Electricity goes kaboom, we lose all human knowledge stored in them.

Um. Yeah. I guess. So much of modern civilisation relies on electricity though, civilisation is pretty screwed if we have lost access to electricity in a widespread and permanent fashion. Even remote African villages have mobile phones these days.

On the other hand, your house goes on fire. Kaboom, you've lost everything paper-based too. Digital media is still much safer taking everything into consideration. If you want apocalypse-style belt and braces, what's wrong with using digital media with the essential books held physically too?

[elasto]

I think it's also unfair to say that the internet would need to go "kaboom" to lose data stored in a cloud. Clouds aren't shared between corporations, so if a business goes under, or say, gets shut down by the US government on a whim, all copies can be permanently lost, as others have learned so painfully.

That's an argument against only storing information in the cloud. You should back it up locally too.

[sourmìlk]

That's not an apt comparison, is it? The book has to be lost for X number of copies published, which usually numbers at 250 and often in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

Most personal information is kept in maybe one book or rolodex or diary or whatever. If you store it on the cloud, it's in shitloads of places. Most things will have far more copies distributed much more widely on the cloud than physically simply because making a digital copy costs nothing.

I think it's also unfair to say that the internet would need to go "kaboom" to lose data stored in a cloud. Clouds aren't shared between corporations, so if a business goes under, or say, gets shut down by the US government on a whim, all copies can be permanently lost, as others have learned so painfully.

I bet you that 99.8% of the files that can no longer be accessed via MegaUpload still exist. And I doubt you could say that's true any time a physical thing is lost.

[elasto]

Btw, one thing to bear in mind in this digital vs physical debate is that we're in a transitional period right now with digital still in its infancy. I'll warrant that within the next century (or two at the outside) the local digital copy you hold wont be on an e-reader or a laptop but inside your own body, powered by chemical or otherwise sustainable sources of energy (eg solar power or body movement).

The advantages digital holds over paper have only just begun to be exploited.

[Steax]

I can think of at least 200 off the top of my head.

Care to elaborate?

All the files in C:\Windows\System32, for example. And any README for popular software, and the popular software itself. Or take most any non-copyrighted literary work.

Yes, if you compare a single copy of a book with all the people keeping them online. I agree that a no-DRM, plain book on the web is easier to keep track of, but it's not as permanent.

That's not true. the book you have to lose once. The online thing you have to lose everywhere.

I daresay readme files aren't what we're talking about here.

Iulus covered the bit about losing books. I'm not talking about individual possessions here, by the way. I'm talking about lost knowledge. You have to lose a book thousands of times, while you're basically relying on a set companies to keep the cloud afloat. It'd be much easier for something to go wrong on their side and a lot of data gets lost, than thousands of books being destroyed by accident. Of course, time tends to do that too.

I was indeed, actually, thinking of situations where we lose power to electricity. If we were hit by some electromagnetic storm and pushed off electricity for a few days, how are we to contact each other when even our address books are embedded in our devices? Again, I'm not arguing about the practicality of it, but about the safety of said information.

There are situations in which both storage methods fail. But whereas you'd have to have something absurdly cataclysmic like this to wipe out information on the cloud, a book only has to be lost. Why do you think there are all these non-profit services to upload books onto the web? It's certainly not because the web is less permanent and secure.

think my main issue is the single point of failure. Internet goes kaboom, and we're down to our local copies (which can easily turn out to be inoperable because we thought the cloud would be safe). Digital media goes kaboom, lots of important information lost. Electricity goes kaboom, we lose all human knowledge stored in them.

There isn't a single point of failure. Saying "Internet goes kaboom" and "electricity goes kaboom" is like saying "paper goes kaboom." There are tons of individual things that have to go very wrong for all that to happen.

People upload books to the web to share information, and as a backup location. They don't then discard the physical books.

You do not need something cataclysmic to wipe out one of the important pieces of these chains. Widespread electricity loss due to various issues have happened before. Digital attacks, malware and viruses have wiped out data before. Saying "paper goes kaboom" is meaningless. If I'm holding a piece of paper in my hand, the rest of the world can collapse as I know it, and this piece of paper can still be read.

Either you're thinking the modern world is incredibly stable (hint: it's not), or I'm missing something.

I bet you that 99.8% of the files that can no longer be accessed via MegaUpload still exist. And I doubt you could say that's true any time a physical thing is lost.

I doubt you think that printing presses, factories and so forth only produce one of a physical object.

I think my main issue is the single point of failure. Internet goes kaboom, and we're down to our local copies (which can easily turn out to be inoperable because we thought the cloud would be safe).

If your local copies are inoperable then the copies stored on the net were useless too. I'm suggesting you store an identical open-source, DRM-free file both locally and backed up off-site. The chances of an open-source, DRM-free file becoming unreadable without you having years if not decades of advanced warning is zero.

Digital media goes kaboom, lots of important information lost.

What - you mean the internet is gone and your local media (eg laptop) is gone too? And you didn't have time to print out physical copies of vital books first (eg you aren't going to care you lost your digital copy of Dan Brown)? Well, yeah, you're in trouble then. But you probably have more to worry about if it's happened that quickly - like your skin is currently being melted off by a nuclear fireball or something.

Electricity goes kaboom, we lose all human knowledge stored in them.

Um. Yeah. I guess. So much of modern civilisation relies on electricity though, civilisation is pretty screwed if we have lost access to electricity in a widespread and permanent fashion. Even remote African villages have mobile phones these days.

On the other hand, your house goes on fire. Kaboom, you've lost everything paper-based too. Digital media is still much safer taking everything into consideration. If you want apocalypse-style belt and braces, what's wrong with using digital media with the essential books held physically too?

I'm talking about long-term feasibility of storing important information (like the encyclopedia being discussed in this thread), and yes, I think they need to survive worldwide cataclysms. So would maps, medical information, sciences, math, and other building blocks of civilization.

But I do think we're in agreement that the best solution is to keep physical copies somewhere safe, and use digital copies for general consumption and distribution.

[sourmìlk]

Your argument now is not about the reproducibility of books but the breadth of their distribution. Digital files are and can be distributed so much more broadly. If copies is what you're worried about, I alone can make copies many times faster than anybody can make books.

Nothing has ever come close to wiping out any substantial portion of the internet's information before. Digital attacks, malware, companies shutting down, power outages, all of these do virtually nothing to the amount of data we have. Compare that to the Library of Alexandria or Baghdad: the data lost there was mostly irrecoverable. The data lost in the shutting down of MegaUpload was negligible and it almost all still exists somewhere. Books can never be distributed and hidden in the same way that data can be.

Your ideas about permanence and security are wrong, and every non-profit that uploads books to the cloud for safekeeping relies on on those ideas being wrong. Libraries are literally throwing away books because they don't have places to keep them. The text within is lost forever. That kind of thing just doesn't happen on the internet. It's impossible: somebody will have a copy somewhere.

[elasto]

Steax: If your argument is entirely about humanity as a whole losing knowledge, that's simply not going to happen. There are numerous public and private organisations (eg The Library of Congress, Google Books) making their own digital and physical collections of human knowledge - digital media and the cloud is just one part of that.

If you're worried about civilisation coming to an end, just make sure you have a few physical books on things like wilderness survival, healthcare etc. But for everything else, a digital copy stored locally and remotely is vastly safer and superior to a paper copy of anything. If you've lost both the local and remote copies of the files - and so has everyone else - then you've seriously got more things to worry about than that book.

[sourmìlk]

I don't think that civilization coming to an end is a feasible scenario that we really should be planning for, particularly because it's something whose very nature prevents us from planning for it.

[Steax]

It's worth noting I walking in the context of encyclopedias and material like it. How many people do you think store encyclopedias on their dropbox accounts? Yes, there are entities managing them, but again, single points of failure. Both as a collective species and as individuals, in terms of stability and ability to withstand everything else collapsing, physical books win.

I will not deny that for practical purposes, yes, digital is the way to go. (I work on the web, if I don't believe this then I wouldn't be here.)

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

(wait, am I, by thinking of world collapse, being more a cynic than sourmilk? .... I'll go hide now. And yeah, this line is a joke, not an actual argument or anything.)

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

Did it actually vanish, or did it just stop getting served over the Internet? If the latter, then it's no less accessible than a given copy of a book.

[Steax]

For all intents and purposes, unaccessible. Web hosts tend to just delete files when their paying customers stop paying. And they can't give the files to anyone else anyway, because it's owned by the original owners.

We've seen websites die a lot already.

I suppose this is an issue because digital media must be deliberately backed up to the 'cloud'. Books can pretty much just sit on a shelf, intentionally or not.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Wat. There's digital media on my shelf right now.

[Iulus Cofield]

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

Did it actually vanish, or did it just stop getting served over the Internet? If the latter, then it's no less accessible than a given copy of a book.

My fanfics vanished.

[Steax]

Wat. There's digital media on my shelf right now.

But there's no guarantee that, at any given point in reasonable time, you can load it, read it, or even have access to a device that can read it. Again, electricity failures, storage failures, etc.

(To repeat myself, digital is perfectly fine for practical uses. I'm talking about high-content information that would be valuable to keep for a long time, with added resilience.)

[elasto]

It's worth noting I walking in the context of encyclopedias and material like it. How many people do you think store encyclopedias on their dropbox accounts?

Why would you need to store an encyclopedia on your dropbox account? You realise that you can download the whole of Wikipedia for free if you want, right? The chances of the information stored in Wikipedia being lost to humanity is essentially zero. If the company went under in such a way the information stored centrally was irrecoverably lost, there's thousands of copies out there it could be restored from. There's simply no way that the central information and all the distributed information could be lost unless we lost electricity for, I dunno, centuries. And even then someone would probably have found time to print it out.

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

And you don't think that happened much more often in pre-digital days? What do you think happened when people had conversations in times past? The situation is way way better now than when we only had paper to record things on.

Almost everything on the net is permanent now - just look at the WayBack machine:

Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.

It's not perfect, and it's not utterly infallible, but it is a heck of a lot better than we ever had before. Books can be rounded up and burned by tyrannical governments. Digital media is irrepressible and will probably live on forever.

My fanfics vanished.

That's an argument for backing things up locally.

[sourmìlk]

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

Did it actually vanish, or did it just stop getting served over the Internet? If the latter, then it's no less accessible than a given copy of a book.

My fanfics vanished.

I'm pretty sure this is a point in favour of cloud storage.

Also, I don't really know that any information has ever disappeared from the internet. There are so many backup and caching services, so many people downloading things and so many off-sit backups etc. that I think almost all of it's still there.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Perhaps I'm biased as a developer who's seen whole stores of knowledge, useful discussion and information vanish because people were uninterested, their hosts shut down, and nobody thought they'd need it in the future.

Did it actually vanish, or did it just stop getting served over the Internet? If the latter, then it's no less accessible than a given copy of a book.

My fanfics vanished.

So did my hand-drawn renderings of the Battle of Yavin. If you only have one copy of something, it's going to be vulnerable to loss no matter how you store it.

But there's no guarantee that, at any given point in reasonable time, you can load it, read it, or even have access to a device that can read it. Again, electricity failures, storage failures, etc.

Is there such a guarantee for books? Sprinkler failures, library raided by Caesar, etc.

[elasto]

Wat. There's digital media on my shelf right now.

But there's no guarantee that, at any given point in reasonable time, you can load it, read it, or even have access to a device that can read it. Again, electricity failures, storage failures, etc.

Electricity can be generated locally. Storage failures can be dealt with by backing it up - both locally and remotely - or relying on other people giving access to their backups (eg bittorrent piracy).

You talk about it being a single point of failure - but it isn't really. Multiple cataclysmic things will have had to have happened - in which case accessing your book will likely be the least of your troubles. Unless you are already prepared for living off the land alone you're probably screwed in such a world-wide collapse of civilisation scenario with or without access to your books.