I used to work in a fine & rare book room at a library. The kind of thing behind a lock & key, climate controlled, you need to apply for permission to look at anything and you're monitored while you do it.
The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library.
Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/ and see the entire British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts...something I wouldn't actually ever be allowed to do with the physical books.
But the post is pretty misleading it says
> Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.
But every library I've been at also has active maintenance for their physical books! They control the humidity, they check for water leaks, they look for pests. Nobody is throwing 100+ year old books into an aluminium shed.
Also, I now live in a country where I don't speak the local language especially fluently, so reading books published here is less fun. Importing physical books in my native language is extremely expensive, since books aren't especially light. Shipping is often close to the price of the book itself. And delivery usually takes weeks, anyway.
Digital books actually are available to most of the world in a way that physical books aren't.
The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the information. If you find a thumbdrive with the same flyer as a pdf from a hundred years ago it will take a team of experts with specialized (or at this point very old) hardware to figure out the contents.
Video is even worse: a film roll that you can look at with your bare eyes vs some realplayer codec nobody can decode. This is why the library of congress lasers video onto analog film for archival. Reading an analog film is a question of blasting light through the transported film. Reading the equivalent realplayer file involves a little bit more in terms of hardware, OS and software (and this is just one codec I picked randomly).
The entire year I was there no one ever used it. To actually access the materials you'd have to travel to our specific library.
Meanwhile, I can go to a site of digital books like https://www.manuscriptsonline.org/ and see the entire British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts...something I wouldn't actually ever be allowed to do with the physical books.
But the post is pretty misleading it says
> Our paper books have lasted hundreds of years on our shelves and are still readable. Without active maintenance, we will be lucky if our digital books last a decade.
But every library I've been at also has active maintenance for their physical books! They control the humidity, they check for water leaks, they look for pests. Nobody is throwing 100+ year old books into an aluminium shed.
Also, I now live in a country where I don't speak the local language especially fluently, so reading books published here is less fun. Importing physical books in my native language is extremely expensive, since books aren't especially light. Shipping is often close to the price of the book itself. And delivery usually takes weeks, anyway.
Digital books actually are available to most of the world in a way that physical books aren't.