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Am I the only one that reacted to voluntarily chopping up books with shock and horror?
"I'm digitizing my friends and family by chopping up their bodies and scanning them."
"That way I won't have to freeze them later"
X-D
For me, the shock and horror was cancelled out by the knowledge that the books would be digitized. Books are important to me only insofar as they are repositories of information; the destruction of books is only horrifying in the sense that a copy of that information is being lost.
Since, in this case, the intention is explicitly the preservation of information in another form, the downside (and therefore the shock and horror) is eliminated for me.
Not entirely for me, since digital media are a lot less robust than paper.
You make a good point; but one of the advantages of digital media is that it's so easy to translate it into other forms. Hook up a printer, print and bind it, and you've got another copy of the book; which, as a bonus, has had its clock reset.
Of course, I realise one wouldn't do that for most books due to cost; but combined with a good off-site backup policy, the possibility nonetheless exists that the books may survive longer.
Yes, but this requires continual active maintenance.
The answer is a good sturdy ROM.
I'm inclined to think that big companies and governments may already be doing this sort of thing, but since ROM is basically useless for consumers, we don't see any of it.
If it's not already being done, that's a big project someone needs to get on.
CDs and DVDs are ROMs. Not as robust as paper, but then, you can't usefully put audio or video recordings on paper anyway.
But a ROM that can't be read by the naked eye isn't a complete solution, as you have data formats and hardware readers to think of. There exists data that is fairly robustly stored, but no-one can read, because the support technology has moved on. Betamax tapes, Laserdiscs, Zip drives, floppies of various sizes. How many people can still read those? Even if you have the hardware, can you mount the file system and decode the documents?
Point. They are, however, nowhere near as robust as the ROM of old, and are often not truly ROM at all, so I wasn't really thinking of them in that category. Technically, you are correct, though.
The same can be said of the written English language (or just language in general). I expect, that with time and patience, it would be perfectly possible to reconstruct the system needed to read a data format, just from the data format itself. Harder, certainly, with more layers of encoding, but by degree, not kind.
If we are attempting to preserve data beyond the point where the human race can look after it themselves, chances are that any information at all, regardless of storage medium, will require a fair bit of detective work, decryption, and translation.
True. It's a trade-off between long-term survivability and short-term copyability.
Unfortunately, a lot of digital media have deliberately been encumbered to make it unusually difficult to do just that.
That is indeed a major problem. I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that when digitising one's own books one would select a format that one could easily copy and translate at will.
By no means! Some books in particular I've been very hesitant to cut up.
I was doing this in the past to heavy-weight books for very pragmatic reasons: Gödel, Escher, Bach is worthless to me if the book would just sit around in a corner, but to take it with me and read it while commuting, I had to get the weight down.
Since learning this amazing trick, any book I read and that's inconvenient to hold has to fear the knife.
Definitely not. I was reminded of Rainbow's End.
It was my gut reaction of about two seconds. At that point that I remembered Friendship is Optimal and chuckled internally at my amusingly illogical double standards.
As long as information and utility are both conserved, and ideally increased (in proportion to the entropy expended in the process), I really see no problems intellectually, even if I dislike the thought of mutilating books on principle.
I was mostly amused.