Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Fergus Wilde <fwilde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 21 November 2005 21:51, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> The Monday 2005-11-21 at 07:06 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> > I, too, love books and my apartment is not big enough to hold my
> > library. Does that stop me from getting more? No way.
>
> Me too.
>
> > But I think it's likely we'll see digital paper that is entirely
> > paper-like (thin, flexible, probably tougher than real paper) that can
> > display text and imagery like a printed page but be electronically
> > changeable as well as holding its image persistently even when no power
> > is supplied. Such books would have all the characteristics of a book
> > today plus allow moving images and sound and search. No doubt with such
> > technology in hand, people would find new things to do with "books."
>
> I don't need cute features like search or sound, for that I'd have the
> wall computer or the tablet (think Star Trek). What I want is to decide
> what I'm going to read, "plug" an empty or available "digibook" to the
> computer, and download "I Robot" to it in a reasonable time, so that I can
> take it to bed.
>
> > Would you object to having your library in electronic form and only as
> > many "books" as you could actually use at once? Probably, and probably
> > so would I, but that may not be true of future generations of book
> > lovers. I do like to browse my library and pick up titles to peruse
> > just to see what snippet of new knowledge I can pick up. Of course,
> > when I can't find something I know is in some book somewhere in my
> > library, I'm annoyed...
>
> Paper is probably more perdurable than any other technology we have
> invented yet for data storage. It has been proven "technology" over the
> centuries.

Apart from adding that parchment is probably to be preferred if you want 
serious longevity - our 700 year old Matthew Paris manuscript is liable to be 
going just as strong in another 700 years as long as no-one soaks or burns it 
- Carlos is absolutely right about longevity. The bulk of material in our 
library is two to five hundred years old, and I would like to see the 
electronic technology that proves stable and reliable enough to retrieve data 
anywhere you like that has enough light without power supply over that kind 
of timespan.

Various highly misguided schemes, such as 'transferring' books and periodicals 
to microfilm, trashing the originals to save space, have already come 
horribly unstuck as 'disposable' 19th century newspapers prove time and again 
that they last a great deal better than the surrogate media intended to 
replace them. Nicholson Baker has written an excellent book on this theme, 
'Double Fold: libraries and the assault on paper', 2002. Check it out for 
some very interesting findings on serious data longevity.

>
> Think!
>
> You need a CD. A computer. Electricity. Suppose civilization is destroyed,
> you have to build anew. You know the "disaster first aid manual" is in
> that CD... which you can not read, because there is no power, computers
> were destroyed, and you have to build electronic manufacturing first. It'd
> take ages! Supposing the knowledge or the paper books to rebuild
> all that were written and survived...
>
> Ok, I shut up. It is OT. Well... it could be worse... that CD could be in
> word instead of in OOo, and only Linux could be rebuilt because Microsoft
> had disappeared! :-p
>
> --
> Cheers,
>        Carlos Robinson