Digital Wanderer | Books - About digital media

Umberto Eco and his buddies have put out some book about books called “Don't Hope to Get Rid of Books!”. Here is a piece on Delfi

In turn, Jean-Claude Carrière told a story about a friend whose basement is stuffed with old computers, which he keeps solely to be able to play back some materials dear to him. And this applies to all information media, be it magnetic tape or the first CD-ROM. The striking image of a basement stuffed with old computers is a symbol of what is happening to us, to our memory, and to our attempts to preserve information in the "digital" age.

This quote is enough to make you realize that these old farts don't understand a thing about digital progress. You can see here how they are trying to apply digital in the exact same way as in the era before it. That is, they tie information to physical media. This is absurd, since getting away from that is exactly what we're trying to do. What this friend should have done is copy the data to a hard drive in advance, back when high-capacity ones became available. And then constantly copy it to new drives when upgrading, while keeping a backup on an external device. If he doesn't want to waste time on this (which is understandable and right), there are mountains of online services for syncing and storage at his disposal nowadays. They didn't exist before, but you have to understand that right now is a transition period, and by old standards it's passing in the blink of an eye — the transition from leather manuscripts and papyri to paper took way longer.

Besides, the quote about the difficulty of reading old data isn't really fair. Any modern drive reads old CD-ROMs. A floppy drive is harder to find, but still possible for now. As for data formats — nobody is forcing you to use proprietary ones. A standard text file in UTF-8 or Unicode encoding will still be readable hundreds of years from now. With pictures it's trickier, but it's highly unlikely that bmp, jpg, and png will disappear in the coming decades, thankfully they've been de facto standards for a long time already. Video is the worst off, but here again you have to use the most standard tools — MPEG 1/2/3/4. But we don't even need to talk about video, because regular books can't even have it in the first place.

Lovers of physical media also like to muse about the ephemerality of digital and how easy it is to lose data. The problem exists, I won't argue. But similar problems existed with old media too: a book can rot, mice can chew it up, it can burn down, or who knows what else.

In short — e-media become obsolete faster than people change their habits... For instance, U. Eco complained that somewhere around 1984 he dumped the first draft of the novel "Foucault's Pendulum" onto a floppy disk of the time. Well, when he needed this text some 20 years later, he couldn't find this floppy anywhere, and never did find it, it got lost, but even if he had found it, what would he read it on now?... But if, Eco says, I had typed this draft on a typewriter or written it by hand, then being a bibliophile, he of course would have preserved those manuscripts...

Again, strange logic: being a “bibliophile”, he gets attached to the physical medium. It makes sense that such a medium embodies the content too much for him, both out of habit and due to the wiring of the human brain, which demands something real. But why parade a quirk, even if its side effect would have brought some benefit, as a virtue? I, for one, know digital “pack rats” who collect works in digital form in exactly the same way, and they would have preserved it in exactly the same way. The best and most correct scenario is when using digital tools is so simple and convenient that everything is reliably saved on its own and the content is easy to recover later. That is where things are heading.

P.S. I am not considering scenarios of a global cataclysm — that's a separate issue and people are working on it too, but it goes beyond the scope of this post.

P.P.S. It is quite possible that the book itself isn't as categorical and inflammatory as these quotes, but still.