Digital Wanderer | Books - About digital media

Umberto Eco and his buddies put out some book about books, “This is Not the End of the Book!”. 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 impressive image of a basement stuffed with old computers is a symbol of what is happening to us, to our memory, and our attempts to preserve information in the "digital" era.

This quote is enough to understand that these old farts don't know the first thing about digital progress. You can see here how they try to use digital in the exact same way as in the era before it. That is, they tie information to physical media. This is absurd, because this is exactly what we are trying to get away from. 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 during upgrades, and keep a backup on an external device. If he doesn't want to spend time on this (which is understandable and right), there are now mountains of online services at his disposal for synchronization and storage. They didn't exist before, but you have to understand that right now is a transition period, and by old standards it's passing instantly – the transition from leather manuscripts and papyrus to paper took much 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 forces you to use proprietary ones. A standard text file in UTF-8 or Unicode encoding will be readable for hundreds of years to come. With pictures it's harder, but bmp, jpg, and png are unlikely to disappear in the coming decades, thankfully they've been de facto standards for a long time. With video it's the worst, 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 normal books can't possibly have it anyway.

Fans of physical media also love to pontificate about the ephemerality of digital and how easy it is to lose data. The problem exists, I won't argue. But there were similar problems with old media too: a book can rot, mice can gnaw on it, it can burn down, you name it.

In short — e-media become obsolete faster than a person changes their habits... For instance, U. Eco complained that back around 1984 he saved the first draft of his novel "Foucault's Pendulum" onto a floppy disk of the time. Well, when some 20 years later he needed this text, he couldn't find this floppy disk no matter what, and never found it, it got lost, and even if he had found it, what would he read it on now?… And if, says Eco, I had typed this draft on a typewriter or written it by hand, then being a bibliophile, he would certainly have saved these manuscripts…

Again, strange logic: being a “bibliophile”, he gets attached to the physical medium. It's understandable 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 craves something tangible. But why parade a quirk as a virtue, even if its side effect would have brought some benefit? I happen to know digital "pack rats" who collect works in digital form in the exact same way, and for them it would have been preserved in the exact same way. The best and proper way is when using digital tools is so simple and convenient that everything is reliably saved on its own and the content is easily restored later. That's where things are heading.

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

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