I mean, books deteriorate, a file can be copied and backed up. There’s no doubt DRM-Free Ebooks are superior, right? Is there anything I’m missing?
I mean, books deteriorate, a file can be copied and backed up. There’s no doubt DRM-Free Ebooks are superior, right? Is there anything I’m missing?
In the moment, yes.
However, the longevity of digital data is problematic. Computers have existed for less then a 100 years, but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape.
Modern protocols and formats are much more complex, so I’d say that reading your data in 100 years will be harder then reading 100 year old data today. Have a look at a pdf in a text editor. Imagine trying to figure that out once the documentation is lost. (… or stored in the pdf)
Without continual efforts to convert data or preserve hardware and software, the data will be lost.
Compare that to written documents. We have writing that’s thousands of years old, and it’s still legible and understandable. We have paper documents about as old as we’ve been able to make the stuff.
Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.
USB floppy drives are pretty easy to buy online now. I bought one from either Amazon or Ali Express a little while ago, and it works perfectly :)