Dead tree storage medium? How quaint…

The physical book was never the memento of mankind, it was the written word it contained. I find it amusing so many people cling to a 2000 year old invention but have no qualms replacing their cellphone every 2 years.

Assuming there is only one hard copy of an old rare book, given the choice to preserve it or digitize it, the choice should be made on its utility value which is, I think, the digitization of the copy.

@Eric Daum and @Morghan If the point is to preserve it, once you digitize you can make as many hard copies as you want and store them in separate locations, while keeping the digital copy available to everybody.

@Jed, totally agree! This attachment we have with paper books will fade with time.

@Everyone saying they still like to have paper books
You might, but chances are, the vast majority of your children’s children will not care. They will be brought up on amazing interactive digital books that come to life as you read them, and maybe more. Possibly add another 1+ generations if you are skeptical it will happen that fast, either way it’s inevitable.

@Ethan
In regards to holding off for better methods, what about the possibility of losing some of the physical copies in that time due to degradation or other possibilities.

I think that while digitizing everything is a cool idea, 1) it isn’t practical, 2) I like to have real, paper books in addition to ebooks, and 3) there will probably be licensing/DRM issues caused by the whole project. I think that it is handy to have a digital copy of something, but, to me the physical copy is much more important. Also, this isn’t a very practical undertaking. We don’t have the technology to do it yet. If we ever get the technology to destructively digitize books, we should hold off, because, undoubtedly, newer, better technology will come along, enabling us to do the same thing, just in a non-destructive manner.

@astine if your concerened about the remaining integrity of a file, after partial corruption, you are doing it wrong.

I havnt read the book, but surely this would only be an issue with increadibly rare books, would the world care (to much) if a single copy of a popular book, was destroyed?

And I disagree about the importance of libraries today, at the Uni I attend, people still use physical books. There was large public outcry in the city I live in, when the council (who run the librarys, and finance it off house rates) were planing to introduce a per book charge, which they backtracked on.

As much as I love the practicallity of ebook readers, I will still love my physical books, for all the warm fuzzy niceties I find in them, which an ebook lacks.

The Earth, in my vision of the future, is a park or preserve. No matter how advanced, even post singularity, the Earth should be preserved until the sun finally takes it. Even in the efficiency there must be some nostalgia, and there will always be people who refuse to upload.

Sidenote:
Digital stuff is physical, too. As a human, you just need an interpreting device to access the information.

I would say the physical copy is better because it still works when there is no power. When the inevitable happens and our computers are rendered in operable by the nuclear holocaust there will still be books. Books which will educate and entertain the survivors during the long nuclear winter allowing them to rebuild civilization on the other side.

I’ve done work in digitization projects so I can tell you that destructive digitization is definitely not a purely science fiction concept, at least not for video. The Library of Congress actual has ancient video images stored in a variety of formats that can only be retrieved once due to the degenerate nature of the storage material and there is a serious debate as to whether we actually should do so.

Very few librarians are actually apposed to the digitization on the grounds that physical copies have some important intrinsic value as it’s pretty clear that it’s the content that counts. Besides, the physical copies will degenerate sooner or later eventually anyway and as soon as you digitize, you can easily make more copies. The debate is actually more one of analog vs digital, as well as one of costs.

Basically, digital copies can only contain a certain level of fidelity to the original, and the question is, “how long should we wait to digitize something,” so that we can get the best fidelity possible. It’s also cheaper in a lot of ways to store a physical object than a digital copy, because digital copies need copies of themselves, because digital copies are far less resilient individually than physical copies. Even our best digital storage technologies have a lower shelf life than paper so we need to be constantly migrating tapes or hard disk, which gets expensive with large collections.

You can’t reasonably compress digital copies either because that makes them less durable. You get a situation where 1% bit rot destroys a copy whereas 10% or 50% is survivable with uncompressed, high fidelity copies.

In the end though, everything’s going digital eventually. It’s the obvious trend and the advantages are too great for it not to happen.