Reality Check by Dave Whamond for June 15, 2015

They are.

Live long and prosper.

As technology changes the medium has to change. Think * tracks, cassette recorders, floppy disks, and soon CD’s.The file may exist but will be inaccessible unless you have functioning equipment that they don’t sell anymore.

The DVD is ironic as they too are almost dead. In fact they are more obsolete than books.

Those book were bound to turn on them sooner or later.

Digital readers do a pretty good job for reading.

While a Kindle is a step in the right direction, they rate about 41% of a book. Microsoft’s Reader was much closer, on my PDA, perhaps 95%.

A ‘reader" is maybe 1% of a book; it has words – though briefly. A book works in sunlight, doesn’t get dead batteries, and looks, feels & smells like a book.And as any archivist will tell you, if it’s not eye-readable, it’s not preserved. Microfilm (only medium other than paper that will last 150 years)? Get me a magnifying glass. Electronic file? Pretty much history as soon as it’s made.

Fair enough, but each medium has its place. Camera phone pictures won’t last forever, nannynew says; but then neither will Polaroids, besides which maybe 0.01% of camera phone pictures are worth keeping for more than one week. As for books, well, not every book is THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. WINDOWS 8 FOR DUMMIES will be obsolete before the DVD; there is no conceivable reason to by such a book on high-quality, acid-free paper so that your grandkids can enjoy it in decades to come. The vast majority of books are fluff, or evil (yes, there are evil books), or on a topic which makes them obsolete after a few years. (Any textbook on astronomy suffers this last fate due to the pace of discovery.)

“buy”, not “by”

I mean, really, just because they were here first! WOW! The unbelievable self-importance.

They are!…..They are!

They are-for reading. But on hard drive is good to, for when the book falls apart, so it can be remembered and re-written.