Why we do it

Some thoughts on books and technology by Ed Charlton

I'm a pack-rat. I admit it.

In my parent's garage is a collection of 78s. For those who don't remember them, they are the original vinyl platters. They were big, heavy and moved very fast, so fast that you couldn't get much music on each side.

In my own garage are my collections of 45s and 33s. In my basement are the boxes of audio cassettes, that, to my disgust, I can no longer play in the car - since today's car stereos typically only play CDs.

Radio Shack has stopped selling VCRs. After all, everyone is watching DVDs aren't they?

The husband of a friend of mine was a Math professor. He had stacks of disks with programs and lecture notes - floppy disks, not diskettes, genuine floppies. I've been around computers for twenty-five years and have never used a floppy drive. All that stuff is impossible to recover without what is now classed as specialist equipment. NASA found this a problem when investigating the anomalies with the path a Pioneer spacecraft is taking out of the solar system. They had to build a drive from scratch to recover some of the early telemetry. The technology has changed that much since the craft were launched.

Where are your photographs?

Your traditional photographs, if they are properly stored, and depending on the quality of the paper and the ink used when they were printed, should last for several generations.

Where are your digital photos?

On diskette? Dell no longer ships PCs with diskette drives, you have to order them specially.

On CD? The days of CDs are numbered. They hold a fraction of the data that the next generation of disks will hold. Flash drives and Compact drives are rapidly taking over. As yet there is no universal device that has conquered the market - nothing that is so common that it can be guaranteed to be used for years and years to come.

Unless every manufacturer guarantees what they call 'backward compatibility' - and they won't - to look at your digital photographs in fifty years time you are going to need today's equipment and today's programs. Good luck.

The same thing is happening with electronic books. Each machine is offered as 'The Machine That Will Do Away With Printed Books Forever' and each one is a proprietary device with a limited sales cycle.

Take a look at your bookshelf.

If it's anything like mine, there are books up there you've had all your life. Maybe some of them were on your parents' or grandparents' shelves. Books aren’t going away any time soon. How we make them might change, what we make them out of might change, but books are a medium both universal and time-tested.

That’s why I love books.

In fifty years' time, your readership won't need an antique computer, a weird looking disk-drive, or expensive retrieval software to read your words. Your book will be on a bookshelf - where else?