[TheOtherHobbes]

The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default.

You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes.

But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media.

We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing.

Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off.

A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.)

This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility.

A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all.

A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone.

And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.

[mrob]

>If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.)

Any examples of video or audio files that are currently impossible to watch/listen to because knowledge of the file format, and all software capable of playing it was lost? If such a thing has happened, there are probably people interested in reverse engineering the format.

[pbhjpbhj]

I can pick up some writing on physical media -- an Akkadian clay tablet -- and read it (if I have the knowledge) despite it being thousands of years old.

Things like laserdiscs, I can probably still buy equipment to read, but it's substantially different as I need the technology to read it.

Microfiche is quite good in this respect, you can easily read it even without the specific tech it was made for (using a magnifier, or projecting the image with a simple light source.

I wonder if you could make a crystal where, like a hologram, you can rotate the crystal a minute amount in order to project a different page (an idea I saw decades ago had a digital clock style projection from a crystal, used asa sundial -- pretty sure it was theoretical).

That way the information is relatively easy to discover, and with a simple light source you can get info out if it.

[elygre]

I keep hearing the fear of losing content because of obsolete file formats.

Then I think about Linear B, and I rest again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B

[mrob]

There's no emulator that can run a Linear B parser. If a linear B dictionary ever existed, it was never mass produced. Linear B is older than the printing press, let alone the Internet. But now we do have those technologies, and "lots of copies makes stuff safe" is cheaper and easier than ever. I don't believe any mainstream digital format (i.e. popular enough to have a Wikipedia page) will be permanently lost unless there's a complete collapse of society, and then we'll have bigger problems to worry about.

[Koshkin]

In the modern world, a physical book is nothing more than a mere printout of a PDF file or a photocopy of an old edition. People print web pages all the time, but nobody in their right mind would think much about these printouts, let alone philosophize about their tangibility, endurance etc.

On the other hand, old books, with their high-quality paper, binding and letter-press print do seem have some kind of personality...