Will we be able to read today’s e-books 20 or more years from now? I’ll show you why it’s absurd to hope so.
This is a picture of the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas printed in 1663, 347 years ago. The book is easily readable, the typeset is a little archaic but not dramatically different from the font you are now reading. I have several other books in my home which are over 300 years old. I estimate these books will be readable for 300-400 more years before they are too fragile to be read.
Summa Theologica printed in 1663
Completed in 1274 this edition of the Summa was printed in 1663 and is readable 736 years after the book was written. Will that be true for most or even some e-books which never see paper? I would not take that bet.
Also shown is a 5.25″ floppy disk which contains an electronic copy of my PhD thesis written 22 years ago on an MS-DOS machine in Word 2.0 (or something like that). This disk is not readable for several reasons: 1) I cannot find the hardware to read the disk, 2) Microsoft has intentionally obsoleted this old .doc format, and 3) the magnetic bits have begun to degrade. This disk was essentially unreadable 10 years after it was written. Typical computer storage media have a lifetime of about a decade. The primary driver of this limitation is the economic pressure to stop making outdated equipment. The plastic CD/DVD may survive 20 years, but soon most people will buy pads and phones instead of computers, and few people will live in a home which has the hardware to spin and read a plastic disk.
Many bloggers are joyfully touting the end of bookstores, libraries, and paper books. I believe this will be a disaster for our society because the durability of e-books is measured in years. How many times have you accidentally discarded a book? Now how many times have you accidentally deleted a file, in the past month? Files are lost every day in countless mishaps. Can you imagine a world where the only copies of The Lord of the Rings are electronic and could be permanently lost by a simple keystroke? Or how about a world where we have lost the encryption keys so the only way to read “A Tale of Two Cities” is by an illegal brute force decryption? I don’t want to live in that world.
I predict that within 10 years we will be not be able to buy an e-book reader which can read some files purchased for today’s Kindle or Nook. This may sound absurd but note that I’m not necessarily talking about a technical limitation. If Barnes and Noble cannot find a buyer it may disappear. If Amazon is purchased by Microsoft the obsolescence of the e-book format could become embedded into the product cycle. If the EFF and Cory Doctorow succeed in eliminating the DMCA then the current encryption standards could be judged illegal and a producing a reader which decrypts such materials could also become illegal.
The Long Now foundation Rosetta Project is working on a “book” which will be readable in 10,000 years. That book will be printed using atoms because no 21st century electronic file will be readable in 10k years. Anybody who wants to be able to read books 20 years after purchase had better not buy bits, you should buy atoms. And if books printed with atoms disappear from our lives then God help our society because we are doomed.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Ian Redman // Sep 17, 2010 at 4:04 am
Interesting, but how the book is published is just the medium, your copy of Summa isn’t 736 years old, its only 347 so you should only be comparing a life of 347 years with a life of 10, doesn’t look so bad now
The other thing to take note of is that I believe modern printing processes are also less durable than of old, so our books probably won’t last either…
2 Sean // Sep 20, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Thanks for the comment. My point is that 736 years after publication there are still readable volumes available. This won’t be true for 99.9+% of works published only as ebooks.
3 Bob // Sep 22, 2010 at 6:15 pm
The vast majority of books (99,9%) published 100+ years ago are gone forever.
We are publishing many million TIMES more books than before and they are being read by billions more people. Paper isn’t a realistic solution.
I can read a digital version of the first bible (last surviving copy) and I will still be able to do so long after that bible has turned to dust.( As it already is doing) How many great works disappeared forever in a fire like that of Alexandria?
A digital version that is redundantly saved on servers is not the same as having in on a floppy. If your thesis was on the server now, your great grand-child would be able to google it. However if you have a paper diary – they will never find it even if it still existed.
Our books will last forever now, as it only takes an instant to make a copy on the next even more durable medium.
Sorry but the digitization of paper books will save them, not destroy them.
4 Sean // Sep 22, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Bob, Thanks for the comment.
Have you ever once tried to read a 20 year old file? I have, it didn’t work.
It’s not possible that we are publishing “many millions times more books” now. There are only about 50,000 books published each year now. 400 years ago the number was probably closer to 1000. I guarantee you that you will not be able to read that specific digital copy of the bible in 2000 years. No file format has survived 20 years and there’s no basis for claiming that will change. When you copy a file from an old storage system to a new one you are re-encoding the file in the new format. The characters in the file are identical, but the magnetic encoding, or holographic storage medium is not. If you can’t read the old format you can’t re-encode it. One minor mistake, one slipup in re-encoding from a dying storage format to a new one, and the file is lost forever.
Finally, you didn’t read my comments about my thesis. Microsoft no longer supports the file format I used in 1988. The file might as well be encrypted with AES, is it not readable. The exact same thing will happen with every file format we use except for text. 100 years from we probably won’t even be able to view jpeg images. I hope you are right, but the past 20 years is strong evidence that you are wrong. Can your computer read a 12″ magnetic disk drive? How about a SCSI Zip drive? How about a 5.25″ disk drive?
5 Graham Storrs // Oct 1, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Sean, it’s true that formats and even storage media are changing fast. A novel I wrote in 1980 on a BBC micro is gove forever because, 30 years on, the media and formats I used are unreadable without enormous effort and expense (although it is not impossible – just difficult.)
That taught me a lesson and I now do not rely on external media but keep my files current on my desktop’s hard disc (I also back them all up on DVD.) Each time I upgrade my word processor (or other software) I take the time to open and resave the files I want to preserve in the current format. Having done that since the early 1990s I now have many 20-year-old files in current formats, including several books and many stories.
I own a Kindle and I don’t expect to be able to read anything on it in a few years’ time. So I keep it all backed up and I keep it in mutiple formats. Eventually, EPUB or something like it will become a global standard and I will only need to keep my books updated in one format. Eventually, the technological fix will be readers which will read any format (e.g. I just bought a Blu-Ray player that reads a couple of dozen older formats – the software equivalent for all old format WP files is probably here already if I bothered to google it.) My (published) novel,, TimeSplash, is also stored by the Library of Congress and the Australian National Library.
Paper books tend to last up to 200 years if they are cared for but can be preserved longer. Your Summa Theologica had already gone through some manual format changes before it ever reached the format you own, and the only way to preserve it longer is to copy it again. Nothing much has changed. However, the change to digital storage does mean that we, as a society, must keep at least the current level of technological infrastructure going, or we risk losing everything.
6 jdb // Nov 30, 2010 at 8:05 pm
I agree with you in general. Pretty much anything except ASCII text can and will be obsoleted. More importantly, files themselves are ephemeral. How much electronic data is retained from a few years ago, let alone thirrty or forty? Anything we expect to be preserved for future generations needs a version in quality hardcopy, the more copies the better.
7 Sean // Dec 4, 2010 at 11:17 am
Thanks for the comments.
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