AAR

[bookmark]

By that I mean, if I wanted to play a VHS tape or cassette tape I owned, I'd have to dig out my VHS or cassette tape player and hope it still works.

With printed books or even photographs, once you have that paper copy, you have it forever as it is. Maybe the paper may fade, but it's readily available and there's no possibility of it being lost, unless in a fire or some such. With the way technology is always evolving, might not some of the hard drives/sd cards/flash drives/etc... or whatever else we use to store all these digital information not work in the future? I'm sure the readers also are going to be constantly changing as well. With my ebook library, if something happens to the reader or the media where I stored all the books, all will be lost. The same with photographs.

Do you get where I'm going with this? Or am I being paranoid and thinking too much? LOL.

[willaful]

Not at all, these are legitimate concerns. You can take precautions by backing up your digital books, which makes it about as safe as anything else on your computer. I think a bigger concern is whether any of the ebooks will outlast the companies that "sold" them to you. This is one of the reasons to prefer books without DRM.

I'm not much inclined to buy ebooks because I feel like I'm only renting them. I get most of mine free or from the library, or from DRM-free publishers like Smashwords.
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"I say, don't read the classics -- try to discover your own classics; every life has its own." -- Rudolf Flesch, _How to Make Sense_

[Charlotte McClain]

I was once told my a digital artist that there are two kinds of computer files. Those you've lost and those you're going to lose. Unfortunately, everything is like that. Paper books get lost or damaged or are packed in boxes in your mother's garage halfway around the world. I keep everything on an external hard drive in the hopes that I'll be able to access it later.
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Angsty romance with scattered humor.
My Faux Website

[NoirFemme]

I don't think you're being paranoid. However, I think consumers are driving the e-book market (for the moment), and with some e-Readers tied to certain formats (like the Kindle and .azw) and others pretty open (like the Sony Reader), the variety of formats will remain. Plus, if worse comes to worst, you can strip the DRM from your ebooks and convert them to different formats via Calibre if you change your preferred e-Reader.

[MMcA]

The photographs worry me more than the books. I do expect, because I'm useless at backing things up, that I'll lose my ebooks periodically. But I'd only want to replace the keepers. And I suppose I hope that ebooks won't go OOP the way physical books do, so that it's a trade off - they may be easier to lose, but they'll also be easier to find again.

But the photos... My children are all teenagers, and keep their lives on facebook - I've only things like school photos and their formal photos in physical form. I keep meaning to print out a selection, but never get round to it.

[bookmark]

But if the media with which I'm using to back up all my information keeps changing, I would need to keep copying my ebooks onto the more newer storage media. The formats of the books I would imagine would also keep changing. As I mentioned previously, paper degrades with time, can not the digital media also have something similar affect? At least, with the paper, we have years of history to show how long they last.

I think having a boxed set of books belonging to you being at someone else's house far away is still more easily retrievable and in its' original state is much different that having digital media that can easily be lost if either the media that stored it or the format of the books themselves has changed.

I'm going to try printing all my photos onto paper just in case!