CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK JUNKIE #12: Rumours of the death have been somewhat premature (or, on the difference between print and digital storage)

by Lavie Tidhar It’s been prophesied for a while now that the print book is doomed. Electronic books! Digital media! Soon, say those biblical prophets of the Information Age, print books will become obsolete. After all, anyone with access to the Internet can now download books – cheaply, quickly, without effort. Soon all books will be digitised, available as electronic files, like an uplifted humanity that has abandoned its physical presence in a science fictional Upload into the matrix, there to live forever as gods in the machine… And yet. Computer hard-drives, as anyone with a personal computer in the last twenty years has quickly found out, have a short life-expectancy. The last time I lost a major amount of data – mostly e-mails – was a few years ago, and since then I’ve switched to using gmail as a way of providing e-mail backup, and a secondary, external hard drive to back up other material – work, photographs, etc. – both of which could nevertheless fail. I like electronic ... (link)