Yes the books might be forgotten but in 50 years when some historian wants to look back to what real life was like in this decade they are going to be lucky if they find something not a government record left online. The books and printout will still exist in some attic. in some quantity so if someone wants to look for it(theres historian digging trough personal attics for stuff created 50-75 years ago rignt not), theres a change of finding something.

I do find it interesting, though, that in order to show the internet’s “non-eternal” status, extreme apocalyptic scenarios had to be introduced. Barring these, I think the internet remains a true archive of human endeavor.

Good point about linking to the Internet Archive’s funding page. I’m sure they can use all the help they can get, although as I understand it they do have some pretty big backers as is.

Thanks for commenting.

paper has a much better chance to survive nuclear warfare than the average online posting. and hey, it wasnt me who brought eternity into the discussion. nuclear warfare could put us back to the punchcard age. electronic storage has its issues.

i agree with some other things you are saying, and thanks for the discussion. uhm, maybe the link to the internet archive should point to the donations page. it is nothing to be taken for granted, you know.

.~.

Robert, I have the opposite experience as you – I generally find websurfing to not be relaxing, but to give me a strange mix of satisfaction at the perceived accomplishment of emptying my RSS reader, and stress at just how much more there is out there to read. I usually go away feeling a little amped out. Reading a book – now that’s relaxing. E-books included, naturally.

Daniel, salient points. Electronic documents, as opposed to web postings are possibly more likely to be lost than paper printouts. But I stress the “possibly.” Who’s going to sift through all those cardboard boxes and file cabinets? Whereas, archived pages are already organized and searchable, at least in theory.

Nico, thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to have a look around your site.

Kiran, I am a Free Culturalist to the bone, as it were – but – if in 25 years there are no longer enough trees to produce books we are going to have much, much bigger problems than the ones Carter and myself are worried about …

Thanks, everybody, for your comments.

I also took issue with Carter’s piece, and blogged about it here.

Going digital means having a high rate of copy destruction, i mean i have printouts but as a rule no digital copies of most of what i did of work doing my education in a box somewhere. and the stuff i write at work is almost always overwriting someone else’s work(we dont keep long term backups) and when i move on someone else will overwrite my contribution to the documentations, and by then no copies will exist of previus versions since you dont do versioning for a knowledge database.

Books maybe turned into pulp at the source but theres going to exist a lot of copies out in the wild where boxes of stuff gets forgotten in attics, basements, and old office spaces. and discs get outdated i actually found a disc probably i perfect working order formatted for old macs, even locating a drive was hard and windows cant even read it, i even doubt modern macs can. The only readable part was the label.

Do we finish a lot of long things on the Net? Or do we only read a lot of short things? Another way to put it: would we be more comfortable watching 10 15 minute Charlie Chaplin movies or 1 Star Wars episode?

Personally, I would hate to do the math and figure out how many words I’m reading/wasting online each day in comparison to books. While reading online, I skim an awful lot.

It’s the information overload vs. information scarcity problem. Information overload really results in less enjoyment of reading; on the other hand, in this age, we need to have the ability to sieve through lots of information.

The next question is: when do you enjoy reading the most? At the moment I surf for 30-60 minutes in the morning before I get starting with work or whatever. I find it pleasant and relaxing, but not really a rich experience.