From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sat Mar 11 2000 - 17:06:56 PST
Joseph S. Barrera III writes:
> Books don't need batteries, and if properly cared for, they will still be
> usable in 500 years. Browned, foxed, brittle, perhaps, but still quite
Only if printed on acid-free paper. Many books from the 1960s are by
now essentially unusable. They disintegrate when you try to turn the
pages.
> usable.
Well, I have a library of, what?, ~5000 books. Unfortunately, it is
unusable because 1) it's bulk doesn't make it transportable, at least
not on my budget, so it has been sitting in storage for over a year,
under suboptimal conditions 2) I can't full-text search, nor can I
send copies of relevant volumes to my friends, nor cut & paste text
passages, and I can't backup it either.
In short, information on dead trees sucks. I would much prefer the
library to reside in a 1280x1024 laptop, if not a rugged wearable with
multimegapixel-headup, and a clear defined migration path.
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