Digital doesn't wear out

[smarriveurr]

It was with palpable pain that I noticed that my copy of the third Riverworld novel was splitting along a bend in the spine. I put it down that night, and even though I was a couple chapters in, I haven't picked it up since. In part, this is just because, as mentioned earlier, I am ludicrously kind to books, and for some reason anal-retentive about

Comments

[lietya]

Oh, that is a shame. Poor book. You are also clearly a bit more organized than I am - my books always start out in perfect order, and then later additions get piled on/near the shelf and whatnot. :)

That is true about CDs. I was thinking that they were marketed as likely to last *longer,* not forever, than tapes (which was certainly true in my experience). I'm also not sure about the totally immune part, since as you then go on to say, the access can become an issue; one still needs an interpretive program and a method of connection to the storage medium, and both of those can theoretically go kaput in weird ways as technology and progress run us over.

I do agree that the proprietary formats are particularly and specifically difficult, and it's one reason I wasn't thrilled about iTunes. I have no idea, incidentally, why Amazon made a big deal of selling DRM-free music and thereby pressuring the market to follow... and then chose to DRM the hell out of their e-books. It's bizarre.

As far as that goes, ironically, I prefer the e-book reading experience on my PC (it allows *me* to choose precisely the screen dimensions/resolution/input method/etc. that I like best), and yet I spend so much time staring at a computer for work that I don't actually want to carve out additional hunks of my free time to do so.