After the Burial!

Funny, I don't recall anyone blissfully sniffing their books until the threat from e-publishing appeared. Now, readers can't resist comparing their moldy old tomes to the finest Bordeaux.

I'm not an e-book contrarian. In some ways I think e-books are cool. I work in technology. I love technology. If it was legal, I'd marry technology. As a tech writer, I've been making online documentation since before Project Gutenberg when AS/400s were the means to get electronic documentation. I may not have said "RTFM" first, but I was an early adopter. It's just that my online documentation isn't around anymore except on my hard drive. I have kept nearly every project I've written since my early days of CP/M and Wordstar. Here's the rub: when I try to open one of these old documents, here's what I get:

My high school paper on Jon Donne was written in Wordstar for CP/M and looks like crap now

Why is that? Wordstar isn't around. Oh and check out this error:

Word doesn't like older Word docs.

That is Microsoft Word protecting me from my own early Word documents. Sure there's a work around but now we get into security and old files. Those who have not adventured to DIY PC maintenance may be at a loss as to how to recover that letter they wrote Aunt Marge telling her to stick it.

Do you know what this is?

Old documents and software I have to keep for some reason

This is a necessity for previous client work. Somewhere in this stack is Corel Ventura so I can open a bunch of documents I did for somebody many years ago. I don't know what the retention should be on holding that kind of work. I'm no longer independent, but if they want the source files, I have them. There are no rules for this other than everything changes.

How about PDF? It's an open standard right? The only wide and open standard is PDF/A is plain text and doesn't prevent anybody from copying and forwarding out the books. So we go back to digital rights management (DRM). I hate DRM. Why is it that I don't have the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs anymore? It's because I bought that album from MusicMatch in 2004 and Yahoo took MusicMatch and flushed it down the DRM hole. However, I still have all of the MP3s I purchased from Lala.com as real downloads and I'm glad I did since Apple seems to be treating Lala.com like MusicMatch's ugly step-sister's dog. I predict long-term e-book DRM will be full of headaches, lost purchases, and overcomplicated restriction. It's the nature of the business.

Also from that article is this:

The shelf life of dead-tree books roughly approximates that of a pint of yogurt, but out-of-print books get eternal life on the Internet.

Levine goes on to explain how one of his books is out of print but alive and well as an e-book. That's great for authors. But I point you to the photo above of my stack of CDs. In that stack are CDs of electronically published books I never reference. I forget about them. I forget who wrote them. I forget what they are about. The very fact I have terabytes of documents and a growing deficit of time to organize means more things are lost in the shuffle. I don't see much cover art and authors' names when I look in a directory.

Your book may live on forever on the Internet, but what is "eternal life"? Authors don't want to be pirated, but Levine discusses free classics and their abundance online. The classics are abundant because they are freely distributed. I can get Sherlock Holmes books from any number of sites in just about every format imaginable. But my favorite edition is this printed edition I had recovered after my dog chewed the spine.

It's not anything but a personal preference. When I buy a real book, it's tangible. While I don't normally smell my books, I will admit loving the bookstore smell. I also don't collect books in the first-edition-or-die sense. But here are my shelves:

Technical, business, and design books:

Technical, business, and design books.

Living room fiction:

Living Room Fiction

Bedroom fiction:

Bedroom Reading Queue

Eldest child fiction:

Eldest Child Fiction

While my collection won't live forever, I've yet to have a shelf not allow me to read a book or give me something incompatible with my reading environment. I'm open to e-books, but not that open.

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