Lost in Storage

I have resisted Kindle, in part because I do not think of books as “digital information”. The having of the book and its location on the bookshelf is part of the experience. The medium is the message.

The thought came to mind when we recently had a conversation with a library science student. Skipping over the part of the conversation where I stepped in it by being naively unaware that so-and-so is transgendered, we talked about electronic media. A hot issue in library science (yes there are!) is the effort to categorize and preserve various forms of electronic media.

Take for example the Kindle. How 2009 is the Kindle? In 20 years will Amazon be supporting Kindles while they are trying to peddle Kindle Super 5’s? Will all those books be lost?

Closer to home, I’m writing in Word and html (hyper-text mark-up language) to be posted on the Internet and located by http (hyper-text transfer protocol). In 20 years there will be an Internet, but Word? Html? Http? In the future someone is going to need ancient technology to find Contraria. There will be no book on the shelf.

Of course it has already happened, but I never thought about it. My attic has dusty boxes of 8” disks in c/pm format WordStar. Is there some magical machine somewhere that can read them? I have a box of 5 ¼” disks in DOS formatted Q&A word processing and 3 ½ inch disks in Word 96 for which I keep one 3 ½” disk drive for emergencies. All lost, lost and lost.

So the Library Scientists have a challenge. We live in the moment, writing in Word then html found by http, oblivious. Since Gutenberg we have had books as we know them. The future? As usual, not so clear.