No matter the quality of the paper, it will eventually decay. If you can still read your book from 1640 that's really great but realistically how common is that? There are a lot of environmental factors that affect paper duration and in many areas of the world, a decade is already very long for paper (have worked with an NGO based in Thailand that has 15 years of archives; the first 5 years are hardly readable)
As I said, digital data has the potential to exist forever. Digital data is independent from the media. A media is mostly cheap and disposable.
> Now, if you think that every book with stereotypes should be discarded, that's sad.
I certainly didn't mean that (cf. "gold mine").
> We have the responsibility to preserve history, and the moral duty to challenge what we consider wrong with our reason.
My point exactly. Which is why my comment invited the op to get a data dump and archive it properly. We all know that paper is sensible and would be careful for storage. We need to build and apply a similar set of precautions to store our digital data.
> To wipe it off, that's censorship and a recurrent disease of totalitarian mindsets.
"My" book isn't particularly resilient, it's just the oldest one I've got at home. It was covered in mud, maybe that's why it was the only one not stolen from a very old family house of ours. After all that abuse, it still works, and as a passive device, has needed no energy to keep its contents for 370 years without any change in format or computing platform able to read it every other decade or so. Try any decent library, very old books use to be in the basement, you'd be amazed.
It's a bit embarrassing having to remind you that at least before the 1990s people used old books. Most of the Archives have survived without any special care for centuries (this one is a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_de_Indias). Of course, they didn't use toner neither chlorine bleached paper.
Digital data has the potential, yes, but unless you take continuous action, it suffers from many of the same environmental factors that affects storage of paper, and it is far more prone to losing content from minor errors.
On another forum I follow, someone has spent weeks trying to piece together data from a single 880KB Amiga formatted floppy from 20 years ago...
The reality is that we are notoriously bad at safeguarding digital data. Tons of data has no real backups.
The potential doesn't help us when it doesn't match reality.
As I said, digital data has the potential to exist forever. Digital data is independent from the media. A media is mostly cheap and disposable.
> Now, if you think that every book with stereotypes should be discarded, that's sad.
I certainly didn't mean that (cf. "gold mine").
> We have the responsibility to preserve history, and the moral duty to challenge what we consider wrong with our reason.
My point exactly. Which is why my comment invited the op to get a data dump and archive it properly. We all know that paper is sensible and would be careful for storage. We need to build and apply a similar set of precautions to store our digital data.
> To wipe it off, that's censorship and a recurrent disease of totalitarian mindsets.
Definitely OT.