On the one hand people complain that eBooks in general will never last, simply because those big gov't databases were kept in formats no one can read today. . .on the other hand you don't want this to be mentioned up front. . . . None of the people arguing this case were there when we met with the President of Folio, none of them were part of doing Gibbon's "Roman Empire" . . .so please just leave it be. Some day, when you are all gone, perhaps someone else will sweep your efforts under the carpet. . .and Google will go down as the inventor of eBooks and the first eBook library. On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, D. Starner wrote:
From the standpoint of an archivist, I have to fall on the side of keeping all file formats available and accessible to the reader. PG is as much a historical catalog as it is a library.
Since when? Why?
If we want to teach people about the death of old formats, maybe we should have a page about old formats, and how WordStar and Folio and other formats were da bomb, and how it's hard to find anything that can read them now. If they come across them in a search, how will they even know that it's an old format nobody can read? For all I would have known before this discussion, you could run out and buy an ebook reader that takes Folio, or download a program to read them.
Remember that it's not just proprietary formats that die; I seem to remember code to read WordStar files in one of my old programming books, and there's a bunch of open source programs where you'd have to go through old CDs to find a version of the program that could read your files. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
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