What makes medium permanence a value per se ?
(I agree with the remainder of your reply) My argument is that the transience in electronic media is more deep than that of books (hopefully it's safe to leave stone tablets out of this). Beyond bit rot or pages fading, ebooks can be altered more easily than books both intentionally and unintentionally. The source of the texts, GP mirrors and publishers, perish yet only a publisher's book remains. And to be a little silly, the internet has shown it can survive for several decades, books have been proven for hundreds of years. It was demonstrated in the message I replied to how quickly and easily ebooks can be used to find quotations. An electronic citation then becomes little more than a convenience and an advertisement, which will likely have a shorter life span than the paper itself. Are people ready to put their academic necks on the line? To be constructive, how are the GP mirrors monitored to ensure consistency today? --kris
Academia has developed its traditions around a medium (papyrus, paper) that is permanent. Not the other way around. If the medium they had used was impermanent the methods and traditions of Academia would be different today.
Medium permanence can be a big disadvantage too. The scholars in the middle ages relied blindly on Aristotle. Scientific method in the middle ages amounted to find out what Aristotle said about some subject, and that was that. Own research was not deemed a scientific method.
Of course, Aristotle said that "wood swims and metal sinks" and that "heavier items fall faster than lighter ones".
-- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
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