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
What is the purpose of PG? Is it to be a white-haired old man, with a scraggy beard, carrying a sign on the beach that says "Proprietary e-book formats may die!" or is it to provide a repository of information that is useful today and into the future? I wholeheartedly second the notion of moving obsolete formats into a "hall of shame."
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, John Hagerson wrote:
What is the purpose of PG? Is it to be a white-haired old man, with a scraggy beard, carrying a sign on the beach that says "Proprietary e-book formats may die!" or is it to provide a repository of information that is useful today and into the future?
Riiight. . .one book out of an entire library. Just put the appropriate note in it and move on. . . . [I think the current note could be improved. . .I don't know who wrote it, but it wasn't much of an issue then, and shouldn't be now. Tempest=Teapot] As long as people are proposing .pdf for all eBooks, which they are, this is a serious issue, but even when, hopefully it is not, it is not something that should be forgotten. Such as when WordStar went to court to claim copyright on ALL documents stored in WordStar format, and wanted royalties every time you used the documents you wrote yourself. Think this is silly? It was a HUGE case! Now swept under the carpet. [not to mention the people who tried to copyright the human genome, or who DID patent one person's genome. . .Mr. Moore, who was immune to a form of cancer.] This is a non-issue. . .no one else is every going to notice as much as this week.
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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participants (3)
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D. Starner -
John Hagerson -
Michael Hart