I think the most notable aspect of the 1911 edition - and every edition before and since - is that each is still around, distinct and readable. I don't yet know whether people will be able to reference a '2011 edition' of Wikipedia in a hundred years time. I'm aware of various archival projects, but unless they receive continued support, we could very easily be at risk of losing vast checkpoints in the history of humankind. The written word on paper and stone has been proven to last hundreds of years in general and thousands in rarer cases. Magnetic and electronic storage is yet to prove itself in that respect.
Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades.
I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to damage it. It's sad because it's gold mine of stereotypes and good words on blacks and gays.
I think your point regarding "checkpoints" is more interesting but still falls moot because Wikipedia uses versionning. If you really cared that much about digital data you would do what you are doing with your book: keeping it.
Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppies from 1992 are mostly gone, CD/DVDs won't last that long because of decomposition of dye. Backup tapes, good luck with that. Now, go check which sites from the 90s keep their old files (thank God for the Internet Archive). People take for granted that every bit will stay forever, that's delusional. We have to keep moving them, if everybody stops copying a content it will be lost in less than 50 years. Now, if you think that every book with stereotypes should be discarded, that's sad. We have the responsibility to preserve history, and the moral duty to challenge what we consider wrong with our reason. To wipe it off, that's censorship and a recurrent disease of totalitarian mindsets.
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.
> CD/DVDs won't last that long because of decomposition of dye.
That's burned CD/DVDs. Pressed ones from the 1980s usually still work. Some early production runs had problems with the aluminum layer not being properly sealed and oxidizing, but they definitely have the potential to last many decades if Not centuries.
This I have thought of for a long time. By doing everything electronically we (or the future generations) are at risk of losing everything. Discounting the useful knowledge, we would be losing sentimental things.
I think it is sad the EB is stopping presses. I think they should continue, if only they could find a way to print it in a way the would reduce its cost considerably. Acquisitive cost, more than anything, is what is killing them.
