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Disastrous-Bite4258 t1_iwjvv0r wrote

Reply to comment by AtraMikaDelia in Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books - Internet Archive Blogs by koavf

I mean you can read plain text files with a command line interface if you really want to, on pretty much every computer ever made.

You can put that file on an IBM PC from 1981, write "type filename.txt | more". You can use the cat command on a 50 year old Unix system to read the file. If you somehow put the file on a Commodore 64, you can read it too.

It's a format that is extremely unlikely to become unreadable in the foreseeable future, regardless of where technology progresses.

Of course, for everyday use PDF and EPUB are much better. But for compatibility and archival? Can't beat plain text.

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Gyr-falcon t1_iwo0d2j wrote

Curious. You are advocating for text but use BOLD for emphases. Do you remember that plain text has no bold? Nor italics, or chapter headings, plain text doesn't have much in the way of formatting.

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AtraMikaDelia t1_iwjwhs8 wrote

Yes, with how technology works you will be able to open older formats on both new and old computers, while old computers without updates will only work with old formats.

But if you rely on this trend to assume that all future computers will always be able to read a text file because computers have always been able to do that, then why wouldn't I be able to extrapolate from that trend and say that it is equally unlikely for future computers to ever lose the ability to read a pdf? Realistically they are always going to be able to read both.

And if you need to archive them, archiving something in a format that loses data seems questionable. If you save it as a .txt you lose italics, bold, etc. You lose chapter titles being in large font, you lose any pictures that may be in the book, you lose a lot. On the other hand, if you save it as a .pdf, all of that is retained. And if you ever need to convert it from a pdf to a txt for whatever reason, that is possible to do. I don't see why you would ever feel the need to do that, but if you want to there are numerous ways to convert a .pdf file into a .txt.

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Disastrous-Bite4258 t1_iwk0glb wrote

> it is equally unlikely for future computers to ever lose the ability to read a pdf

Well, we'll just have to wait and see. I wouldn't count on PDF files being easily readable in, say, 40 years (if humanity even exists at that point :D).

Anyway, this has been an interesting discussion, random person on the internet. I need to head out to a Covid test, wish me luck.

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