>When that necessary software gets deprecated, such digital things are effectively lost

No, this was the whole point of my comment. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get updates or isn’t supported anymore. The software will keep working forever if you provide it with the same environment.

No one is holding you at a gunpoint to update your software, you can also always install old versions if it comes to that. The digital book itself is fine as long as you keep it safe.

Also, try reading more than one sentence into the comment before responding. I’ve written the exact same thing in the previous comment, but I presume you stopped reading after deeming it ‘not relevant’.

An epub file is just a zip file with plain text chapters + images + table of contents inside laid down in a structured (read: standardized) manner. You can literally extract an epub file to a folder with a zip tool (like WinRAR if you use windows) and use notepad to read the book if you want.

And, even if it weren’t a fancy zip-based file format, but a binary format, the specification is out there and open freely.

I think the user I replied to used wear out in the sense I’ve interpreted it in my response, they talked about epub readers not being updated and therefore not working with epub files anymore, which doesn’t make sense at all if they didn’t imply them wearing out with not being updated. A better term may be deprecation. Software (or digital data) doesn’t deprecate in the sense that it loses functionality, that’s what I meant and that is what the user above was implying with their comment about epub reader, sims 2 game etc. I stand by what I’ve written.

Anyway, let me answer your question with another question:

Do you think print media lasts 50, 100 or 300 years on its own without maintenance? If your answer is no, then you can do 0.1% of that maintenance for your digital books by keeping backups of it / software that can play it and maybe the operating system. Heck, even keeping an old computer in storage for archival purposes works too.

I understand your mini disc example and you’re right, but that’s a different problem. You are talking the physical medium specifically, not the digital abstraction of it. The only argument against digital data I see is a catastrophic event where humanity is regressed to a point where utilizing computers is impossible.

I’m sorry, but not one of your paragraphs make any sense whatsoever.

Software as a construct doesn’t go through wear and tear. What you are talking about is software entropy, old software may not fit users’ expectations or configurations anymore (your example with Windows 7 and some old games fits here), or may not be maintained anymore.

What differs all this is from typical wear and tear is that in case of normal wear, changes occur in the object itself. Take a CD for example. No matter what you do, you can’t stop it from degrading given time. You can try and slow it down, but can’t stop it completely. That’s wear and tear. In case of software, this doesn’t occur. Changes in the environment cause software entropy, and even decades later, you can still use that software as long as you make the required changes to the environment.

> There’s a gamer on youtube who played the Sims 2 recently, but it was pretty buggy. (And he plays games for a living, so I’m certain he spend time on getting it to work as best he could.)

This is so trivial that they could do it in an afternoon if they had the required knowledge. Just fire up a VM with Windows XP or ME, you don’t need to do anything else.

> Anything digital (that is dependant on something else to work) sadly just isn’t as long lasting as something analogous. Digital has its advantages of course, but longevity isn’t one of them.

Wrong. This is just totally wrong. One of the primary reasons digital media was invented was the fragility of analog media. Analog media is a direct representation of information, you can’t faithfully make a copy of it without losing some of that information in the process or store it indefinitely. This attenuates over time and eventually you lose most if not all of the original information itself. Digital data abstracts information over it’s representation. You can make infinite identical copies of it, change the abstraction (difference between epub1, epub2 or epub3 for example), share it across the world and the information that lies under that digital media is still the same as the original one. This is the reason why libraries all around the world are digitizing their catalogs.

This doesn't make sense, just because your new client doesn't support epub1 or epub2 doesn't mean that the book is "worn down", it's there and as long as the data is safe, the book is safe.