I agree with you; I don’t think books are going anywhere anytime soon. Not because the technology isn’t there – the Kindle and other similar devices show that the tech exists – but because there are many people who just aren’t ready to embrace it. I read tons of stuff online, but it’s news, journal articles and the like; I hate reading book-length works on the computer. There are other issues, such as one that my boss mentioned to me when we were discussing this very issue: she likes the feel of books. She gets more from books than just the words slapped on each page. I’d say most people can relate; there’s something nice about a well-made book that a digital device can’t really replicate, even if it can replicate the font and what not.

Being able to search via digital stuff is great, and I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to not being able to. But books are great too, just in different ways.

One of your spheres, though, that I’m not sure I agree with: newspapers. I’ve read (online, ironically) that many newspapers are going through a bit of a crisis now, as they try to convert their offerings to the new medium, and it’s just not working particularly well. I’m not really sure what will happen to them to be honest.

Regarding the historical issues, I’ll get back to you after I’ve thought about it some more.

I’m a communications major and am currently doing a research paper on how printed material will survive the digital influx. I was starting to lose faith in my stance because my instructor told me that my research question was immediately answerable (that of course digital material will triumph and how I was doing a futile job proving my point). However, your article and the comments left have given me more reason to believe that I will make it and I will ace it.

My paper has 3 spheres:
1) E-books vs Printed books
2) E-papers and Blogs vs Printed Papers and Magazines
3) E-mails vs Printed/Written Letters

If possible, I would really love to hear more from you regarding issue of printed material in our digital age. Thank you so much.

I think the ability to back stuff up with such ease is part of the problem. I’m not saying I don’t like the ability – quite the contrary – but I think it has led to people not really caring if there are any long term solutions to digital data storage. Why worry about a hard drive or CD that will last for a century when you can buy another hard drive for $40, or a blank CD for $.50?

Will archive.org be around in its current form in 50 years? *shrug* But barring the odd legal challenge, I see no reason its database of information would disappear. We may not yet have a digital storage medium with the ease of survival of carved stone sitting in a dry cave, but barring some immense cataclysm the files will be backed up in multiple locations until there is something like that. And a cataclysm could do a pretty good job of ruining real-world archives, too.

Regarding archive.org: Yeah, archive.org exists and you can go back quite a way, but will it be up and running in 50 years? 25 years? I’ve never looked into web archives much; are there any other services like archive.org?

About going back to your house in 2003… well, if you haven’t moved said item from said drawer, it should still be right where it was.

@Tom: Yeah, the reliability of digital storage is one of the big problems when looking at this issue. Your remark about archival CDs reminds me of a news story I saw a couple years ago. Some fellow had been really big into music CDs, and had bought thousands of the things, right around when they started getting popular. To avoid having them deteriorate from sunlight and what not, he had them put into storage. 15 years later he got them out and… they were all ruined. The material inside that was supposed to have lasted practically forever had rotted away. Oops.

I hadn’t thought about the problems of context at all; it’s a great point. As we’ve gotten used to being able to just fire off another email if we forgot something in the first one, we’ve gotten sloppy about being detailed in our communications. It works for us, but it won’t work for a historian who, when reading an email, is told to “click here” – which goes nowhere, of course. An email of one line saying “Yeah, let’s do that” will be totally useless unless the researcher has access to the initial email.

Secondly there’s the issue of cultural interaction with the digital/virtual world. How much information is actually conveyed in regular emails and texts. Probably not much whereas a letter from the days of old was simply packed with juicy bits. Though I certainly haven’t studied the information ratio I do know that nowhere today have I found anything rivaling Herodotus’ account of his trip to Egypt, Plutarch, Giraldus Cambrensis, etc etc. These persons wrote with such a painstaking attention to detail that has been lost these days because of how we perceive our technology is able to do our work for us. No one describes anything anymore, they just link to it, show a photo or simply forgo description. To a historian of the future, description is necessary to make any sense of anything and I question how present that is in our world today. Read any random blog you come across and tell me how much useful information you can find. I’m often left shaking my head in wonder. Of course not everyone is an author but most internet/digital writers are just plain lazy relying on context far too much. Context is something future historians won’t have.

However, imagine that you had the foresight (and Google added the capability) so at some advanced age release your email from its account. Then a historian would probably have MUCH MUCH MORE content from you than they would from the average letter writer of yesteryear. Hell, their research will be that much easier because they’ll be able to search your email for specific words, or look for time periods near important events. When your family members found stashes, did they find a stash of 10,000 letters covering an entire life in indexed form?

As well, you already made a mention of archive.org. It’s imperfect, but reality has NO equivalent. If I want to view a site from 2003, there’s a good chance I can… if I’m willing to put up with a lot of broken images, and non-working portions that used Flash. However, if I want to visit a so-so version of my house from 2003, and to maybe look for something I knew I had in a drawer at that time? I’m pretty much screwed.