You are right about the problems of the existing e-book systems but going back towards felling of trees isn't the right solution. It is possible to build resilience and redundancy on web, either through open source or with a distributed design, and this is something a new player will have to bear in mind while building a replacement.
> Libraries with books that are hundreds of years old.
Scrolls and tablets pre-date books by quite a bit. History would seem to actually show that properly baked clay tablets are the most durable. Books are far more vulnerable to fire, water and air.
edit: Looking towards the future, broadcasting an e-book to the stars is probably the most durable (and hardest to recover) form of storage.
There is no need to be pedantic. A scroll is clearly the same concept as a book before they figured out how to bind books...
If you want to stand the test of time there is no substance that will survive if a great destroying force is used. It doesn't further your argument when clay bricks are the source of truth. All I know is I can leave a book on a shelf for years and pick it up and read it instantly. I'd be lucky if the device turned back on and could get the latest Kindle update 5-10 years from now.
Books don't have batteries so I'm not limited to how long I want to read. Here's the other kicker, no one can revoke my access to this book or push language updates to the book. It's a preservation of the past.
Well, an digital book is the same concept as a paper bound book and is arguably more conceptually similar than a tablet.
You can't easily encrypt and hide a paper book or distribute to multiple backup points. Paper books are much easier to censor and burn.
A Kindle is an e-reader, one of many devices that can be used to read e-books. If your e-reader is destroyed, you can buy another one and restore your digital books from backups.
Nobody can revoke your access to an e-book without DRM and it is very easy to strip DRM and backup your e-books. Nobody but me can change the copies of e-books I have stored in various mediums.
Clearly the paper book and the digital book have different trade offs (I love paper books) but books are not the most durable medium in history and paper books are not categorically more durable than digital books. I would bet good money that in the far future, if humans exists, the vast majority of books we have today will have survived directly because they were digitally encoded and stored at some point in their history.
> While I agree that books tied to plastic hardware is bad, but felling trees isn't less evil either… it is only more so.
No, it isn't. Paper is leagues and bounds more renewable and most data shows the rate of deforestation is going to stabilise within a few decades. Paper decomposes cleanly (and recycles) whereas a Kindle will be the same hunk of scrap for centuries if buried.
