Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.

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ionwake 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for your reply and request for clarification.

Yes destroying a book is in my opinion identical to a book burning.

One day there will be no hard copies, the digital books are hence vulnerable to patches, whether its due to a new political movement or a sudo abled hamster running on a keyboard... and if that occurs information will be permanently lost.

I would have thought a HN user understand well the importance of backups.

I dont want to sound mean, perhaps you also support keeping some hard copies as backups, but Im just explaining my concern.

To be honest I think everything I am saying is just common sense, I was just making a joke earlier about the architects deciding to do this because they had a bad tuesday.

	▲	joshstrange 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are multiple digital ways to preserve exact copies of the original. Both through things like personal backups (I have digital backups of all my physical books) and through collective recordkeeping. For example, Anna's Archive stores them (or at least provides access) via a hash of the book. You can't patch the book and keep the same hash. Yes, hash collision is a thing but there are better hashes or other ways to accomplish the same goal. It pains me to say "blockchain" but that's something we have today that could be leveraged, though I think there are other cryptographic methods we could employ. I'll admit I have less concern with (every) digital copy being altered and if we assume a future where all computing is completely locked down and governments have the ability to reach in a tweak anything then yes, we are screwed. But we are screwed if we allow that to happen even if some of us have squirreled away physical books. In that techno-hell (of completely locked down computing with no open options) then some of use will have "illegal" computers that still do what we want and I see that as no different than keeping physical copies. Put simply: Preserving the original does not require a physical substrate (or at least one made of paper, obviously computers run on physical hardware).

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zahlman 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book.

I genuinely don't understand how it's possible for someone to type that out in all sincerity. Have you ever held a physical book?

	▲	joshstrange 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Have you held a kindle? What does that even mean? I vastly prefer digital books to physical ones. I own many physical books (as well as their ebook equivalent) but the physical books on my shelves are nothing more than art to me, I won't read the physical books because the experience is infinitely better when reading on my (jailbroken) kindle.