Apex Book Company

It’s been prophesied for a while now that the print book is doomed. Electronic books! Digital media! Soon, say those biblical prophets of the Information Age, print books will become obsolete. After all, anyone with access to the Internet can now download books – cheaply, quickly, without effort. Soon all books will be digitised, available as electronic files, like an uplifted humanity that has abandoned its physical presence in a science fictional Upload into the matrix, there to live forever as gods in the machine…

And yet.

Computer hard-drives, as anyone with a personal computer in the last twenty years has quickly found out, have a short life-expectancy. The last time I lost a major amount of data – mostly e-mails – was a few years ago, and since then I’ve switched to using gmail as a way of providing e-mail backup, and a secondary, external hard drive to back up other material – work, photographs, etc. – both of which could nevertheless fail.

I like electronic books, both to read and to provide me with a handy, searchable research tool when I need it, but any kind of modern data storage suffers from the same basic problems, creating an entire field of research that has come to be known as digital preservation. The first problem is that of physical storage: digital media degrades and deteriorates. It is one thing for me to lose my e-mail, but think of an entire library lost in a flash, or a national security agency discovering their top secret files have disappeared overnight, never to return?

Backups are one solution. Keeping multiple copies of documents in multiple locations and on multiple machines is one way of ensuring the survival of the data. In fact, one could argue that digital book piracy – the sort of free-distribution of copyright e-books that takes place on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks, is one of the most effective ways to ensure digital preservation of that same material. A supposed-negative phenomenon, in that light, becomes a positive. However, regardless of one’s position on electronic piracy, digital preservation has other problems. Chief amongst them is what is called digital obsolescence.

Computer formats are not universal. If, to begin with, one used plain-text files under an ASCII code (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange), that quickly changed as word processing software evolved in a competing market place. Not only that – data is encoded differently for images, spreadsheets, movies, audio – and text itself is encoded differently for different platforms, depending variously on the type and version of the operating system, the device involved (say a handheld versus a desktop computer) and the company owning the current dominant format.

Let’s assume you are a writer and have been using personal computers since the mid 1980s for your work. You may have been using Multimate, or Leading Edge, which ran on IBM-compatible machines, or you may have been using Excellence on the Amiga, one of those early PCs that fell by the wayside as the 8086-chipset family, coupled with Microsoft’s DOS (and later, Windows) operating systems gained the ascendancy. Either way, fast-forward twenty years later and the question still remains – how do you read your files?

Conversion software does exist for some, such as the above. But take, for instance, the case of the early Hebrew word-processors (so far, the unspoken assumption has been that we are using English, the default language of the digital world). Since there was no support for Hebrew writing, several companies of eager young programmers attempted to rectify the situation (and make a few bucks in the process). These included such fabled antiques as QText, Alpeh-Bet, and even Oren, the first Hebrew WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) word processor.

How, then, do you even read these files now?

The problem is universal. It is compounded by the fact that many file types are proprietary, which means one has limited access to the format specifications or the ability to legally use or exploit that format. The fear of this kind of situation – of file types becoming obsolete, of data existing but being essentially incomprehensible – is such that the possible evolution of the problem has been termed a Digital Dark Age. If the problem with text-based documents is fairly simple to address, imagine how much more complicated it is with non-standard picture files, or, increasing further, audio-visual files. Organisations such as The Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) or The National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA) — and many others – attempt to address this problem in various ways.

But consider.

A few years ago, wondering into a second hand bookshop in the Notting Hill area of London, I purchased two small books. The bindings were a little chipped, the spines a little loose, the paper somewhat grained with age. No surprise, perhaps: they were two collected volumes of the British magazine, The Spectator, published in 1724, 284 years ago, and still sound, still providing a range of opinion, scurrilous gossip, and much detail of eighteenth century Londoners’ strange but active sex life, long after its publishers and initial readers had disappeared beneath the London ground.

The technology of paper-making, coupled with the technology of movable-type print, signaled the beginning of the Information Age of which the Internet is part, not progenitor. It was, and is, a revolutionary technology, providing the ability to store knowledge and information in a durable, accessible form that can be widely distributed. Moreover, it is a stable technology. Books degrade, but even the maligned pulps last far longer than a DVD (a much-heralded, much-disappointing storage medium). Paper books can be destroyed – by fire, by water, by a hundred different causes – and they can degrade, but they are still the stoutest form of information storage that we have. Moreover, the data, once printed, cannot be easily subverted in the way dynamic, and thus vulnerable, digital data can be subverted. The last problem of digital storage, indeed, is how to ensure the integrity of the data. In a book, what you see really is what you get (WYSRIWYG, if you will, rather than WYSIWYG) but digital data can be compromised, modified, rewritten in a way that leaves no trace – a problem that may well be facing historians in decades to come.

Rumours of the death of print, I suspect, are somewhat premature. And until we can figure out a way to make computers as stable and as durable as the humble paperback, the paper mills will continue, quite cheerfully, to run.

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.