The Disappearing Digital Data

Of course I’m a big fan of digital media for obvious reasons, but I’m also a big fan of print. This would be one of the reasons why:

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Salman Rushdie’s digital ephemera is one thing. Quite another is the prospect of losing the physical traces of key works in the world’s written canons. That’s clearly not going to happen anytime soon, but the more that we move to a system that puts digital books above physical ones, the more likely that prospect becomes.

Not that these problems can’t be overcome, but for now if I’m picking one medium that’ll survive the ages . . . I’m picking print.

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