Electronic media versus books

[Arshad Ali]

There was an interesting essay in New Scientist a couple of months back examing how enduring hard drives, magnetic tapes, optical discs, compact discs, and flash memory drives are. It turns out not very. Books, on the other hand, can endure for centuries. So I don't understand the shift towards DVDs and hard drive storage among chess players to the detriment of printed material. I appreciate the plausible excuse of paucity of space. I understand there are ways of searching, molding, and extracting data from a computer database that are either onerous or impossible with printed material. But printed material endures. My books and informants will still be around twenty years from now. I can't say the same about my electronically stored data.

The New Scientist essay: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... tml?page=1

[Alex Holowczak]

If you store data electronically on a computer, then you can have both a version on your hard drive, and a version elsewhere, e.g. Google Documents, DVD backup. While you may not keep the master copy forever, I don't see why you couldn't preserve the original information, but stored on a different electronic medium.

That said, I really like the paper version, they're much more personable things, particularly if it's a collection of your own games.

[Arshad Ali]

That said, I really like the paper version, they're much more personable things, particularly if it's a collection of your own games.

I'm partial towards books -- I like their heft, I like their smell. I'm ambivalent about digital information -- first of all it's a torrent. The torrent encourages contempt. If I have a 3m game database, I don't pay that much attention to a single game or position -- particularly when I'm looking at it on a computer (unlike books, people tend not to stare at the computer that long). And that avalanche can militate against slow careful digestion. In this sense I think less is more. But perhaps these are anachronistic habits and outlooks.

[Peter Rhodes]

My books and informants will still be around twenty years from now. I can't say the same about my electronically stored data.

All my pgn and cbn files will be around because I take regular backups. I fully expect my hard drive to fail at some stage and my storage strategy is designed with that in mind.

If there were an asteroid collision or a pole-shift taking us into an armageddon scenario, conservation of my chess literature would be one of the last things on my mind.

The article you quote makes an interesting point, but I think it's point is aimed more at historians/librarians. I would like to see Simon Williams summarise his latest DVD on a clay tablet !!

[Arshad Ali]

If there were an asteroid collision or a pole-shift taking us into an armageddon scenario, conservation of my chess literature would be one of the last things on my mind.

Perhaps you're not a bibliophile (aka maniac). The bibliophile's first priority is to save his hoard of books and this takes precedence over survival itself. The bibliophile thinks, "What kind of subsequent existence would it be without books? Nay, better to perish than to have none." If you've seen the film "The Name of the Rose," you might recall that Brother William (Sean Connery) keeps going back into the burning library to salvage what books he can. Now there's a bibliophile.