General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Tampa Bay Times Bill Maxwell laments "slow death of bookstores." I'm with him on that. [View all]kentauros
(29,414 posts)but they didn't do that even when CDs were the norm! So, now that inexpensive home equipment exists for people to rip these out of print albums, well, they're not just sitting on their thumbs: http://music-favourites.blogspot.com/
And some publishers are making their entire catalogs available for ebook formats. Just because the Big Six aren't doesn't mean the rest of them aren't, either.
For example, Baen Books. And then there's Project Gutenberg (which has been around online since the early days of the w-w-w.) Plus, the Internet Archive. Both of the latter sites accept scanned or ebook formated files of books to their archives.
As far as security goes, I know I've read of the FBI being successful in subpoenaing libraries for their checkout records. Anyone intent on surveillance of you won't have much trouble paying attention to what books you're picking up at the library or bookstore if they have reason to believe you're intent on something nefarious.
Oh, the latest technological development in memory storage is on optical crystals and promises storage periods measured in centuries.
By the way, how many books have been lost over the centuries because they went out of print, weren't kept in optimum storage conditions, or just weren't popular any longer? How many manuscripts went unpublished because a handful of publishing houses didn't see any merit in them? How many publishers did J.K. Rowling go through before one of them accepted her work? (I've read it was at least eight.) How much of all the media we humans have ever produced has been lost to time, and not because it wasn't digitized?
Any "fears" of us losing a lot to digitized books are just that, fears.