Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. (For more about iconic books, see the links to the Iconic Books Project at left.)

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Durable Digital Media?

I have long complained that digital media shows no promise for long term preservation of texts and other data. Milleniata is now marketing a DVD that actually etches data the disk and is readable in a standard drive.

But even if this proves to be a permanent storage medium for digital data, it doesn't address the problem of cultural obsolescence, as Alexander Rose points out on the Long Now Blog:

They really need some sort of marking on the tops of all the blank media that explains what the DVD data standard is and how to read it. Otherwise in a 100 years, I can't imagine that many people will remember…

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