Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!yale!cmcl2!acf3!tiedeman
From: tiedeman@acf3.NYU.EDU (Eric S. Tiedemann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk (Medium!)
Message-ID: <764@acf3.NYU.EDU>
Date: 11 Nov 88 17:37:15 GMT
References: <968@accelerator> <-290109999@hpcupt1.HP.COM>
Reply-To: tiedeman@acf3.UUCP (Eric S. Tiedemann)
Organization: New York University
Lines: 43

In article <-290109999@hpcupt1.HP.COM> vitale@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Phil Vitale) writes:
>"Who" decides what books are *important* enough to backup?  The number of
>works will not decrease, making the backup process an ever growing problem.

To a greater extent than in the past, individuals will be able to afford to
make backups.  This is the good we see.

>In addition, CD-ROM is probably the first major print distribution medium
>where the act of copying and the act of modifying are of equal ease.
>
>"Who" will insure that the copy of the book in front of you is really a
>copy of the original, or one that was modified along the way by a "concerned"
>individual/party/government when it was "backed-up."  (Orwell and 1984.)
>
>(Not that these concerns are new to CD-ROMs, just that the potential
>for abuse seems greater.)

Ultimately, the reader will have to ensure this for himself.  One way is to use
public key authentification.  It's a lot easier to be sure you have the right 
key than that you have the right text.

>Electronic form is not the only way to preserve knowledge.  Books have
>been remarkably successful at preserving information across the ages.

OK.  The prudent among us may use codex form.  Again, this will be cheaper to 
do if you have the text in machinable form to begin with.

>There are serious efforts underway to come up with methods to de-acidify
>large (room-sized) numbers of books at a time.  Also from what I gather,

References?

>Somehow the same information loses its impact
>when it is displayed on a
>CRT screen.

Somehow information loses its impact when it's gone, as you go on to note.

>Then again, it would have been nice to have some backup disks of the
>library at Alexandria before the fire ...

Eric
tiedeman@acf3.nyu.edu