Hi all,

Today I met someone who wanted to borrow my copy of Dances on Draxghr. You know, the physical one.

I went ahead and lent it to them, even though I’m worried about whether or not they’ll take care of it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ease of preserving copies of books; as you may or may not know, we have several databases throughout our part of the galaxy that overlap with another entirely different system, so that if one goes down information will still be stored in another system that works. However, as unlikely as it is, there’s still the possibility of both systems failing, or being shut down. Then we would still lose everything stored on them. It would happen so fast.

So how sturdy is a physical book, versus a digital one?

I’m curious. I know it’s likely that the digital version will win out in the end, unless our systems fail (I sure hope they don’t), but seeing what this acquaintance does with my copy of Dances on Draxghr may give me some new ideas.

Signed,

IT