Does anyone read or write anymore?

[barbarian]

I buy books. I sometimes read them too. They are in boxes, too many boxes, here, there and everywhere. Why my father-in-law died the 'family' were going to ditch his books, photos and records. Well I've got them. Ditto with those of my parents.

I have a friend who has a little plaque in her house that says:

"Of course you don't have enough shelf space for your books. No one worth knowing has enough shelf space for their books."

[daveh]

...or to modify the C. Northcote Parkinson's Law "Books expand to overfill the space available".

I too would have that plaque on my wall, if I had enough wall space. I have paintings (mostly prints) and framed photographs in cupboards and boxes waiting to be allowed wall space.

[Randy]

I have a couple of full book cases.

[mickeyobe]

This is the den, the first room I finished when we moved into our new house in 1972.
Little did I know that the built in shelves would very soon prove inadequate.
Within several years there were floor to ceiling shelves in three of the four bedrooms and in the basement.
The books in the den now are those most loved and most read and most referred to.
The TV is going to be recycled. No more idiot boxes or boob tubes in this house.



Two of the bedrooms are now my office and my workroom/camera museum but they still harbour their share of books.

Cameras have invaded almost every room so many books are now stored in cartons. Many of the books have emigrated to my sons' homes.

Books are important to me and my family.

I still write usually with a fountain pen but my two finger dance on my computer keyboard does most of my writing now.

Mickey

[Berndt]

I think, when it is about non-fictional literature, the internet might be the better source meanwhile. Google is more efficient than an encyclopedia of the past, but if I want read a novel, I definitely prefer a real book, which smells like a book and feels like a book.

I worry more about the writing. How will an imprtant letter, written by a famous person be displayed in a museum of the future ? As an e-mail on a screen ? ... strange imagination somehow ... and it also affects things, we ( as normal people ) are writing every day. My E-Mails of a few years ago are already gone, but I still have my handwritten love letters from my youth. My dissertation from my time at the university is just digital garbage, because I wrote it on an old Atari Falcon ... no computer can read this format anymore.

But it is also about picture/movie files. Will there still be a "jpeg" format ten years ahead ? The memories, I recorded on my camcorder just three years ago ... can't open them anymore, because the filetype is not supported anymore and the software for converting has been discontinued.

So, obviously, nothing is for the eternity anymore ... or not even for the period of our own existence ... unless we are constantly converting billions of files into newer formats ... or simply write on paper or photograph on film.

[Peltigera]

Jpegs will be around for a long time as there is so much stored in that format. I would imaging that the likes of Getty Images will maintain hardware/software that will read jpegs for many decades to come. It is really about quantity. ten years a go, the quantity of digital photograph and movie files was very low and the formats were fairly experimental. Now there are a great quantity of both and the formats have tidied up into a very few. I expect both to last for a long time.

[daveh]

berndt: "I wrote it on an old Atari Falcon ... no computer can read this format anymore."

You could always write yourself an emulation programme to run on your current setup. The only 'old language' emulator I have is one for FORTH.

[Berndt]

Daveh, my computer skills are not that advanced, I guess ;-)) Even though, I wrote a lot of own programs in the pioneering days of computer technology. As I remember, I won some award for realizing the calculation of an infinite place of "Pi" on one of the first Casio calculators by just using 126 program steps ... but that has been long time ago ;-)) Now, computers are just a "black box" and I can barely handle them.

My dissertation has been written on a program, called "Signum", which has been quite an amazing piece of software, BTW. The whole program didn't need more than 2MB and could do nearly everything, what a modern WORD can do. 2MB ... that's less than the size of a picture nowadays ... hahaha ...

But ... it was actually just an example anyway. I truly think, that formats are the biggest problem of letting our data survive over the time. It might be true, that JPEG will be among us for a while, but there are so many specific formats, which are changing with a new version of a software too soon. Older and newer versions of common softs like the Adobe graphic programs or simply WORD are already incompatible and people might collect all their photos in an iPhoto library, which might be discontinued already with the next version of iLife, like they did it with iWeb. Or if people want to change from Windows to MAC or the other way round, most of their data ( like mails, etc. ) become just garbage.

Sure ... there are always ways to restore something by using emulators and stuff, but that can't be the way for common users and if I look at the amount of datas on my harddisks ... those are TeraByte, stored in hundreds of different formats. It would take years to convert all of them into newer formats all the time.

Plus ... why do every camera maker wants his own format ? That's ridiculous. Good example are 3D cameras. It is basically very simple to store a 3D picture, but every maker needs his specific format for that. Fujifilm f.i. is the only company, capable of printing 3D pictures in Japan yet ... and of course, they only accept their own specific picture format for that. Same situation for cellphones or movies on cameras. The AVCHD codec of my Lumix camera hasn't been cracked for years ( so that it can be simply unwrapped instead of converted ).

Some standard formats might survive for a while, as Peltigera said ... hopefully ... but in general, I think, a lot of data will become lost as they are already becoming now.

[daveh]

Berndt,

To make matters worse, not all manufacturers files are 'the same' in spite of appearing to be so. In terms of Canon I had a 30D. RAW files are CR2. When I bought the 7D the new RAW files were also CR2 but not the same as the earlier file. What was worse still is that neither Windows nor Canon provide a patch for viewing these most recent CR2 files in (Windows) explorer on 64 bit machines. Another problem is that even quite recent Photoshop wouldn't read the new file, so I had to upgrade to the latest version. (Fortunately a I got bona fide version from China for £100, so it wasn't too bad.)


(Just a further note: occasionally some of the new CR2 files are visible in Windows explorer. I don't know why, some will show at one thumbnail magnification, but not another. Some won't show at all. If they will occasionally 'burst into life' why on earth can't the clever people at Canon or Microsoft resolve it, by making a patch?)

[Steeler Fan]

I never was much for writing, my hand writing was and is atrocious. I got to the point that I started to print everything instead of writing. Years ago a co-worker asked me if I would help his sister out, she was taking a hand writing analysis course and needed subjects. When he gave me the piece I was to write I automatically printed it! After being admonished I wrote the piece and found that I had to concentrate on each and every word trying to remember how to form the letters.

As far as reading I have always been a voracious reader. It started at an early age and thankfully has stayed with me. Two years ago my wife bought me a Sony Ereader. It is the basic version, no color. Since then she has apologized for not getting me the latest and the greatest but I much prefer this one as it fits easily in my back pocket. Right now I have 44 books on it and I am not even close to having it filled. But as much as I like it there still is something unique about the feel and smell of a book.

[daveh]

Handwriting worsened with the demise of the fountain pen.

Pretty soon we shall all be writing in text speak and smilies. Then, before you know it, we'll have a language where hieroglyphs rule.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, and all that.

[mickeyobe]

Nov 21, 2011 20:19:15 GMT -5 daveh said:

Handwriting worsened with the demise of the fountain pen.

Pretty soon we shall all be writing in text speak and smilies. Then, before you know it, we'll have a language where hieroglyphs rule.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, and all that.

David,

Perhaps some brilliant IT will invent an electronic Rosetta Stone.
Then "all the changes that stay the same" will be decipherable by some future Napoleonic linguist.

Mickey

[daveh]

It's amazing how just one document, the Rosetta Stone, allowed us to understand the hieroglyphs. However, it would have been so much easier if they had cut an English version in the stone. The hieroglyphic and demotic versions are all Greek to me, and the ancient Greek version is double Dutch.

[Steeler Fan]

Well if the time comes that we have a language where hieroglyphs rule maybe someone will be able to decipher my shopping list!

[daveh]

Steeler, take my advice: do away with shopping lists. That way you always buy what you have plenty of and forget what you really need. If ssems to make life so much more interesting.