Comment by fullstop

3 days ago

eBooks can be backed up and survive a house fire or a flood, though.

Depends where the house fire or a flood is. If it's in a data center then they might suddenly disappear[1].

[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...

  • You can keep multiple copies in different locations.

    • Exactly what the provider said.

      > Customers were not even compensated for lost data, unless they had paid for backups [which were also lost], with the company saying cloud customers should be handling their own disaster recovery plans.

the challenge is I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence, so ebooks just aren't as valuable. If my physically books were destroyed in a fire I would be sad because i lost the objects, not temporarily lost access to the contents.

  • For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books of it. I've kept about 50, on a wide variety of topics, and I value them both for the unusual content (Ancient churches of Wales; Jazz record catalogs from the 1940s; English artists from the early 20th century) and for the fact that they remind me of him.

  • > I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence

    Curious thing to say. For me it is obvious that the content is the book’s essence.