What will we leave behind?

Will we ever get to the stage where a truly great literary work is published only in electronic format?

If so, will it still be around in 200, 500 or 1,000 years?

I can’t help wondering if the rapid pace of technological change that defines our era also makes us incredibly short-sighted. I remember being taught how to use a word-processing program at school. I was told that it was very important to master it, that it was a crucial business skill, that it was the next big thing – everyone would be using it.

By the time I entered the job market, I’d forgotten everything I’d learnt about it.

But that was OK – it was obsolete anyway by then.

Of course, things will be a little different with published e-books, and I’m sure efforts will be made to transfer existing works to new formats as those new formats are developed. There is also work under way to ensure that work stored in obsolete formats will be accessible by current users (this looks like an interesting and worthy project: Keeping emulation environments portable or KEEP).

But this only goes so far. Because I think our high standard of living and sense of technological achievement belie the ephemeral nature of that achievement. There is no guarantee (especially with the environmental troubles facing future generations) that our civilisation will continue in the same form for the next 100 or 200 years, let alone the next 1,000.

So there may come a time when all that is left of this great technological age is what can be discerned from the archaeological record. And there is a chance that that won’t amount to very much. Even if hard drives, CD-ROMs and magnetic tape survive for generations, will future civilisations know what to do with them?

And if not, should we be keeping printed, written records of everything that is published electronically? Should we also be trying to ensure that those printed records are durable (something that, perhaps, goes against the grain at a time when we are supposed to be making everything biodegradable)? Of course, the trouble with that is that there is probably not enough paper in the world to do it. Someone could browse the web for a lifetime without coming close to reading all the content on it.

So it is inevitable that a huge part of the world’s repository of knowledge and literature is, by its very nature, transient.

This places a huge burden of responsibility upon publishers. They are the ones faced with the enormous task of sorting the wheat from the chaff (and you don’t have to browse the web for very long before realising that there is an awful lot of chaff out there!). And although their primary motivation is obviously to make money, we can also hope that they also have an eye on their place in history.

After all, it is possible that the work of the greatest writer who ever lived is languishing, undiscovered, on a web server somewhere, waiting to be given the permanent form of a printed book before it is lost forever…