While there are guidelines for creating archival quality PDF files, I’m not familiar with work on preserving the layout of non-PDF e-books. The guiding assumption is often just to let software emulate the display of Kindle, etc.

Since many people do like to hold something tangible in their hands, I’m actually seeing more possibilities for publishers in the future to create more special edition books in print for those who want to purchase a very nicely designed print edition.

-bowerbird

Hi Sean, its great to see you here! We were discussing the point you are making here at Wiley earlier this week. One colleague has more than 20,000 digital photos!

I read the Bible quite a bit and have a similar issue with highlighting. There is an online version of the Bible at biblegateway.com that I use frequently. But, I can’t hightlight like I can with my hard copy.

It’s also easier to just pick up the book and start reading where you left off. I do have a laptop but if I were to rely on the electronic copy, I would have to wait for my computer to boot, remember where I was, etc.

Alternatively I could download the entire page to my system and keep archiving it over and over as digital formats change (and incur those costs, by the way.)

I could trust it to the cloud and hope I can get it back decades from now to share, and even so it wont be anything more than my grandchildren could find on their own, using whatever device is in use at the time.

On the other hand, the paper will sit and wait and with a little care on my part be a piece of history my grandchildren can hold in the palm of their hands.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not anti e-content. In fact read a bit here at the blog and you will see I am a really big supporter. I’m just saying we need to do more with our digital formats to ensure they wont end up like the floppy disk and dozens of formats before and after.