Reply #327: Interesting example with the library in Alexandria

[customerserviceguy]

Because most works were laborious to copy, there were fewer copies. With electronic information, copies can be made easily, cheaply, quickly, and in as many copies as there are places in the world to store them.

If that were the case with the Alexandria library, nothing really would have been lost, it would have been replicated somewhere else. I have faith that the algorithms needed to decode Word and PDF files have been replicated enough places so that someone will always be able to translate them in the future. The thing that doomed knowledge locked up on very early storage methods was that they were not widespread enough to have survived obsolescence.