Hard copies of are good but there is an advantage of keeping digital copies; storage capacity. Physical books take up a lot of room if you have a lot of them but you can store huge libraries worth on a 1 TB drive. Just make sure you do it on an airgapped machine since OSes are becoming untrustworthy
Unless you have an archival quality copy of a book printed on acid free paper, you are out of luck.
Modern paperbacks and most hardbacks are printed on paper treated with aluminum sulfate. Over time the aluminum sulfate reacts with water in the air (humidity) to become aluminum oxide and sulfuric acid. The acid turns the pages yellow and eats the glue that holds the binding together. Single pages start to fall out, and eventually the paper becomes too yellow to read.
How long the process takes depends on the humidity of the environment, but almost all books will be heavily damaged after 20 years.
Almost all books go out of print forever after the death of the author. Only a tiny percentage of books stay in print after the author can no longer advocate for the books and is not writing more to make their back catalog relevant. 99% of all writing just ... disappears after a generation.
Want to change that? Start scanning books. Sort them by category and upload them in a Torrent. Textbooks, fiction, SF, whatever. You can fit a thousand OCR books in a torrent, and hopefully it will be persistent.
Hard copy works just fine still.
Hard copies of are good but there is an advantage of keeping digital copies; storage capacity. Physical books take up a lot of room if you have a lot of them but you can store huge libraries worth on a 1 TB drive. Just make sure you do it on an airgapped machine since OSes are becoming untrustworthy
Unless you have an archival quality copy of a book printed on acid free paper, you are out of luck.
Modern paperbacks and most hardbacks are printed on paper treated with aluminum sulfate. Over time the aluminum sulfate reacts with water in the air (humidity) to become aluminum oxide and sulfuric acid. The acid turns the pages yellow and eats the glue that holds the binding together. Single pages start to fall out, and eventually the paper becomes too yellow to read.
How long the process takes depends on the humidity of the environment, but almost all books will be heavily damaged after 20 years.
Almost all books go out of print forever after the death of the author. Only a tiny percentage of books stay in print after the author can no longer advocate for the books and is not writing more to make their back catalog relevant. 99% of all writing just ... disappears after a generation.
Want to change that? Start scanning books. Sort them by category and upload them in a Torrent. Textbooks, fiction, SF, whatever. You can fit a thousand OCR books in a torrent, and hopefully it will be persistent.
https://www.amazon.com.au/IRIS-5-PRO-Iriscan-Desk/dp/B07VGTG6ZG/