NYTimes has an article on going paperless at home. Yes, you heard me right. We have always been hearing about a paperless office. But this article concentrates on how to go paper less at home. Recipe is to scan receipts, bills, taxes, even books! and storing them digitally. There is only one thing that I am wary about in this whole exercise.
“Once the books are all scanned and backed up on several hard drives, I’ll never have to worry about the shed roof leaking and ruining them,” he says. “I’ve preserved them forever if I put them on the computer.”
Is that really true — about preserving them ‘forever’ ? How long do digital hard drives last ? CDs ? DVDs ? All of these have finite life times. But if you store your books inside a concrete/brick house, you are guaranteed multiple lifetimes.
Read the NYT article here.
And the article touts a Google engineering director. I am even tempted to believe that it is a google planned article/conspiracy 🙂
Hahaha..
“….tempted to believe that it is a Google planned article/conspiracy”. Well Google has this tie up with Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is trying to scan in every single volume that the library at U of M has in its racks. Its a very sensible thing to do, considering the “Go Green” push that people seem to be crazy about these days (what were they thinking, say even 30, 40 or 50 years back???? No “Go Green” at that point?). And being a book collector myself, I have to admit that I have nearly 1500 books in PDF on my HDD. In my case having soft copies helps (organizing the files is another nightmare), but nothing really beats the feel of having a good book in your hand and sippin’ a cuppa coffee :)..So I’m a little on either side of this fence, especially w.r.t. scanning books. Receipts, papers etc….who needs that junk anyways, unless you need to show some sort of proof for the USCIS :))
Cheers!
Sai