C. J. Cherryh's answer on why she and her circle of authors are putting their backlist into e-format

[estara]

As she says in the comment I'll be linking here directly - someone needs to keep a record of this intention and impression. I want to post this so I remember it when people talk about ebooks and their pros and cons. And because I'm afraid she's right.

It’s like watching the Alexandrine Library burn…that everything they created is being threatened by, ironically, the pace of progress, and a world that regarded their work as ‘pulp’…and therefore not to be preserved. Here we have people finally making college courses out of the field—teaching it alongside the development of technology—but they’re having no really fast effect on the preservation of the field, which is decaying at the rate of pulp paper, being flooded in basements, thrown away by heirs who never approved of ‘that stuff’…or just mouldering away unrecorded, lost. Link