What happens to books that were only electronic?

I just finished a five-book series called “The Faerene Apocalypse”. It has to do with a generally benign invasion from the fantasy world across the ‘veil’ and their intent is to save Earth from being invaded by the ‘Kvstm’ who will enslave the entire population of Earth and sell us off or breed us as needed. Sounds pretty grim. Unfortunately to arrive at saving the Earth, the Faerene must kill off six billion of the seven billion inhabitants of Earth. Maybe not so benign after all.

It’s quite well written and takes up some ideas I’d never thought about before. BUT this isn’t a book review. 🙂

What I was thinking about was – what happens to books that aren’t on paper anymore? Obviously there are a few paper copies of my books around. I keep a hardback version and a paperback version of each cover design, for instance. But in the scheme of things, those will just vanish.

Of course, I’m not too concerned about a copy of Jane becoming lost forever. I’m more thinking of the loss of educational materials. By that, I don’t mean loss of history books or whatever. I’m thinking more of how to grow apples, how to tan hides, how to keep track of the important knowledge.

So much of it is electronic now and would vanish in the case of a disaster.

Is that really a problem? If Amazon went down and all of the millions of books stored only on Amazon went away, would that be as much of a disaster as the Library of Alexandria?

I don’t know. Maybe so. Do we even know what the collected wisdom is that exists on only Amazon now? And even in the case of the Library of Congress, is one copy of every book published even germane to world survival?

I did hear an interesting idea the other day. Buy a Kindle, put all these important books on it, like animal husbandry, proper fruit techniques, skinning, mining – all the important things to survival. Then bury it along with a solar charger in a moisture-proof container and it would be there with all that knowledge if it was needed. How long would it last? I mean, theoretically an unused uncharged Kindle could sit for decades, maybe longer, and still be operational when it was removed from its tomb. A small simple solar panel to charge said Kindle would likely last forever. Even if the battery disintegrated and would no longer hold a charge, being plugged into the solar panel would bring the ‘book’ to life, right?

Also, having a good backup is often the main thing that keeps the disaster from happening. I mean, you never need it if you have it. 🙂

All it would have to last would be a few decades, I’d think. I mean, either we’re moving to a brighter future, or we’re moving to one that will need the contents of that Kindle.

What do you think?