It annoys me that it won't be returned to print or otherwise made available by the press.
It also appears to annoy you that presses don't have electronic copies of twenty-year-old books.
I am currently reading a book published by Harvard. It's pretty good, and I find the doctrines it expounds mostly agreeable, but at the same time it seems mostly unnecessary for it to exist. I mean: despite the hopes the reviewer expresses in the final paragraph, I see little reason to believe that this will be the book that gets its more or less familiar, albeit decidedly minority, positions discussed by the main stream. It's just kind of there, bringing together a standard, if, again, minority, set of influences in a fairly predictable way. (I may be being too harsh: I haven't finished it.) Wilson's book is far better. I am annoyed that it languishes!
It also appears to annoy you that presses don't have electronic copies of twenty-year-old books.
Well, why shouldn't they?
Could you store a book in Word Perfect?
9: Why not? I mean, there's a good chance you could open it now to be able to do a conversion, though you might lose some formatting. A couple of years ago I opened some Word Perfect 5.0 docs I created in the early 90s and stored on 3.5" discs. The version of Word I was using had the ability to open Word Perfect so I didn't even need special software.
But I suspect that for most books published in 1989, you're only going to get them in an electronic version if someone scans a copy of the print book.
In 1989, I think I was using Apple Works.
I'd kind of like to see what my programming assignments I did as a kid looked like, but even if I do find the 5 1/4" disk I may have kept, and even if it is readable, I don't have a drive that can read it.
I have a bunch of 5 1/4" inch disks from when I was a kid, and I have a 5 1/4" inch floppy drive, but I can't get the drive to recognize the disks. Probably because the disks are Apple and the drive is PC. I am not enough of a hardware geek to know how to fix this problem.
I worked at the University of Redacted Press during my last summer in college. I was very excited to get the job in part because I had recently read the first two books in a trilogy that they'd reprinted, and I was very eager to find the mysteriously-omitted third. I figured they had it lying around somewhere. But no! I had to go to special collections at Northwestern and ended up transcribing a noteworthy passage by hand, to the point of noteworthy cramping.
Much later, I spent a lot of quality time with the 3rd floor photocopier in my graduate department and a couple of dissertation-necessary titles that cost more than $50 each and were worth, respectively, $15.99 and $0.00015.
Can I pile on with related annoyance? Mine isn't even current but your posting has...has...stoked the flames or poked the embers or lowered the fruit or something.
So when I was trying to go back to school I had to take the GRE. First I tried to get official reports, even though it had been way, way too long for my old scores to be usable. Then, for some reason I can't remember, I just tried to get any report, no matter how unofficial, of my old scores.
I was told they have absolutely no record of them. I mean it wasn't before the computer era that I took the fucking GRE. As above, couldn't they save a few WordPerfect files with a long list of scores?? Or...?
18: Maybe it was supposed to be for your own good -- they destroy the test scores after fives years, so they can't be held against you for the rest of your life -- like they destroy juvenile arrest records.
I know this sounds crazy to you young folk, but there were actually ways to keep records before computers.
Most companies have document retention policies which come from thinking about laws and profits. Document retention means the rules governing document destruction. Old documents are usually seen as a liability by management, and often seen as valuable by employees doing work.
Yeah, I don't think they keep test scores long after the scores "expire".