This clip, about a Luddite monk’s discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will
it just disappear? Plus ça change…
On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following an ownership dispute, Amazon erased George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four from the Kindle, and all the users’ annotations. Readers could appreciate the irony, if little else. This was a vanishing act worthy of Airstrip One.
For a whole text to disappear like that is a rare hiccup, but to lose a single word or part of a text during digitization is a constant danger.
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