There was a time when everyone thought that everything on the Internet was going to be there forever – rings around the world. And, to be fair, some stuff hangs around and some stuff unexpectedly pops up when you’d rather it didn’t (though I am not over-enthused about this idea that you should never post pictures of yourself showing skin or being silly in case a future employer is appalled – the sooner employers understand that what staff do when they are off the clock is not generally any of an employer’s business, the better).
But things do disappear off the internet, or at least shift from one place to another in a way that is aggravating and time-consuming when you want to refer back to this brilliant article you read a few years ago that would utterly settle the hash of some idiot you are currently arguing with (no, this is NOT just me.), the link is dead and you can’t remember the name of the writer or enough distinctive keywords to find it again.
It might be worth remembering that, Bezos’ general villainy aside, one of the great things about Amazon in its earliest days was the
possibility of acquiring all sorts of books you had loved and lost and which had gone out of print. You can still sometimes do that now, though the pricing structure for used books on the Zon is getting progressively more tiresome.
I’m particularly growly about this at the moment because something I really wanted to stock up on and keep selling has disappeared. I suppose in the case of that particular book the solution is going to be: set up my own publishing company and reprint the bugger, but I can’t see that being awfully workable these days. I’ll just have to keep on haunting eBay for the foreseeable.