Type Specimen For Paper Books

There is a curious thing going on in California. There is a man, or should we say, hero-to-be, named Brewster Khale who is compiling and storing a huge pile of paper books in case our digital world falls apart. Which it truly could. (Did you see the episode of The IT Crowd where Jen borrows the Internet for her speech… and well, things happen?)

Click on the picture to see the clip.

Anyway:

Brewster decided that he should keep a copy of every book they scan so that somewhere in the world there was at least one physical copy to represent the millions of digital copies. That safeguarded random book would become the type specimen of that work. If anyone ever wondered if the digital book’s text had become corrupted or altered, they could refer back to the physical type that was archived somewhere safe.

Not a bad idea, really.
Want to read the whole article? Check it out at The Technium.