Dear Rodger and all, I don't think the committee made a light decision to switch everything to electronic format without first making it necessary to retrieve such data many years in the future. Sure, PDFs will probably not exist in a couple of decades, but the data behind such PDFs remain and could be transferred to another format. In regard to loosing all the data on on one's computer, the idea of electronic copies is that all the major servers on earth will have access and storage of these data and retrievable from anywhere else. If one server crashes, then others will still be online and available. That is the power of the internet. Some people ask what if all the servers on earth suddenly and simultaneously crash? The counter argument is that if such a thing were to happen, we have a lot more to worry about than description of species! Nhu On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 8:20 AM, <totototo@telus.net> wrote: > On 21 Jul 2011, at 10:57, AW wrote: > > It also smells like a knee-jerk reaction "Oh, print is so old-school, so > anti- > digital, so anti-cybernetic." Tell that to someone whose home computer > crashed > and left them without printed backups of their contact lists. >