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By David Rothman

imageNo one was hurt in the well-publicized fire and explosion at The Planet, which owns data centers housing the TeleRead’s Web server and thousands of others.

Some recent posts and comments were AWOL when we came back online today, and we’ll also have to plug in a few missing images.

But all should return in the next week or so, thanks to Robert Nagle‘s help.

TeleHell

In terms of the continuity of the TeleRead site, however, this was the Data Center Fire from Hell. And we don’t just mean the interrupted reading. We hurt with you when you didn’t see your comments to the blog or your posts in the main part. Be assured they’re safe, thanks to the miracles of RSS feeds and other measures. Still, Robert and I were more than a little disappointed with the Planet’s priorities since we were among the last sites to see service restored.

TeleRead was a victim by way of its dependence on WebFaction (ballyhoo: "agile hosting by helpful humans"), which in turn used the Planet ("reliable, scalable and affordable web hosting service"). Yes, we’ll be investigating other hosting alternatives and looking for ways to improve redundancy. Meanwhile here’s a fun little tidbit. Guess who won SearchDataCenter.com’s Data Center of the Year competition recognizing "excellence in data center project management."

"Excellence," Planet style

planetvideoCheck out the related YouTube paen from Tech TV and the information there.

As valuable as energy conservation and  cost-savings can be, might The Planet management have spent a little less time on those issues and a little more time coordinating disaster plans and other matters with the Houston Fire Department? The Department did not immediately let the Planet fire up the interrupted servers again. Could better planning have at least reduced the down time?

The e-book angle: A lesson on the need for different business models

towerofbabel The outage was all the more ironic considering a major theme of this blog—the need for e-books to be a durable medium. We mean it when we fight DRM and eBabel, the enemies of permanence. Thankfully, RSS and other Web standards are around to make it easier to rebuild the TeleBlog (even if RSS for now comes in dialects).

Alas, if the DRM and eBabel factions prevail, that might not be the case in the future with e-books. Do not trust corporations (driven by profit and all too willing to jettison old material, as shown by the loss of radio shows, old movies and TV shows and the misplaced AudioBlogger files) or even publicly funded libraries (given their vulnerability to political pressures) by themselves. At one point Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was even quoted as saying he might stop selling books. His ultimate obligations are to his shareholders, not to customers and society at large—a point that Kindle owners might consider if they truly want to own their purchases in his proprietary formats. Forget it.

The only true way to guarantee eternal access to e-books is to use a variety of business approaches and avoid Rube Goldbergish technology and the "company store" approach. That means jettisoning DRM and proprietary eBabel. You need to be able to own your books for real by way of nonencrypted files and standards such as ePub and HTML. I like paper books, too, by the way.

E and the asteroid threat

In the end, of course, you never know what will survive, or won’t. If the DRM and eBabel won’t do in books, maybe asteroids or other space rocks will. E-books and humans on Mars for redundancy’s sake, anyone? Ugh, another Planet, so to speak—ideally with skillful terraforming and other goodies to improve on the original? Just joking. For now, let’s follow Gregg Easterbrook‘s advice in the Atlantic site and focus on safeguarding Earth.

 
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