Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper?

Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could ever be, and easier to read as well. No power source necessary — just a lens.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta

Program once memory is quite resistant, and of course, plain old ROM is a rock, literally. Transistors do not deteriorate unless you use them, just like resistors and a lot of the available capacitors.

On how to operate it, it's an e-reader, you turn it on there's the manual there. There is the really difficult part of telling people "put 12V DC here, ground on the outside", but it's trivial compared to the problem of people understanding the books inside.

> ground on the outside

A diode bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge) can easily take care of polarity inversions. Voltage is a harder problem.

Since we're going through flights of fancy in these threads, another option would be to add a built-in solar panel to your hypothetical e-reader. Expose it to enough light (and you can probably assume the lighting won't be much brighter than a tropical midday sun) and it turns on.

Yes, but then you would both incentive people into placing your device under sunlight and need some of the shortlived kind of capacitors.

It should still be possible to make a solar powered e-reader long-lived, but a replaceable power supply is a good idea even if your device has to last for a couple of years.

But 21st-century ROM isn't human-readable without a 21-st century computer. Would that survive a millenium? It's not enough to have a storage medium that lasts 1000 years; the entire tech stack has to.

A more accessible approach than the High-Density Rosetta might be the M-DISC.[0] It's essentially a DVD/Blu-Ray which materials engineered to last significantly longer than standard ones. I attended a chemistry lecture by Prof. Matthew Linford (BYU) and from the gist of his description,[1] the materials that they were using have a good shot at lasting 500 to 1000 years if properly stored.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[1] : https://purl.pt/24107/1/iPres2013_PDF/Permanent%20Digital%20...

That assumes we'll have DVD drives 1000 years from now. The thing I like about HD-Rosetta is that it doesn't depend on any special technology to be readable. Magnification is the sort of technology that will always exist in any sufficiently-advanced society, while the specifics of DVD encoding could easily be lost to time.

> After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it

Same way they know now. Humans will still be humans. If my 3 year old son can figure out how my e-reader works from nothing, so can future humans.

Can he figure out how to build a charger for that e-reader from scratch? Wall sockets are going to be different in a millenium, if they even exist at all. With no manual, they could easily fry it with too much voltage before they actually get it working.

Somebody wrote down their thinking on exactly this subject: http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/