Digital vs Physical Preservation

Think about it this way - to view the particular page, article etc you would have to be able to travel to the library in person to view it. If digitized multiple people across the entire globe can access the content. Furthermore printed material degrades over time and at some point becomes unreadable. By digitizing it it remains accessible to future generations. Who knows what may or may not be of interest to future generations. Storage is cheap - historic information is priceless.

Storing books digitally may make them more available in the present, but it will also likely mean that they're be less available at some point in the future. Physical libraries with physical books have proven they can last for centuries, sometimes for millennia. For all we know, none of our digital storage media lasts significantly longer than decades, and even to pull that off, you have to constantly invest in copying and duplicating your data. Hard drives of the seventies, floppy disks, c

even if we archive everything, hundreds of years from now all of “the worlds information” could very well be unusable and unreadable for a variety of factors(no one remembers how to deal with the file formats, EMP, bit rot). books however will continue to work just fine as they have for thousands of years

The scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics. Meanwhile, finding a reader for the Jazz disk with your thesis has become impossible.

It's 100% true for a book forgotten on your attic, but if discussing organized effort to preserve information I argue it's an illusion - the libraries have to be actively looked after too. There is a fire protection, regular deratization and disinsection, if roof starts leaking it has to be fixed. If you just leave a book in the middle of a field unprotected it won't last a year. When libraries are left without funds their books get destroyed fairly quickly, I've seen that fi

Digital files can be duplicated, hashed, have redundancy logically built in.Analogue files render incorrectly too; surfaces deteriorate - media rots, oxidises, decays.I've got digital files from last millennium that have survived better than analogue ones - both written text and images. For the most important I've kept logical and physical redundancy (but not yet needed it); much harder to do with bulky physical media.Libraries in my UK city, and across the UK, have been close

Yes, but look what happened when we tried to digitise and preserve a 1000 year old book.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservat...

The huge difference is that digital data doesn't ever "wear out" - it might get lost or it might be in format that you don't know how to open on your current device - but it will never become partially unreadable or fragile like the physical media. Both of these problem are relatively easy to solve. It does cost money to make backups and do the format upgrades (or backup the old tools), but it generally costs a lot less than storing physical books over the same period of time

A very good question. Some time ago I've heard that big libraries and archives print digital photos back to film because it is much more durable than the modern media and the picture really exists and is visible. A different problems I have with text files which would seem much less of an issue. But I have already thousands of e-mails and text, how can I be sure that in 40-80 years there will be machines or programs that could read my old text files.

Don't bullshit me, copying files and applying error correction is trivial compared to maintaining paper copies of books which degrade and burn. We write emulators for just about every popular old computer system, so even if you have to use a dated reader to extract the info, should be possible. We have whole organizations dedicated to digital preservation that would have no issue doing this for millions of books.