If, when the twenty-third century arrives, the history of the Mughal Empire is better known than that of our time, it will be because of our enthusiasm for electronically stored digital files  The contents of most digital media vanish long before words written on high-quality paper would, and they become obsolete and unusable even sooner due to rapid technological innovation
While information written on paper can be read directly, access to digital information is doubly indirect: the sequence of digits representing the information must be retrieved, and then that sequence must be decoded by the appropriate software
Information written on paper is more readily accessible than the contents of digital documents.