Interestingly (and perhaps appropriately), the Wikipedia entry on “information as records” says the following:

Records are a specialized form of information. Essentially, records are information produced consciously or as by-products of business activities or transactions and retained because of their value. Primarily their value is as evidence of the activities of the organization but they may also be retained for their informational value. Sound records management ensures that the integrity of records is preserved for as long as they are required.

As far as Alex’s article, I think that’s the kind of information that’s being discussed.

I have a few mobile devices, and I have even seen the Kindle and Sony Reader in action. I still can’t see myself moving my entire library to digital.

Eventually, the use of paper will be greatly reduced, if only to decrease our affect on the environment. However, there will always be a market for physical media like novels.

People are not only more comfortable with it but there is secondary industries (book resale, first editions etc . . .) that could not exist without them.

Why is this an advantage? Preservation! For example, literate English-language speakers can pick up and read documents from the past 600 (or so) years and still understand them. And older languages can often be deciphered as well. And parchment and paper have proven to be able to last for decades-to-centuries, depending on the care taken.

What about digital media? Digital media are encoded – more literally – in multiple ways: File systems are formatted according to certain conventions. Files are written with certain structures. Text is encoded into a digital format, typically (these days) ASCII. Text is also “marked up” in a variety of ways.

But while many of these formats seem “standard”, the fact is that most of these standards are only a decade or two old – if that. ASCII has been around for my lifespan, but HTML and PDF have been around for a much shorter span. Both Apple and Microsoft have introduced new filesystems since 1990, and that typically means that old filesystems cease to become supported.

Consequently, as old hardware falls into disuse, files in these old formats cease to become readable unless someone makes the effort to transition them to new formats. And that means that documents are lost.

Throw in issues such as physical media decay (digital media tend to decay much faster than paper) and how the DRM question will play out (DRM often prevents people from making copies of items they’ve purchased, which means they can’t transition their files to newer formats to sidestep obsolescence; not to mention that it makes lending a lot more difficult) and I think there are many reasons to see the death of paper as less than imminent.

The kicker is that paper tends to stay preserved simply by putting it somewhere where it won’t decay. Preserving digital data requires ongoing effort.

Most of the content which has aggressively transitioned to digital is timely or transient content: Most people don’t care about preserving news, or blogs, or whatever. (Should they? That’s a good question in and of itself.) They want to get their daily fix, and then they rarely go back to it.

The interesting thing about this point is that it won’t necessarily inhibit the end of paper, but it might lead to a lot of data loss in the next few decades until people perceive the problem (and decide to do something systematic and organized to fix it).

My book collection may take up a lot of space, but I know I’ll be able to enjoy it for the rest of my life, at only the expense of moving it when I move. I can’t honestly say that I know the same thing about digital content.

Paper at the moment, is too cheap and too versatile to be replaced. We are far, far away from such a scenario.