Sumerian clay tablets can still be read but the long-term survival of digital texts cannot be taken for granted. Libraries and other depositories must not think of digital storage, as they once thought of microfilm, as an answer to the problem of shelf space but as an adjunct to their traditional activities. The transition to digital books will be unsettling enough. It should not be a pretext for pruning the legacy of the Gutenberg era.

Jason Epstein, “Reading: The Digital Future,” The New York Review of Books, July 5, 2001

I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future, p. 29.