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