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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 3499547" data-attributes="member: 151">The fact of the matter is that no medium is permanent.  Paper breaks down, and is just as susceptible to fire, flood, air pollution and other environmental factors as anything else.  Paper also comes in varying qualities, just like electronic media:  I have magazines from the 70s and 80s that are yellowing from exposure to the air, have staples coming loose in the paper, have damage from the oils of a readers fingers and so forth.  I have printed pictures from 80 years ago that still survive, and I have pictures from just 30 years ago that have yellowed and decayed.  I have pictures from 10 years ago that have curled and slightly disfigured, and other pictures from 20 years ago that look as good as they day they were developed.Conversely, I have 25 year-old video tapes that, while degraded, still play.  I just cleaned off my desk and threw away 10 year old CD-Rs and even older Zip disks....and yes, they were all still readable.  Some of them had data that I transferred to newer media...some of them I threw away.  I also had some old floppies, some of which worked and some of which didn't.My point is that the lifetime of the media shouldn't really be the issue.  If we're anticipating a catastrophic failure of the infrastructure wherein no solution will exist for reading old AIT tapes, CD-Rs, DVDRs and whatever else, I'm not sure how that's different from an infrastructure collapse where we lose the indexes to 30+ years of articles, submissions, slush piles, artwork and other assorted documents.I have plenty of printed RPG books from my youth that are still whole (such as TSRs core 3) but that I have other, more recent games that didn't.  My Ringworld RPG books fell apart.  My Doctor Who RPG book barely lasted four years.  I don't even KNOW what happened to my Star Ace RPG or associated modules.  My Runequest and Powers and Perils characters?  Lost to time and storage.I guess my point is that I'm not nearly as concerned about getting in paper the first time as I am about getting it in a format that is useful to me.  A searchable PDF with bookmarks and indeexes would be useful.  A substitute for paper?  No....but it has different strengths and advantages that make it a viable pltform for some applications, to me.</blockquote>

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