A book stored on a shelf in a relatively temperate climate can last hundreds of years without issue. For an optical disc to last that long and still be readabl

A book stored on a shelf in a relatively temperate climate can last hundreds of years without issue. For an optical disc to last that long and still be readable, you'll need: 1) Archival-quality discs (e.g. http://www.mdisc.com http://www.mdisc.com). Normal writable discs will delaminate. 2) A drive capable of reading the disc, and capable of interfacing with your computer. Optical drives have a limited lifespan -- the drives used in Sega's Dreamcast, for example, are beginning to fail. Likewise, interconnection standards have a limited lifespan. 3) A file format that can still be read using existing technology. Will converters be likely in 50 years? Maybe. 100? Less likely. 200? Extremely unlikely. That's just optical discs. You're also talking about live archival, for example, to "cloud storage" -- this costs a lot more money than a book sitting on a shelf, uses a lot more power, is locked to a specific set of authentication credentials, must be paid for if the data is not to be lost. That's before factoring in DRM and advances therein. Sure, you can strip Kindle DRM, with extra effort, but how many people will do so and then accidentally store the result in a place where it will keep for 50 years? What about when DRM gets better? Ultimately, we suck at digital archival, and ultimately, there's only so much we can do with a medium that requires a great deal of complexity just to extract any amount of meaningful data whatsoever. There is a huge archival and preservation advantage to simple mechanisms that have fewer failure points.