An important reason to continue buying printed books and supporting print media.
Most web content I've consumed in my lifetime is already lost, many floppy disks and burned CD-ROMs I held onto are now unreadable, and in 200 years, the situation will only be worse.
But I can go to the British Library and read a 1000+ year old text without much difficulty.
FWIW does any of it remain on archive.org? They have some really great collections on there, and writing on digital archiving, like how to preserve CDs as best as possible (spoiler: the brand of CD is a large factor).
That's well and good for the _current_ ability to potentially find some old media, but regarding GP's point about digital data being fickle over long time-spans, Archive.org is only one hack/fire/solar-flare/DDOS/etc. away from being gone (potentially forever). They were recently hacked, thankfully the group who claimed responsibility weren't trying to destroy data.
> A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 145+ Petabytes of server space -- and we store at least 2 copies of everything).
Thankfully they have a few backups around the world, but there are still plenty of plausible events which could render the data useless. In contrast, physical mediums like books, vinyl records or microfilm/microfiche can last for hundreds of years.
But notably, during the 1990s there was a concerted push to switch books to alkaline paper.
A lot of old printed books were done on acidic paper, causing them to more easily disintegrate. Disintegration of acidic books can mitigated by brushing alkaline powder between each page, and by keeping very low humidity.
The switch to alkaline paper substantially changes the smell, much to some readers' dismay. But be sure to look for alkaline prints, when available.
Most web content I've consumed in my lifetime is already lost, many floppy disks and burned CD-ROMs I held onto are now unreadable, and in 200 years, the situation will only be worse.
But I can go to the British Library and read a 1000+ year old text without much difficulty.