Many years in the future, after global warming wrecks our world, when humanity rebuilds civilization, they will be glad for folks like this person. Without physical books there will be no way to reconstruct our time and tell our story. Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.
> Digital media will be useless to future generations if there’s a blip in continuity.
If anything, this undersells it: plenty of not-very-old digital media is useless today with no blip in continuity, either because of bit rot or, more commonly, because of perfectly good data in a format for which there don't exist readers any more.
That's true; there are a lot of reasons not to rely passively on digital media for archival purposes. But I'm speaking here even of digital media from the lost, pre-cloud, pre-SAAS age when one could loosely presume to own at least what was on one's computer, but (therefore?) there was no institutional interest in keeping the large variety of media readable. (For example, I joined the Mac ecosystem not long after they switched away from SITX compression, and almost immediately it became--at least for a new user--impossible to find uncompressors.)
