The Story of Libraries

Author: Fred Lerner
Published: 1998
 

If you want to know all about libraries, then seek out The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age by Fred Lerner. It is a comprehensive history from the time of the Sumerians with their clay tablets to the current digital age.
 

If anything, the book is a bit dry in its exhaustive cataloging (pun intended) of the approaches by different cultures over thousands of years. More accessible is Libraries Through the Ages, an slimmer edited version of the above book.
 

One passage in particular is relevant to my recent musings on paper:
 

"But there are dangers in relying upon digital technology. The machinery used to convert printed publications to machine-readable form, and the media on which the resulting electronic data are stored, rapidly become obsolete. The software which interprets the electronic data is also subject to rapid change. And librarians have no experience by which to judge the permanence of electronic data. Words written on paper, parchment, or papyrus five hundred, a thousand years ago, and more, can still be read in their original form today; but we have no sure way of knowing whether a diskette or compact disc produced today will be intelligible in ten years' time." p.203