Technology, it is assumed, will eventually kill off the printed word. Horrified traditionalist and book lovers would hope that day never comes, but it seems that for centuries books themselves have been dying a natural death anyway.
After being exposed to the elements over long periods of time, the pages of a book will start to deteriorate and emit a particular stale odour. This is the result of the organic raw material that make up the book - paper, ink, glue - reacting with heat, light and moisture.
It is, as a report in The Guardian calls it, the smell of a book's death. And the more acidic the chemicals used in the book are, the quicker the death. Eventually, if not preserved properly, books will die of their own volition, and their texts lost to future generations.
But if you think that the solution is as simple as digital storage, then think again. It seems electronically stored data eventually decays too. Floppy disks are thing of the past and CDs and USB drives will soon be outdated. Software that opens data files will in time also become obsolete and not all archived texts will be saved.
So what is the solution to save all this digital content? Apparently, one of the best options is to quite simply print it out on paper.
Those traditionalists may have been right all along.
