Snark! I love a short and too the point comment. Great thinking.

Quit reading newspapers in 1970 because nothing that I saw in the papers had anything to do with what I could see with my own lying eyes in the war.

Nailed next to the door of the AFVN station at Qui Nhon was an article about an attack on a ship in Qui Nhon harbor that was successfully driven off with no loss to the Americans. Step out door, walk ten feet east, turn left, look down and see the masts of not one but two ships sticking out of the water.

Newspapers are strictly a waste of perfectly good trees.

Coming from a newspaperman who's been saved and seen the light, I find your snarky comment quite amusing. But Ray Bradbury is worried. He's worried because the title of his most famous book could become a reality. What will we do when everything is on a digital format and can possibly be changed at any time. They tell us cloud computing is on its way. What will that mean for the future. Will anything written be permanent. Will my hard drive and my computer be working in 2000 years so that someone can read what is on them. We have parchment documents that are thousands of years old that still exist but can digital records disappear into the ether forever? You already know the answer.

What happens if they ban home storage on quit selling hard drives? Must we write on rocks to ensure that the past and the present and what is to come is recorded so that madmen and dictors can't change history?

Many are angry that so many documents on the white house website and so many emails "disappeared" into the ether during the administration of the last and sorriest president in American history. And that dude, who is ultimately responsible for it claims he's married to a librarian. She must not be a good one if she couldn't convince her husband to make sure that everything that he did was saved for posterity. In fact, she must really be a sorriest librarian that ever lived because she wouldn't speak out about what her husband and his closest subordinates were doing hiding records and destorying them and his being a part of an administration that destroyed thousands of documents that recorded what he and his close subordinates did. All those records of historical importance were knowingly destoryed Every generation has it tyrants and the most powerful librarian in the country didn't lift a finger to stop the mad destruction of records, the likes of which have not been seen since WWII. And Dick Cheney is probably still feeding his shredder as we speak.

Here's the times recording what Ray Bradbury is working on --- his latest project- public libraries. He's worried. Me too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html?em

Actually the oldest surviving written documents are:

"...Allegedly the oldest written document ever discovered is a Sumerian cuniform document (written on a clay tablet), and it is a recipe for beer. This claim has been made in a number of places (notably the Beer Institute of America), and is often repeated, though I have been unable to track down an original source for the claim.

It does not seem unlikely, however, as the oldest documents we have that can be verified are indeed Sumerian. The "Epic of Gilgamesh," for example, is widely acknowledged as being the oldest know complete story written down, and it appears on 12 Sumerian clay tablets which date from somewhere between 2150-2000 BC." (from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_oldest_document_in_world_history)

I think your fears are unfounded, the thing to fear is corruption. That nasty is capable of changing everything including books, paper, parchment and clay tablets.