"All the major newspaper repositories - the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, for instance, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, both of which once had collections of national importance - have long since bet the farm on film and given away, sold or thrown out most of their original volumes published after 1880 or so. Nearly all major university libraries, state libraries and large public libraries have done the same."

Even the Library of Congress has ceased binding and storing copies of American newspapers and throws away some of what it has accumulated. Instead of the hard copy of the past, today's libraries offer the public and scholars hard-to-read and inconvenient-to-use microfilmed versions of back issues of most newspapers and magazines. But deteriorating microfilm - early versions are not quite as durable as first thought - has jeopardized some collections, while copying oversights and quality control problems by some microfilm producers have led to yawning gaps in coverage. Many micro-filmed issues of the Chicago Tribune from the 1950s are "illegible", according to Nicholson Baker, a leading critic of the old book and periodical disposal practices of many libraries.