It seems to me that trying to compare internet archives and physical archives is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges. In the end, I think that it is important for both to exist, as they play different roles in history and pose different sets of advantages and disadvantages.

As Lepore pointed out, so much of the internet is junk that gets turned over within months. The internet poses an easy way to broadcast any idea that comes to mind, no matter how stupid. While internet archives allow information to be stored, organized, and retrieved more easily, I don’t think this overcomes the fact that most of the information on the internet is junk. That’s not to say that the junk shouldn’t be archived–I just think that the accessibility of internet archives is at risk of being bogged down by the content.

On the other hand, publishing a book or another publicly viewable document is relatively hard to do. You can’t be the only person who thinks your ideas are worth writing about–at least one other person has to think so as well. The information we find in books, though constrained by physicality of the book, is tame enough to process relatively easily. In other words, I think that the constraints of the book are rescued by its curated, polished content (ideally).