The recording of the 4-minute reading of the same pages would require 1.9 megabytes of storage and a movie of that reading would take 45 megabytes. Organizing and searching pictures in a digitized library is difficult. Optical character recognition technology often results in less than 90 percent word accuracy. Up to 20 years worth of chemical journals including text, formula, and images have been made available in electronic form. In comparing paper and electronic access, the SuperBook and Pixlook interfaces yield better precision and recall in less time compared with the paper articles.
Digital libraries work.
They are affordable. Scanning a book is now comparable to the cost of building a library. Organization and funding are the major remaining problems in building the electronic library. Not only did hypertext not invent text, it didn't even invent hype as seen in the above assessment of microfilm. The new buildings for the British Library in London and the Bibliotheque de France in Paris cost more to build than the cost of scanning their books.