A major advantage of the digital medium is that so long as the physical media is readable, copies made from it will be identical. There is no degradation from generation to generation as there is with analog reproduction processes such as microfilm and photocopying.
Nothing is fugitive.
Digital media may not hold up as well as paper to adversity and neglect, but its content can be much more widely distributed. As soon as the event is past and the equipment is replaced, identical copies of the data can be restored from other unaffected archives. The third and most intractable issue affecting computer documents is, as William Schleihauf pointed out, the coding scheme in which the data are recorded. A solution to this problem was agreed upon eleven years ago by the international standards organization, but is only gradually gaining wide acceptance, primarily in the publishing industry, government, large corporations, and the European Common Market. Electronic documents in SGML format avoid the problems of proprietary formats and obsolescence, but can be converted to a proprietary format if this is necessary to perform a particular task.