In law, the whole West key number and digest system was a highly creative, albeit labor- intensive, method for dealing with the constraints of information in physical form. Electronic information is fixed neither in time nor in space. Information that appears on screen as text or image, or that is presented as sound, is not stored as text, image, or sound. All electronic information is stored in digital form, and it is in its digital form that the information is processed and communicated. It is only when presented to the human eye or ear that the information is transformed into something intelligible to human senses.
Ink fixed to a physical surface is the basic condition or form of print.
The stability of printed information, the authority of printed information, and the trust placed in printed information derive from this physical condition and from the ability to create multiple copies of an original. As already noted, printed information is also fixed to particular kinds of physical places. To facilitate access to information, legal information is typically found in a different place from economic or medical information. Placing information into electronic form not only liberates the information from its pages but removes the need for specialized spaces to hold particular kinds of information. We are becoming increasingly accustomed to being able to acquire information from our homes that used to be accessible only from an office or library.