The last one happened in 1999, when the British Library quietly announced it was bidding farewell to its collection of American newspapers printed after 1850. A desperate Baker quickly formed a nonprofit organization called the American Newspaper Repository in order to save complete runs of some of the country's most important mass-circulation papers. He now stores some 11,000 volumes in a warehouse in Rollinsford, New Hampshire. Meanwhile, he learned that libraries value space even more than they value their own collections. But rather than building additional storage facilities, some of the most prominent libraries in the land seized on the destructive and costly solution of microfilm.
People read by turning pages.
Still, the accepted wisdom, trumpeted by the Library of Congress, was that brittle paper must be either converted to microfilm or deacidified. Microfilming meant destruction in the name of preservation. Microfilm is perishable and comes with a high margin of error. One look at the illustrations in Baker's book is all you need. Baker himself doesn't read today's newspapers.