If, when the twenty-third century arrives, the history of the Mughal Empire is better known than that of our time, it will be because of our enthusiasm for electronically stored digital files. The contents of most digital media vanish long before words written on high-quality paper would, and they become obsolete and unusable even sooner due to rapid technological innovation. While information written on paper can be read directly, access to digital information is doubly indirect: the sequence of digits representing the information must be retrieved, and then that sequence must be decoded by the appropriate software. Which one of the following statements most accurately expresses the main conclusion of the argument? ['Information written on paper is more readily accessible than the contents of digital documents.', 'Digitally stored information is particularly vulnerable because of the two-step process required to retrieve it.', 'Historically important records from the present era may be lost because of the medium in which they are stored.', 'The obsolescence brought about by ongoing technological innovation will make historical research increasingly difficult in the future.']