[WilliamEdward]

I like that HTTPS forces you to actually care about improving and maintaining your website. Somehow, leaving your site alone forever to gather dust is considered a good thing. The author totally missed that one.

Yes, some sites serve basic content that can stay up forever without change (thistothat.com comes to mind as a good example) but it really doesn't hurt to force people to put a little bit more care into their sites.

[nicbou]

Books get written once. Why can't websites? We still learn from documents that are centuries old, and when a cache of them is found, it makes the news.

Yet on the other side, we let so much information expire because the underlying technology is obsolete.

[ozim]

Books are not going to turn into a botnet node. Books hardware is not getting less efficient when new paper is produced. Electronics will not live centuries unless you spend loads of money to maintain it.

[dredmorbius]

Security arguments notwithstanding:

- Book contents frequently get updated. Revisions, translations, editions, adaptations.

- Book formats see change. There are at least some works which have seem multiple forms (oral traditions, clay tablets, vellum codices, stageplays, printed books, operatic adaptations, three-ring binders/loose-leaf circulars, magazine serials, paperbacks, radio serials, cinema series, comic-book adaptations, Broadway musicals, TV series, PS documents, PDF files, podcasts, videogame adaptations, YouTube channels, ebooks, ...)

Generally, websites are less a document format than a publishing mechanism. Print-on-demand-on-steroids.

[benbristow]

We have the Internet Archive (archive.org) to backup lots of this information via the likes of the Wayback Machine.

Books & physically documents can decay naturally or be damaged physically, digital media can be damaged physically too. A hard drive or SSD can fail at any time, a disc can be scratched, a tape can get tangled. Easier and more accessible redundancy is an advantage of digital media.