I love finding old books, like an 1864 Greek dictionary or an account of the early battles of the American Civil War by William Howard Russell*, the Times reporter who exposed the mismanagement of the Crimean War a few years earlier. Both of them are broken, ragged, imperfect, but perfectly readable. A floppy disk or data tape from 25 years ago is now unreadable by anybody but a specialist in data recovery.

* He got the wrong side of the Federal authorities and was frozen out of access to information. He had made the mistake of telling the facts as he saw them, rather than the official success story. If anyone wants the book, they are welcome to it if they pick it up or pay the postage. It's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article about him.