Nicholson Baker quote about browsing

You know we lose a lot with microfilm, which is not random access
memory. There are consequences when things are only on microfilm:

Real historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
aren't reading the old newspapers very much anymore, though - not page
by page and month by month, for pleasure - and the texture and context
of historical writing has, one suspects, undergone subtle changes
(thinnings of specificity, losses of groundedness) as a consequence.
Historians don't read the old papers because their libraries don't keep
the old papers to read, and microfilm is a brain-poaching,
gorge-lifting trial to browse. When you try to survey a series of
filmed issues methodically, you miss things that would be obvious to an
eye-reader; it's oddly difficult sometimes to do the equivalent of
turning the page, especially when you're handling heavily scratched ore
faded microfilm and must crank up the magnification to make out the
words (This is particularly true at the Library of Congress..

- Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on paper by Nicholson Baker
(Random house, 2001) page 39-40.
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