You know what was a bad idea?

Microfilm!

Flipping through and scanning a hard copy of a newspaper is very quick, but to scroll, stop, and magnify page after page eats up time exponentially.

If you need one article and know exactly where to find it, microfilm's not bad, but if you're browsing around in certain date ranges and trying to find stuff that's maybe there and maybe isn't, it's like the kiss of death.

The tradeoff on time simply isn't worth what you'd save in storage space, though I guess the portability of the reels is somewhat a plus.

The other day, flipping through 4 (four!) issues of a daily newspaper that wasn't more than 30 page each per issue, took me like an hour, honestly.