Paramount Global recently pulled down its websites containing the archives of MTV News and CMT.com, removing access to a vast archive of decades of music journalism. Many were shocked by this, but they were clearly not librarians:
With that in mind, let’s turn to the video below from XKCD’s Randall Munroe, who provides some sense of costs for what it would take to maintain a constantly up-to-date print archive of Wikipedia. The actual printing of the the corpus of Wikipedia isn’t the problem here, it’s the near constant edits, around 100 per minute or 150,000 per day. Munroe estimates that you could keep up with the changes with a mere six inkjet printers, which leads to the real costs, all those ink cartridges.