No, history is all about writing. That's pretty much its definition. The invention of history happened precisely when people decided to start writing things down for the future.
We prevent the rewriting of history by distributing the writing as widely as possible. And that's precisely what the internet is doing.
> Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving history.
I don't doubt that those books have better survivability, but they also represent only the tiny fraction of written information that was worth publishing in book form.
archive.org is a great example of how a relatively small nonprofit organization can now afford to archive historical information at volumes that were previously impossible.
They were referencing unique, long-tail content such as blogs or personal sites, not bit.ly redirectors to mainstream content that is widely replicated on CDNs.
Edit: try using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... or similar extension to find caches/archives of dead links that are no longer online at an alternate address. Agreed that link rot is not the same as offline content, but there is digital content which can no longer be found in any archive or search engine.
Even given that, its not at all comparable to the idea that history is written in books. Books themselves are printed and published and duplicated if people care to do so. How much content that is scribblings in journals and other disposables is lost daily, which is why blogs and the like are the digital equivalent of?
Content that is initially valued is duplicated. Content that isn't dies away. It isn't like things being digital makes them more transient, instead it makes rare copies far more accessible.
The original comment was about "rewriting history".
History is written by winners, who change over time and have been known to rewrite history. Digital formats require constant transformation from legacy formats to modern formats (per http://fileformat.info). This has an economic cost and only a subset of content is prioritized for forward migration, depending on which parties wield economic power at that time.
A book on acid-free paper that has a reasonable print run will be stored in geographical locations worldwide and will preserve information for decades if not hundreds of years, without requiring battery power, OS upgrades or file format migration.
History is also about economics. Digital storage economics is increasingly driven by cloud vendor bulk manufacture of custom servers and data centers, e.g. OpenCompute. Centralized copies can be rewritten. If local communities start building their own https://archive.org/web/petabox.php to record local/global digital history in archival file formats, maybe digital can record long-term history, EMPs not withstanding.
Do you know about Wikipedia's version control and discussion features?
Wikipedia is about 10 GB compressed, meaning that anybody can download a copy and save it forever, for free.
If you include the discussions pages, images, and revisions of Wikipedia it amounts to several terabytes worth of data. (A couple of hundred dollars for a hard-drive that size).
There are many backup mediums that are meant for long-term storage. EMP protection is relatively easy.
How many "acid-free paper books" would it take to store that information?
Wikipedia is a great example of data in an open format that is intended to be migrated forward as technology changes.
It does not protect against rewriting history, one could argue that Wikipedia exists to rewrite history based on the latest consensus and reduction of controversy. While anyone could review the change history, in practice most readers use the latest version. There is at least one research paper showing a steady decline in Wikipedia contributors due to tough editorial policies created to thwart spammers.
Books are decentralized from both a physical and editorial point of view. Look back at any major event in history and there will be multiple records and perspectives of the event. Decentralized locations record the subset of events that are locally most important.
At any rate, it's not an either/or situation. Digital will coexist with print and paintings and sculpture and architecture. Each has a different information density, diversity and preservation profile.
We prevent the rewriting of history by distributing the writing as widely as possible. And that's precisely what the internet is doing.