The main disadvantage of many paper information sources lies in the difficulty of updating them. Publishers will print a certain number of copies of a book and the material will not be updated until a new edition is brought out, perhaps several years later. Many books are never updated at all.
The other major disadvantage of the paper source is due to the difficulty of indexing the contents of any book or periodical thoroughly. Electronic sources can have full text indexing where every significant word in the text is included in a subject index. With print materials even the most skilled of indexers will produce an index with a limited number of subject keywords.
And lastly, the sheer size of paper information sources presents challenges about how to store them. You can easily judge this by comparing the space required to store a 30-volume print encyclopaedia with its equivalent CD or DVD-ROM.