Two Maps

* terrain data: if that map were scanned into digital form, would it be less useful? If it were in digital form to begin with, you could probably overlay others' data / have it calculate time for you. Is this worse?

* digital maps are far more likely to be up to date.

* terrain / vegetation: what if it were in an overlay? Or, going the Flickr route, how about geotagged photos appearing where they were taken? If a paper map has the info, so can a digital one.

* big 3D object: Google Earth? Though, granted, it's a 2D projection - there are intrinsic disadvantages there.

* GPS / guided routes: well yeah, route-finding is hard, building numbers aren't 1:1 with their location, and GPS often isn't high-enough resolution to really know where you are. But what about the map aspect in a city? My iThing shows me road and structure data that's far more detailed and up-to-date than any map you can purchase and reasonably keep with you, and tells me about accidents / construction in bigger cities, accurate to the hour or better.

So, the only real reasons being... bigger is better, and 3D is great (but immobile)? And battery life and durability, of course, though they weren't listed.

I would find it extremely likely that you can't find digital maps with the same information as paper ones you can buy - I still need to go to the DMV to do some things, for no real, rational reason. Such is the world. But that's not intrinsic to the medium, it's merely a consequence of it being newer. Less available doesn't count, that attribute will reverse itself in time. What is it about digital that you find less effective?

So maybe eventually, but I don't think we're "starting to see" electronic atlases that uniformly exceed the paper variety. They are better in some ways and worse in some ways, and that will remain true for at least another couple decades, I think.

well that's the thing - very few if any digital maps allow you to do simple things like this.

possibilities of digital cartography are much greater than paper one for sure, it's just that very few of them have materialized and gained widespread use yet.

I still carry a Thomas Brothers street atlas of Los Angeles in my car as a backup. If you haven't seen the old Thomas Guides, they're a wire-bound book of a couple hundred or so pages; mostly a grid of detailed map pages, each covering something like a 5x5 mile square of the city. They also have index maps, freeway maps that just show freeways and their off-ramps, dozens of pages of street-name indices, etc.

If I take a few hours drive (say, to Phoenix, or San Diego, or Las Vegas, or the SF Bay area), I probably won't have such detailed paper maps with me, but digital devices would be able to provide a similar level of detail in any of those places.

While it’s certainly possible to come up with good algorithms, and outfits like Google Maps and Bing Maps have, maps are judged by esthetics and practical usability as well as quantitative criteria[0], so the best results are likely to be hand-tuned.

0. Maps as opposed to the underlying GIS data, which is easier to judge solely by whether it’s complete, precise, and accurate.

Are you implying that offline cartography like Time Atlas do not come with errors? Both online and offline come with tons of errors, the difference is that online maps get corrected faster.