And where some experimental media -- like quantum holography -- require temperatures approaching absolute zero (273 degrees Celsius) and tremendous energy, DNA is stable at room temperature, the researchers noted. "You can drop it wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later," Church said.

Unlike earlier researchers, Church said his team was able to use commercial DNA microchips to create standalone DNA.

"We purposefully avoided living cells," Church said. "In an organism, your message is a tiny fraction of the whole cell, so there's a lot of wasted space. But more importantly, almost as soon as a DNA goes into a cell, if that DNA doesn't earn its keep, if it isn't evolutionarily advantageous, the cell will start mutating it, and eventually the cell will completely delete it."

In another departure from earlier research, the team rejected so-called "shotgun sequencing," which reassembles long DNA sequences by identifying overlaps in short strands.

Instead, the Harvard team took their cue from information technology, and encoded the book in 96-bit data blocks, each with a 19-bit address to guide reassembly. Including jpeg images and HTML formatting, the code for the book required 54,898 of these data blocks, each a unique DNA sequence.