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I never really thought about it much before this thread, but how secure do we feel our current technology is? I mean, can we envision a human disaster that would leave us without the long term ability to read DVDs, hard drives, etc?
If we move away from paper archival, then we are very dependent on technology to read magnetic storage. But that's not the sort of thing you can do by just being clever - you have to maintain your technological and manufacturing capacity. If we had a major disaster in the form of an asteroid hit, plague, nuclear holocaust, etc would we really expect to be able to preserve digital archives for any period of time?
And of all times in human history, that would be when we most need to preserve the knowledge and history of humans in order to survive. What a shame if it knocked us into another dark ages due to the digital dependence.
I hadn't thought about this before, but now I think I would staunchly support preservation of a significant body of literature and technical books in paper form!
Of course, it's a moot point in the near future because paper books are not going away any time soon, no matter how popular e-books get!
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