Comment Re:I must be showing my age... (Score 1) 207
Digital books, even those encumbered with DRM, are more resilient than paper books.
Every book I buy for my Kindle, I also crack the DRM, convert it into a more generic format, and back it up.
It's trivial for anyone to have an entire library and to share that library, and there will always be a way to update the format to whatever's most convenient.
Books, on the other hand, are relatively fragile and limited. If you have a book, you can't give that book to everyone. You can't zap it around the world. In five hundred years, if it still exists, it will be locked away in a museum and handled delicately by archaeologists with flipping it page by page with tweezers.
Certainly the same can be said about any physical media ebooks might happen to be stored on, but the difference is it's trivial to update, and there WILL be people updating the ebooks, and as long as at least one copy exists then that particular work continues to exist and be easily accessible for all of society.
The only leg up that physical books might have on paper books is if either the human race ceases to exist, and can no longer maintain the knowledge, or if somehow all electronics simultaneously cease to function. In the former case, who gives a shit, we're dead; in the latter case, you just walk off the set of the contrived Hollywood production you're on and return to real life.