On the other hand, I can think of plenty of reasons why going digital is better:

*Broadened access: you can’t bring the kids from poor 3rd world countries or inner cities to the Library of Congress, but you can bring the electronic library to them cheaply.

*Pirating is overratted: This whole pirating business is so WAY overblown by the Music/Entertainment industry, I think this deserves its own sub points:

1, media sharing does NOT hurt overall content sales–the increased exposure for indie bands/movie makers will only help them. Why wouldn’t the same work for individual writers? I don’t understand the logic that, ther easier it is for an creator of content to distribute her product, somehow the harder it is for her to make money. The rapid proliferation of blogs is a great example of how things can and should be different.

2, media sharing does NOT hurt even the dinosaurs like MGM or Sony. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’m pretty sure that, since the internet thing happened, and especially since P2P software like Napster and Nutella made it easier for people to pirate and share music/movies/programs/etc., the sales of music/DVD/software bundles have actually increased. I can’t explain why but I’m not surprised.

3, people don’t realize that, sooner or later anything and everything ever written, shot, sung or played will become public domain at some point anyway. What is important is not how we should stop pirating of digital media, but is how the means of sharing and distributing the same media and making them widely available should not be stopped.

* Potential use not an issue!? What?

People don’t just hit the books to casually browse, most people go to the library to find the book with the specific info that they’re looking for.

If you got a beef with junk books, with all books available digitally Danielle Steel’s of the world will all go the ways of spam.

And I can’t think of anything more immortal than digits and anything more ephemeral than hydrocarbon chains.

*And so much more. Ironic, what you talked about “archiving for its own sake,” “collector’s safe storage,” etc, I was thinking of paper books rather than digital ones. Given (and I do think that this is a given) that digital books is more practical (smaller, cheap, durable, coffee-stain free) than paper books, I just don’t see how paper books are better beyond its obviously superior sentimental values.

Somehow I was thinking that people had the same debate right around the time when hand-written scrolls were replaced by printing-pressed books.

Basically, this project is too cool NOT to happen, those issues are going to figure themselves out or get steamrolled eventually.

However, I don’t agree that digital formats are more practical. Books will always have one step up for one simple reason; accessing electronic data requires a medium (data-thru-device-to-eye-to-brain) and printed paper does not (print-to-eye-to-brain).

Anyway, I was overzealous in declaring potential use of the massive library not an issue, since obviously it’s the potential uses that make it so exciting (in addition to the archivists’ pleasure in collecting). Maybe by cross-referencing the whole works of humanity with links and making it searchable, they’ll be able to find patterns. Make discoveries, predict the future, it’s like finding the meaning in Pi. Definitely cool.