Regarding finding a medium beyond paper, wouldn't it be possible that something will be found eventually? I have to agree with what I recall in the podcast; paper lasts a very long time if kept properly. But wouldn't technology ultimately find an electronic method, similar to the development to good paper?

Don't mind me, I'm playing devil's advocate here

The library community is not lying down on the issue. There are many conversations about formats and media. More importantly, for documents that only exist digitally (primarily electronic scholarly journals), there are various schemes to ensure that copies exist perpetually, somewhere.

For example,
"The ACM award-winning LOCKSS* technology is an open source, peer-to-peer, decentralized digital preservation infrastructure. LOCKSS preserves all formats and genres of web-published content. The intellectual content, which includes the historical context (the look and feel), is preserved. LOCKSS is OAIS-compliant; the software migrates content forward in time; and the bits and bytes are continually audited and repaired."
*Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe

Format is one: there is never any standard 'forever' format. Tech changes, software changes, hardware changes. While it is likely that we can 'extract' information from old documents, sometimes (and we are seeing this now) it is very difficult to emulate very old hardware.

The second issue is the media itself. Silicon and plastic and discs degrade much quicker than a well-stored book would. Your standard CD-R does not have an incredibly long life expectancy. And, as you know, hard-drives always break.
Will solid state be the answer? I don't know how long solid state drives can be archived, truthfully. There are 'archival' quality CD/DVD-Rs that have longer life expectancy now, as well.

But the sum of all this is that there are a lot of uncertainties, so from an archival perspective, making the jump to all-digital could be disastrous.

That was the point I was trying to make on the program, but the State Librarian started talking about the value of the artifact, instead. Oh well.

Regarding your point about formatting, is this problem mostly due to the nascent nature of digital recording of books (correct me if I'm wrong; you are the expert here)? Won't time eventually lead to one preferred format, with appropriate preservation of data so that it will last?

Or am I missing the crux of the issue, being an outsider? Let me know.

Thanks,

Ian