30,000 books, a stack which is a kilometer long, have had to be moved from the National Library of Luxembourg because they were attacked by fungus. This will cost €200,000.
This can’t happen, of course, with ebooks, but I guess the equivalent would be a case of bit-rot in the books’ DRM servers.
More info on Resource Shelf, on the fungus, that is, not the bit-rot.
Well we will need to consider how robust the medium is relative to surviving legibility. I have been involved with library salvage for some time and its the electronics and their media that prove unplayable while the books, though disfigured, can always be read. I have just lost two cell phones to moisture in the last few months.
The only form of digital storage that does not have huge problems surviving even 50 years seams to be papertape and Hollerich cards. Or in general ebooks and in particular DRM based ebooks have a high posibility of being lost over time, since it requires regular copying to new hardware and a persistance of format to remain usable.