@atomicpoet Just to oput some numbers on this...

The US has about 9,000 public libraries (administrative units) and another 3,000 or so academic libraries, for a total of 12,000 of both classes.

There is an estimated total of over 115,000 libraries in the country. (Many are public school libraries.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20181026175219/https://libguides.ala.org/numberoflibraries

I'm going to assume that major-city public libraries and top academic libraries might be considered archival hubs. That's a hundred or so from each list, conservatively.

The US Library of Congress holds 40 million catalogued works (books, generally, a total of ~130 million items of various descriptions).

At 5 MB/book, total disk storage would run about $3,700 ($18.3/TB), for spinning rust. Other offline / nearline storage might be cheaper. I'm going to estimate a disk storage system at roughly 4x this cost, or just under $15,000. (This is probably high, I'm being conservative.)

That is, for $15,000, any library in the world could hold the entire works of the world's largest library, the Library of Congress.

For comparison, the Internet Archive budgets $2/GB for data in perpetuity. That's $2 per 400 books or so.

Yes, "books" != "Internet data". But it's a comparison point.

@polychrome @anji