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I would point out:

No one wants to throw out the original books. They are historical artifacts with value beyond the mere text.

E-archives such as the aforementioned Guttenberg Project, the English Server at Carnegie Mellon, and The Online Books Page at UPENN are tremendously useful and popular. These university libraries still get lots of paperphiles, who aren't even students.

If you don't want to read on a screen, buy a printer.

As for digital media storage, any hard drives, CDs, etc. that the Library used would decay in a few decades - unless they go for some real high end stuff, like some experiemental optical drive. Either way, the cost and upkeep would, presumably, be a fairly large multiple of the library's current budget. I would love to have a digital library of congress, but the costs would be huge. How would we pay for it? Fees would undermine the whole notion of free public libraries, and be fodder for the argument of a "digital divide". Banner ads at the Library of Congress website would probably be a poor solution. And I don't think tax increases would be well received. Nonetheless, our librarian said none of these things, which makes me wonder if he needs to get out of that musty labyrinth of shelves and breath a little fresh air. He sounds downright crotchty.

There's this page which has a lot of commentary (ranting) about the Meese report. An online copy of the actual report is elusive.

[ObFCC]
The FCC is just itching to regulate some more. The idea of a government agency (especially in the US) that would rather not regulate, except those mean nasty corporations leave us no choice would be laughable if people's thoughts didn't actually work that way.
[/ObFCC]

BTW, that's hardly the world's largest palindrome (and in fact, it's not a palindrome at all since technically, palindromes cannot contain proper nouns such as Panama). For a 540 word version of the Panama one, try here. And if you're adventurous and count foreign languages (French) there's this one which is 1247 words long. There's also a really long German one kicking around, but I can't dredge up a url.

So, let's see, Richard Feynman did it, Carl Sagan did it, Allen Ginsberg and his crowd did it and *so* much more, Edgar Allen Poe was alcoholic for a good deal of his life, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the list goes on and on and on. Reminds me of an article The Onion did that the drug czar had to revise his "winners don't use drugs" propaganda; sometimes winners do use drugs.
What's a teetotaling person to do? Sure, most people who use drugs might be losers who are trying to escape from their loser lives, but some are actually experimenting with altered states of being. (Click here for an interesting article on what it is to *experiment*, not recreate, with drugs.) So I make the choice not to use too many chemicals to alter my consciousness. But even chocolate, caffeine, a good meal can do that. Exposure to the sun, rain, Dickens, a boring lecture, a rousing makeout session, all these externals affect my mood and state of mind whether I intend it or not.
Maybe a conscious user, one who's experimenting rather than recreating, asks the question in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Except, I say no, and he says yes.
I dearly hope I'm not wrong.