Let's take a look into the near future and see who wins the race to digitize "the record of humanity up through 2000. The whole premodern world." The current frontrunner is Google, of course, with its Google Library Project. Since I live and work next to the campus of the University of Michigan, I am aware that one answer U-M has to the early Internet issue of people not coming to the library is taking the library to people. All 8 million of the U-M's books are part of Google's project.
But the winner, in the race to put "the record of humanity up to 2000" into digital form, able to be stored on a single 128 Petabyte storage card for $19.99 will be the Informagical Coalition backed by Chinese dollars.
What? Well, yeah, that's according to one of my favorite science fiction authors, Vernor Vinge....