Yup, ran into that problem myself a few times!
I'm not mistaking anything, but I think you are having (and interested in having) a far different conversation than I am. A significant part of my work used to be archival storage (of photos, not books). I have old negatives in a film format that I can no longer get printed anywhere!
As an individual all I care about, and all I need to care about, is that my book collection lasts as long as I want the books (at most until my death) and factors such as cost, convenience, and enjoyment. Those are the ONLY types of factors of interest to an individual.
I did a lot of research before buying an e-reader to ensure that it met the above considerations. For obvious reasons I did not want to be tied down to a single file format or reader. PDF and epub support was required, as both are readily readable now and are likely to be in the future. I can also protect myself further by stripping the DRM if I wish to. The Kobo allows me to store epub files on my computer, so they get backed up automatically and with no action from me, like all my other data. I don't think there is any credible reason to believe these files will become useless to me in the near future, and if I ever become worried about it converting them to other formats is trivial.
I can't remember the last time I was away from a power outlet for more than a few hours, so the 7-12 days of power on my Kobo will do me (I don't go camping etc). Like most newer devices, it is charged through USB so charging is trivial, no special charger needed. If the device does die, I lose nothing since I still have all the files. It is, in any reasonable opinion, so unlikely that all computers and power sources will vanish in my lifetime than I don't consider that a factor. So, to me as an individual, an ebook in PDF or epub format is at least as likely to last my lifetime as a paper book - much more likely, actually.
To be clear - the e-reader delivers the content, but it completely irrelevant to the actual books being accessible. If my Kobo dies, my books don't!
The only remaining considerations are purely personal ones. Do you need mobility? Do you need to feed your ego by showing off your book collection? Do you have space to store paper books? Does any e-reader currently on the market have the right "feel" for you?
Amazon is expected to announce that ebooks sales exceeded paper book sales in 2010 - this despite Amazon holding on to their own format on the Kindle, when everyone else has moved to epub. E-readers are still maturing as a technology, but improving quickly. Most public libraries now support epubs, usually through Overdrive. Really, the only reason ebook adoption is not going faster is reluctance from some authors and publishers, all other considerations have been dealt with.
We are definitely considering the question following different interests: you seem more concerned about everything ensuring the continuity of daily work, and your reference to old film negatives and modern technology is not presenting two different scenarios actually, but merely a discontinuity inside one same way of dealing with information and its handling preservation.
The problem of not being able to handle film negatives is clear from their very name: we are not dealing with photographs, with images, not in the complete final way we are interested: film negatives are a way of dealing with the caption and transmission of visual information, and that way determines the very nature of the final product we want to reach, so that a change like the substitution for digital technology entails a loss of information, and there you give just another example of what I had mentioned: if the handling and preservation of that information relies so fundamentally in an apparently secondary technical device, in short, if the information is too closely identified with the support, and that support depends on a gadget contingency, you are endangering the survival of that information. That's the problem of visual languages and their products, while in natural languages, or mathematical or even musical notations we use a primarily an abstraction of contingent data, not a collection of contingent data like film negatives can be.
My point is, have you considered that the technology you are using today, so useful, may one day put you in the same situation of the old one, because both of them were basically different variation a the same way of dealing with data?
Again, this is not about what what way of dealing with information is more important to whom, or what truly IS and should be considered the most important way, nor is this about the advantages of newer technology, quite obvious, again and again, in storage and browsing. Heck, I am not even saying that ebooks make no sense to me. In fact, whenever this discussion is brought up "in the real world" I usually point out something that I already said in my earlier posts: that it makes no sense identifying "real books" with paper support because the actual book is not a bundle or paper or a circuit board... that e-books are more convenient for storage and handling, but that the traditional support, for all its being as fragile or even more (which, however, I personally doubt) than the newer one, is more self-reliant out of sheer simplicity, and a "safer" option when considering the mere survival of information.
Those considerations bring about some other important ones, namely, what in particular and what amount of information, even at an individual scale, is worth preserving or can be preserved at all. Digitalization allows the storage of huge amounts of data that could end up fossilized and impossible to get access to, just like your old negatives. We already had that problem even with only printed works, hell! the problem was the same even when there were just manuscripts: so the questions remain basically the same, even if the daily appearances may make some think that the situation is totally different.
I was only considering this whole thing inside a wider, more general scenario, and trying to make you consider that what you take today for granted may be an important problem for you tomorrow.
