[halomru]

I agree that throwing away the physical books would be stupid, but the index is ready enough to rebuild if we ever need it again. And in a post-computer world search times in the order of days or even weeks would be acceptable: when looking up crop rotations a few days more or less won't make or break your harvest

[titzer]

Rebuilding the index might require actually reading all the books over again. The whole point of an index is that it is 1000x smaller, so it makes absolutely no sense to throw away a paper copy of it.