[rdtsc]

Youtube is completely owned by Google and their content can't be indexed as easily. "Books" also doesn't mean having an ISBN number, I think plain text should would count as well: blogs, comments, mailing lists, lecture notes, etc. One day Google will decide to scrub all the videos or it will be pushed into irrelevance and will become the Altavista of today. All the videos will disappear too.

[paulpauper]

unless you get the book in the LOC, it will probably be forgotten or have no trace of its existence. why would google scrub all the videos? that makes no sense. Youtube is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

[rdtsc]

They can't make money off of them? It will get split up and youtube spun off and they'll have to cut costs. Some maybe deemed inappropriate in the future. We had Geocities, Usenet and other sites and companies which held content then disappeared. Archiving them might be nice? But what's easier to archive and index videos or text form?

One the other hand, books published over a hundred years are still here even though the authors and publishers may long be gone.