One wonders how many historically significant books are being irretrievably lost in the destruction and violence in Syria and Egypt and Libya, literarily among the most historically active areas in the world.
The answer to "lost works" is to page digitize them in high resolution and make the images available - hopefully somewhat better than what archive.org is doing. The only reason to go through the painful process that DP and PG entails is to create books that people actually want to read. If people don't want to read them, then don't bother. The scholars can always go back and do their research from the page scans. If your idea of "saving books" is to try to run them all through the DP and PG process, they you are right - they are lost forever.