Books in digital form inside survival kits

Has anyone thought of including cd's, dvd's, or flashdrives with pdf's of survival manuals, army manuals, and other books inside their kits?

You can buy cd's and dvd's with hundreds of army manuals on them, cd's with catalogs of plants (including information on which of them are edible), and all kinds of information. I've seen books from the early part of the century aimed at settlers, telling them how to make basic medicines, cleaning products, etc. Books on basic chemistry formulas. Blueprints on how to build things. There are lots of possibilities. You can buy some of them on cd/dvd, scan in pages from hardcopy books, or just scavenge through the net for someone who's already done all the grunt work of scanning (if the world ends, so do copyright laws).

I'm thinking of including some of this stuff in my kit. I think I even have a cooking pot in my kit that's big enough to contain a cd/dvd on the bottom, even while the other pots are nested into it. I'm not including any of the technology to view it tho. Laptops are common as dirt nowadays. After an apocalypse, they'll be left all over the place.

I don't think power will be that hard to find. I have a generator & line conditioner out in the garage, and an inverter that works off the cigarette lighter in my car. Generators are common around here. They make solar powered laptop batteries too. You might run into someone with a solar powered RV. Or worse comes to worse, you collect every laptop you run across and use them one after another for as long as the batteries last. And if you're really running out of power, or the ability to produce it... then you go medieval, and have someone sit there and write it all out (especially good task for an injured, sick, or elderly survivor in your group).

Even if you have a whole shelf of these books at home, you might run into a situation where you have to abandon them... fire spreads through the town, zombies break the door down, bandits attack. I doubt anyone's going to stop to grab hundreds of pounds of books on the way out the door. Information on media doesn't weigh anything, besides the media itself. If you have to run, you can at least take all the information with you. Being able to access it is a problem you can solve later on.

There's a lot of information that would come in handy if you had to set up shop out in the wilderness, when resources start to run out, or if you need some added firepower. One of my favorite science fiction books is "lucifer's hammer", which deals with an apocalypse caused by an asteroid impact followed by the general collapse of society. At the later point of the book (spoiler) a valley full of survivors is trying to figure out how to defend themselves from a slowly advancing horde of raiders (which happen to be anti-technology cannibals too), when a character from the early part of the book shows up completely unexpectedly. He ends up getting invited to the war strategy discussion, held by the leaders of the group. This guy keeps interrupting their war plans to ask them all kinds of weird questions (is there a paint supply store nearby? a pool supply store? etc). When the main leader gets irriatated and asks him why he keeps asking all of these random questions... the guy takes a deep breath...

then he calmly tells them that's he pretty sure he can whip up some things for them... like thermite bombs, flamethrowers, and if he gets the right materials, _mustard gas_ bombs and ballistas to launch them with. By the time he's done talking, everyone's just staring at him with their mouths hanging open. Want to guess who wins the coming war? That part of that book has always stuck in the back of my mind. Knowledge is power dude.

btw, "lucifer's hammer" besides being a good story, gives you a really nice taste of many of the unfun things that will happen after a general collapse of society.