It isn't solved until it is wrapped in a proprietary, inaccessible, bloated format like Flash. Or rendered within Javascript so you can get cool page-turning effects. Or put in a PDF inside a PowerPoint which can then be downloaded via a link on a site. Or... I am out of asinine ideas.
Or a company might decide to try to solve the problem by gathering and indexing all of these documents so they are more accessible than if they were spattered over thousands of locations, unsearchable, and cost time and money to find.
So I can trade hard-to-find but easy-to-consume for easy-to-find but hard-to-consume? That isn't really my definition of "progress". Oh, and in reality, these documents are actually less accessible once they are indexed and put in Flash, if we're using the definition of Web Accessibility.
I would also like to be given an example of something that you found hard to find via normal means but was easy to find via one of these document repositories. I am still wildly unconvinced of your general claim. Google is pretty good at the whole text indexing thing.
