Are you really asking what's the points of making almost any book freely available online?
This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but could not easily get it for whatever reason.
You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry, but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast, reliably or at all.
I mean libraries are a thing, but it's a logistics problem. My local library has thousands of Dutch language books, how is an expat or student in the US going to get to them? And that's between two countries with good relationships and transport links - although said transport is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people.
Consider another argument: book bannings are a thing in the US again, a facist practice [0]. Making these banned books accessible to all despite the bans is a clear anti-facist statement and move.
You may have missed a t-shirt photographed a couple of days ago, on a demonstrator, going along the lines of "We do not delegate education to the state" (oblivious of the principle that schools are there to fix the issue of faulty parental education, and conversely parents orient the children which are necessarily exposed to the world). it is from a group that demands censorship - it counts over 100'000 members. I understood they are also those who want the genitals of Achilles and Hector covered on Greek urns (or them urns hidden altogether from culture, "what is their use").
And of course, each similar group has a different set of "books to burn".
I was in a Kindle Book Club some years ago. The idea was to pay a little fee, from which books are centrally bought. Which books to buy was decided by voting. The books then would be shared with the members. There were never more concurrent users than copies purchased.
Buuut, apparently that violates some TOS and Amazon was terminating the accounts. So it's back to the shadow libs.
You could always buy DRM free books, or destructively scan + OCR dead tree books.
For destructive scanning, the obvious question is why you’d go through the trouble and not upload it to some sort of shadow libs.
I get the impression that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back to piracy as a moral imperative.
I was happy paying for HBO Max due to the high quality original content, but then they fired all the actors.
So, there was an implicit social contract (you produce tv/movies that generate revenue, we distribute it, and pay you for the next one), but now it has been broken.
From a customer perspective, paying the middle man, knowing the people that produced the product will not be paid is immoral.
(Yes, I know residuals exist. That’s not good enough.)
There are some books for which official ebooks don't exist.. but those ebooks appear on Anna's archive. And they are well done conversions, not just OCR copies.
There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist.
I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in both collections.
Kindly present your arguments explicitly, because it is unclear what you mean - why this would be unimportant, why that more important etc. We cannot invest hours trying to reconstruct a "best interpretation".
If you click the search button, it won't work. The console returns 'listener method `openOnClick_` not defined'. It gives me some kind of relief that even Google coders make some mistakes.
