alt Hacker NewsLooking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?
I have a tidy collection of books that are odd or fascinating to me. They're old. But you mistake people like me for being made of money.
Old books shouldn't simply vanish. That is history, art, authorial creation. Once the last copy gets crisped, it is lost.