They should just pass a law stating that if *any* book is ‘lost’ because of any bureaucratic problems, that *each* person involved with said book and laws surrounding the loss of the book, because of the book not being archived, shall be held fully responsible for the loss of a book for the generations of people from now until the end of civilization.
The punishment should be horrible enough that no one would dare not find a way for these books to be digitally archived and safely stored.
The safe storage of these books are much higher priority than copyright infringments

To Some Random Guy, #1

You obviously don’t have very much experience of books, not of thousands of books, at any rate. When you have thousands of books, you inevitably wind up doing a certain amount of your own rebinding. Effectively, you do all the things a professional librarian does, only not quite so often.

To: Anonymous Coward, #6

You are correct that cheap paperbacks used to be printed on acidic paper, the same stuff that was used for newspapers. As the paper ages, it turns brown, and gets brittle. Sometimes the ink from the other side of the page bleeds through. If you sniff an acidifying book, you will notice a sort of salty smell, as if you were at the beach. The reaction seems to take place faster along the rubber binding, and often pages come loose. You will often find the various symptoms in a book printed circa 1960. I’ve had _fairly_ good results by just stripping of the broken-up rubber binding with my fingernails, compressing the pages in a vise, and applying a layer of a product known as Sobo Glue, a kind of latex-modified white glue. Give it a day or two to set, before opening the vice. I have some things which I bound with Sobo twenty-some years ago, and the binding has held up pretty well.

I don’t collect signed editions myself, but as a working scholar, I do collect “oddities.” For example, I have a little pocket handbook of electrical engineering, published in 1908 by International Correspondence Schools. I suppose it was a “freebie.” The flyleaf and the reply coupon, filled in but not detached, bear the name of one Isidore Dombrow, a seventeen-year-old electrician’s apprentice who was living in Brooklyn. By the name, he must have been Russian-American. The book is rather tattered, as one might expect. One has the vision of this earnest kid, probably a political anarchist, carrying a technical manual around in his overall pocket on the job, reading whenever he had a free moment. I bought the book about fifteen years ago in a thrift shop for two dollars. Angry Dude wants to burn all my books. I wonder why? Could it be that the wisdom of the past shows him for what he is?

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20080331/182518709#c177

A lot of things were never printed in hardbound editions because they were more or less disreputable. Out of an edition of a thousand paperbacks, nine hundred might have been carried around in pants pockets and sat upon. The kind of people who bought them were also the kind of people who might tear out pages and use them to roll home-made cigarettes. It is quite common for there to be cases where only one or two copies have survived.

There are other possibilities. One of the major tobacco companies once published cigar advertisements, back in the late 19th century, showing a crocodile about to eat a small black child, maybe about two or three years old, with the legend, if I recall rightly, of: “a tasty morsel.” Naturally the company wants to use copyright to suppress this.

Another point: for doing serious research, you need a big library, of a million volumes or more. Five million is better. The internet is a godsend, of course, but, due to copyright, it has certain systematic blind points. Not all cities have big paper libraries. Even when they do, the cities are often large enough that getting to the library is inconvenient. The number of copyrighted worked should be kept down to what a truly local library, eg. a high school library, can afford to stock. If the government has to buy up copyrights and place them in the public domain, so be it. The government is paying already– it is just that the publishers manage to collect government money while restricting the availability of the books in question. Just to cite one obvious tangible public benefit, it would become easier to find prior art for bogus patents.