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Also, newsflash for people taking to their fainting couches and clutching their pearls over destructive scanning: books are just goods for sale on the market. They can be bought and destroyed by anyone at any time for any reason or none. The market doesn't preserve books.

Having out-of-print books in the hands of private sellers or buyers does society at large no more good than having them in a landfill. Most books, even library books, are destined to wind up in a landfill, anyway. If "Windows 93 for Dummies" helps Claude write better marketing prose, win-win.

If you're OK with a copyright system that lets five multinational corporations control the printing and circulation of 90% of books for ~150 years after they are written, you are in no place to whine about what happens to the last few copies of the books that these corporations refuse to re-print.