Post

If you want to preserve old books for public access, fund libraries. If you want to make the contents of out of print books more widely available, shorten the term of copyright. Do those two things and there is no reason to stress about destructive scanning.

Brandon Butler

@bb.usefairuse.com

28 July

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.

Brandon Butler

@bb.usefairuse.com

28 July

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.

Brandon Butler

@bb.usefairuse.com

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.

28/7/26, 4:50 pm2 reposts13 likes

Brandon Butler

@bb.usefairuse.com

28 July

If you think it's OK for publishers to force libraries to rent e-books rather than owning a preservation copy, you cannot complain when the last physical copy is in the hands of a company you dislike rather than a research institution you trust.