Wouldn't help. You might as well say people could use Wikipedia and Wikibooks.
A big reason people go to libraries like the British Library is for collections of rare books an manuscripts (https://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-lose-a-library/), which you're not going to find on some pirate site that scraped the (relatively) low-hanging fruit of digitally-distributed academic papers and ebooks.
You might as well say "Man if only people would spend the billions of dollars to digitize every scrap of archival paper in the world, and put it online for free."
>A big reason people go to libraries like the British Library is for collections of rare books an manuscripts
I love rare books and have donated to my library specifically to restore rare books in need. The vast majority of patrons would never notice them missing or care if they did.
>Wouldn't help...You might as well say...
So, a huge collection of books available for free won't help library patrons, and the main reason why because I can't also use it to view Chekhov's handwritten notebooks or the Leningrad codex? Ok.
> So, a huge collection of books available for free won't help library patrons, and the main reason why because I can't also use it to view Chekhov's handwritten notebooks or the Leningrad codex? Ok.
You're moving the goalposts. I'm sure the UK already as quite a few everyday lending libraries that would fill that need while the British Library is offline. Library Genesis could perhaps fill in for one of those if it was shut down because of hacking, but few people would care.