[eudamoniac]

I've never read a coherent argument for why all of these "should"s should be. I understand you want to read the books. But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want, even things the author or owner doesn't want you to read.

There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print. It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.

[jolmg]

> There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print.

Because the point isn't so much in reading whatever text as if all text is the same. The point is the spreading of knowledge. A single book can contain knowledge not present in any other.

> But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want

In order for your "people" (country, etc.) to do better, you want them to be educated. In order for people to understand one another, you want them to be able to see all the same various perspectives there are. It makes perfect sense for laws to aim for these goals. This is why libraries exist.

> It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.

Books aren't simply trinkets, like an item you bought at a gift-shop.

> I understand you want to read the books.

I think you're looking at this too much as what people want for their own individual selves, when it's more of what people want for everyone. It's about what they believe is best for society as a whole. They don't need to want to read a book themselves.

[eudamoniac]

Which books are in copyright, not being published, and contain unique valuable knowledge? I've never seen this be the case. It's always some genre fiction or obsolete botanical text or something. I've never seen valuable knowledge locked away like you are describing.

[TFNA]

"Which books are in copyright, not being published, and contain unique valuable knowledge?" Most works in a large number of academic domains from the twentieth century.

In my own field (at the intersection of linguistics, history and archaeology) I am constantly, multiple times per day, referring to information in publications from e.g the 1960s or 1970s that never got republished later except as a brief citation to that old book. And guess what, nearly all that twentieth-century scholarship is still under copyright, often from the big German or Dutch publishers that enforce their claims fiercely. The academic community has been doing a lot of work to scan our institutional libraries and upload them to the shadow libraries, but this is still all illegal copyright violation.

[tesseract]

You're going to make me quote the "Dive Manual" scene from _Cryptonomicon_ again, aren't you.

(It features a software engineer introspecting about the fact that his line of work has caused him to dramatically overvalue recency when evaluating books about... pretty much any other technical field.)