| The rare book community is the community that has facilitated these crimes. There are more black hats than white hats--no money at all for white hats in this business. Private book traders make all their money by selling unique items to rich people. The rich people doing the buying want to own something special that other people can't have. Bibliophiles are technophobes. They love the paper page, the book binding, the book stacks. They don't love the content of the books, and they don't want to share them. They have "aristocratic" ideas about who deserves to have access to these special items. Every last one of them is a hoarder that wants to have things that others can't have. They hate book scanners. They hate ebooks. They hate digitization. It just threatens their business, their status, their one-of-a-kinds. Rare books is all about prestige and exclusivity. Digitization is a threat to this. I'm a book scanner--someone who loves the contents of books more than the objects--and my kind are scorned like the gargoyles from Snow Crash. |
Moreover, the availability of pictures of Mona Lisa is a big part of its popularity. Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?