If it wasn't grandfathered in and someone suggested it today there is no chance in hell that it would fly. Profit maximization is the only thing publishers care about, and public institutions aren't going to stand up for the public interest.
I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library.
This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that.
Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.
I have a deep interest in magic and mentalism, and found a library here that has books on the subject that are so old they're not even in modern English (or German as is the case for some of the books they have). Luckily the illustrations are detailed and verbose.
Also in Toronto we have the Reference Library which is a gold mine, and probably is even more archive.org-like than most libraries. I honed my Assembly Language skills there in the 90's, and did enormous amounts of research on Artificial Life and that sort of thing. They have some of the best stacks, so you have to use the CueCat or whatever they call it to summon up all the good stuff they dare not leave on the shelves.
Nowadays a lot of material is available on the Internet. Yet most books are so very much better than a current blog or online "tutorial." Even the older books. So there is that.
PS: I always buy the e-books that I like. Paper copies if they're available, since I prefer them. You can tell a great book by how dog-eared it gets over time. You don't get that metric with ebooks.
It's a real book, but if you're limited to the Internet you might not even realize it exists.
Even better, try finding any version of Joaquin Miller's The Battle of Castle Crags.
You are vastly understating the problems of bitrot, linkrot, and the amount of quality information available at your local library, and are massively overstating the amount of quality information available on the internet. (And much of that quality information is gated behind proprietary walled gardens, or is monetized through adware and spyware.)
Not to mention the modern trend of burying five bits of useful information in an 8 minute video, the first two minutes of which are pointless small talk and requests to like/subscribe/follow, and the other six are an unsearchable morass that takes way too long to get to the point.
The internet does two things better - searchability, and multimedia. The rest is a hot mess of largely superficial depth, and dubious quality.
This is an important point too. If it's something I'd like to keep for later use and on a single page, I almost inevitably print the page into a PDF (from reader mode).
I think it depends from where and when you look at it. While for someone living "out there" the online stuff is an enrichment, for someone used to live metropolitan or at least some university town, it's only so so and not really overwhelming.
The same is true for (good) book stores dealing with dead wood. The haptics are simply different. You can stroll along there and find something interesting widening your horizon by random chance/serendipity.
The recommendations from sites like Amazon or Goodreads don't offer that, even if they are trying to emulate that.
Not the same, more like tunnel vision, and if something like "surprise me!" is offered, it's different from walking into some rarely or never visited part, quickly scanning a few pages and "seeing" how it's like.
The same applies to reading "on-screen", no matter which device, size, and display technology. The haptics are mostly WORSE.
Not having experienced the good parts of "dead wood" it may be excused, because not knowing it any better. Nonetheless there were and still are many good parts about "dead wood", and the ecosystem surrounding that. Just not everywhere.
/endrant
Videos are often even ~10:10 minutes long for a while already now. I think it's a monetization thing on YouTube.
If you know keywords, you can search for them using your browser's search function in the time stamped transcript that might be available from the three-dot-menu below the video.
Increasing playback speed also helps.
I often thought about some 45 to 60 minutes piece that they could have done that in 5 to 10 minutes without wasting my time.
Are you sure about that? If you're not in a super-large library with full anonymity, your librarians will definitely know when you're reading a lot of books that suggest some ideology. They may not keep a profile written down, but they definitely will remember. And they do keep a list of books you took home, at least our local library does.
Regarding new ideas: might be different in other places of the world, but public libraries over here aren't that well stocked and feel like they primarily offer what the librarians value (which will largely mirror the mainstream opinion of the general population, as they're state employees). That's different for university libraries, which do keep a more diverse collection.
Oh, yeah? Try finding out how to do something in Visual Basic 6 or try finding out how jeweler's used to cut accurate screw threads.
Knowledge prior to 1996 was in books. Many of those books have been discarded because they "don't circulate". I have even tried to pull some of these things via interlibrary loan programs--the books simply do not exist.
This knowledge is no longer available to someone without significant resource. It's not online; the books are gone; old periodicals may be online but are behind a paywall. You might be able to purchase one of these books if someone with an extensive personal library dies--but the book will be expensive.
As a child, I could walk into my local university library and pull car repair, machining, Popular Electronics, etc. off the shelves and simply read them. Free of charge! No library card required (even though my parents paid for one for me). This certainly contributed to what I am today.
Libraries no longer attempt to serve as a resource for the broader public. And that's a terrible, terrible loss to society.
https://www.vbtutor.net/lesson2.html
https://www.appropedia.org/Cutting_screw_threads
If you have any books and want to make them last forever, you should get them scanned and uploaded on libgen for maximum reach and robust archiving. Local libraries are a nice idea, but they can't have the same reach.
And, as for screw threads, tap and die simply aren't accurate enough for stuff like watchmaking (although with modern technology--carbide cutters, titanium materials, CNC machines, etc.--they might be).
The screw thread question wasn't hypothetical. I actually asked at a fairly big machinist's meetup how to do that on a jeweler's lathe. Nobody knew how.
The answer, it turns out, is that they would build a custom power feed. This is documented on p62-76 of "Practical Benchwork for Horologists." This is such an important concept that the book devotes more than 10% of the "Tools and their Uses" section to it and it's the only thing in the book with actual plans.
Yet nobody now knows. And I had to figure out where the answer might lie with very little guidance. And I had to buy the book blind to figure that out. I got lucky and the book was $20 (it's normally about $200) so I took a flyer (It's a wonderful look at the art of machining. As I explained to my wife why I found a nearly 100 year old book so entertaining--"It's engineering porn. You're not supposed to understand.")
I couldn't request it via interlibrary loan from any library in my purview. I couldn't find the knowledge online.
And this wasn't a terribly rare book. Sure, it wasn't a bestseller, but it went through 7 or 8 editions over about 70 years. There is zero reason for it to be gone other than the libraries threw it out.