What's the point of these kind of "Free books"? It would be better if we could organize something like real book exchanging worldwide.
This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but could not easily get it for whatever reason.
You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry, but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast, reliably or at all.
Consider another argument: book bannings are a thing in the US again, a facist practice [0]. Making these banned books accessible to all despite the bans is a clear anti-facist statement and move.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-amer...
You may have missed a t-shirt photographed a couple of days ago, on a demonstrator, going along the lines of "We do not delegate education to the state" (oblivious of the principle that schools are there to fix the issue of faulty parental education, and conversely parents orient the children which are necessarily exposed to the world). it is from a group that demands censorship - it counts over 100'000 members. I understood they are also those who want the genitals of Achilles and Hector covered on Greek urns (or them urns hidden altogether from culture, "what is their use").
And of course, each similar group has a different set of "books to burn".
Buuut, apparently that violates some TOS and Amazon was terminating the accounts. So it's back to the shadow libs.
For destructive scanning, the obvious question is why you’d go through the trouble and not upload it to some sort of shadow libs.
I get the impression that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back to piracy as a moral imperative.
I was happy paying for HBO Max due to the high quality original content, but then they fired all the actors.
So, there was an implicit social contract (you produce tv/movies that generate revenue, we distribute it, and pay you for the next one), but now it has been broken.
From a customer perspective, paying the middle man, knowing the people that produced the product will not be paid is immoral.
(Yes, I know residuals exist. That’s not good enough.)
Like many would. Do not take libraries for granted - not even in "rich" countries.
If they offer internet access though, AND if projects like these are still around, the access to information is infinite.
There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist.
I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in both collections.