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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

We run a little library in front of our house. It's amazing how many people dump boxes of old books off in front of it hoping that they will find their way back into someone's collection.

The sad truth is the vast, vast majority of printed literature is neither interesting nor useful. People are not dumping off stacks of Umberto Eco. We frankly have to toss a lot of awful cookbooks, self-help books, trashy mass-market "novels", and sketchy religious works. As it is, even the stuff that makes it to the library is not very impressive.

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Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that.

It's all interesting for something, even if it's just a meta analysis of culture during a certain period or what kind of trashy romance novels were popular in 198X. At least in my view.

If only the Roman's had digitized their self help literature!

This is most of what we have for the great philosophers - half "why is the world like this" and half "how do you live a good life", right? some original plato lectures would be interesting to have.

> Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that.

It would be great, but it's a bit off topic here. The point the parent is making is that most of these works are going to be trashed regardless of Amazon's behavior. If Amazon (or any other company) is digitizing it, they're at least preserving it in some form. The alternative may well be that many of these books never get preserved.

Now would I prefer the government or an entity like The Internet Archive do this? Sure.

They were all lost when the library at Alexandria burned, so clearly we should ban libraries. Too much risk of losing unimaginably priceless works all gathered in one place like that

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