Looking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?
Some of my books were literal pennies, and they would vanish too if neither of us nor the companies bought them. Again, this is just confusing where these books are with the Louvre. Just because they were available for purchase doesn't mean they were a shared community resource, because the community didn't care about their fate until now. I just don't appreciate the lack of self-awareness.
