These are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".

Yeah but I unironically would love to have a copy of that on my bookshelf. It likely has fantastic illustrations!

This is the whole problem. A lot of people assuming they can speak unilaterally and with authority on what other people value or should find valuable.

It's disgraceful. What happens to the old hacker ethos? I'd never thought I'd see the day when, on a site called hacker news the majority of posters are defending the right of a large corporation to destroy public goods permanently just to be able to charge people more for "intelligence as a service".