I really have trouble getting worked up about this. "Rare books" is thrown around regularly but my gut feeling is that's not the case. These are used (often? always?) books and while I'm sure there is waste, in general they just want 1 of every book.
While I wish there was a repository of every book that was already digitized (it pains me this is the best solution), there isn't one and so I think this is not a real problem.
It'd be a different story if they had furnaces that ran only on rare books that they had to continually feed books to but that's not what's happening here. And that 1 destroyed copy will "live on" in a way that it otherwise might not.
While I wish there was a repository of every book that was already digitized (it pains me this is the best solution), there isn't one and so I think this is not a real problem.
It'd be a different story if they had furnaces that ran only on rare books that they had to continually feed books to but that's not what's happening here. And that 1 destroyed copy will "live on" in a way that it otherwise might not.