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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  1766 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rethinking College Libraries in the Decline of Book Checkouts

    If the book was published after 1990, there's a stupidly high chance that I can download/access it legally from a computer.

This also works for books that are so old, they're now in the public domain. There's so many interesting old books out there, not just fiction. Old scientific journals and textbooks, collections of sermons and speeches, engineering and repair manuals, on and on it goes. What's really interesting is, there's a lot out there that hasn't been digitized yet. I know two different people that work for two different private libraries that have literally hundreds of books each that date from around 1600 today and I bet the majority of the books in those collections can't be found on Google Books or Project Guttenberg (I know because I've poked through their indexes and wrote down titles to books that look interesting but I wasn't allowed to access because they're too rare, fragile, etc.). It'd be interesting to see the process involved in converting old texts to a digital format.