I have, at odd times over the last year or three, noticed that books that can be awfully hard to find (reasonably priced) on Amazon, are also often far from appearing on Gutenberg. It seems that "A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan."1 At first glance, this emphasizes the importance of libraries, until you realize that any given county or city library system purchases only a fraction of the books published any given year. At second glance, the inter-library-loan system might seem to help with this, until you realize that 1) many people do not realize it is there outside of the university research libraries and 2) you have to pay to borrow a book that way. I have no problems paying to own a book, but paying to borrow it for 2 weeks, when it can easily take me longer to read it, is distasteful. At third glance, even with the ILL, I strongly suspect that we still only have a small fraction of the books published any given year, because libraries almost certainly have a very significant amount of overlap in their purchasing habits.
The end result is that if I do not buy a book that I might ever want to re-read, I am unlikely to ever have that opportunity to re-read it.
Ms. Rebecca J. Rosen.
"The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish" The Atlantic Last Viewed 2013-07-31. ↩