> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.
Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed.
The shadow libraries have made a lot available to the whole world. It would suck if private corporations scan and shred remaining copies of these before the shadow libraries can get a scan.
Our little project endeavours to digitise books from the erstwhile Soviet state which were published in many languages
We have, over the last 15 years, acquired/borrowed from libraries, and scanned a couple of thousand books on all topics of interest. All of them are out of print. Some of the physical copies were have, especially in indicate languages might be some of the few surviving ones
Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed.
The shadow libraries have made a lot available to the whole world. It would suck if private corporations scan and shred remaining copies of these before the shadow libraries can get a scan.