Yes, but being the only one able to get their hands on that book and destroying it has that added benefit. My point is that there is no motivation to preserve those books, quite the opposite in fact.

Then they are not rare by definition. These are not the books they are buying.

You have been lying to people.

Yes... you do. That's why it's a backup copy.

If you think copyright law shouldn't work this way, great. We should should really change it to remove any incentive to hoard these scans - obviously these purchases aren't making the authors any more money. But right this second, this is the law, and that's what following it looks like.

Yeah why don't they just spend an order of magnitude more effort and money to maintain an unusable forest of dead trees until *checks notes* forever minus a day?

I fucking hate bad arguments, for my own sake. I hate misinformation going round and round, with shrill comparisons to the fucking Nazis, because someone dared to buy and privately preserve a copy of a book that nobody else was likely to ever purchase.

Relax copyright if you want this to go better. The idiots inflating the bubble are doing this because our stupid laws say they kinda have to. It's an asinine legal situation that leads to crap like this, and no amount of well-they-oughtta is gonna change crap like this.