The scan doesn't go away, and can be released when the copyright expires.
Oh no, a lump of cellulose is gone. Will no one think of the fibers?
Oh no, a lump of cellulose is gone. Will no one think of the fibers?
But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.
> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
Even if the authors died immediately after publication there is no way the copyright has expired.