One of my "if I ever win the lotto" goals always was to hunt down high quality and high importance nonfiction that never was released digitally - or deliberately so by the author to avoid piracy, Tim Vasquez' Storm Chasers Handbook comes to mind - and do a maximum quality destructive scan and OCR, and release it into the wild.

Also, one of the goals of the Random Library has always been to have the books most essential to stand a modern civilization up from nothing in case we knocked ourselves back to the stone age. Give me Mordor and the Random Library and you can keep your fucking ring, I'm smashing Gondor flat with planes and tanks and guns and mechanized infantry, from first fucking principles.

Lasers! Eight o'clock, day one!

Yeah, me too. But for porn.

Also known as Mrs. Knumbknutz

curators, collectors, archivists, hobbyists ... no harm done.

It has always frustrated me that despite Isaac Asimov being (alledgedly anyway) one of the most prolific authors ever, it's really hard to find a lot of his work.

its easy to find old asimov. check used book stores in small towns. i find more trash by asimov than anyone else.

now if you're looking for stuff by say, Lester del Ray, that shit is near non existent, and he was a prolific writer in his day. same for Fred Pohl or Robert Heinlein.

a lot of it has to do with how they were published. Asimov was one of the authors big enough to get novellas done outside of magazines

I'm not saying you can't find *any* Asimov, I'm saying your can't find a lot of his work given how much there was. His famous works are all over the place, for sure, but the rest has vanished off the planet, at least that I've ever been able to find. I've had better luck with Pohl and Heinlein.

I think that's probably just a hazard of being such a prolific writer; when you write probably 10x as many books and stories as Pohl and Heinlein combined there's just a lot more stuff that can be lost to the mists of time.