How to keep people from reading

[UltraBudgie]

Am I wrong in doing so?  I don't feel like I am.  These books are 60 to over 100 years old.  I feel they are very important and have lost knowledge that we need.

I don't think you are. As you say, they're more than 60 years old and likely out of print, at least in the mass market. But that only determines the copyright scope and the extent of 'legality' under the Berne convention, not whether sharing digital version is 'right', in a moral sense. I suppose that depends on how your morality presents itself individually to you. Certainly there's an argument to be made that preserving knowledge is important. But what is strange is that it doesn't 'feel' wrong. I am quite scrupulous, for example if I'm given incorrect change at a store, even too much, I always point it out and never take advantage, because I think it would be wrong and I would feel moral guilt at that. Even if the 'victim' would be a huge corporate chain or insurance company rather than an individual. But, I don't get that same sense of moral wrongness if I download a book. I wonder why that is. I feel some angst and turmoil at this, because I really do want to live in a society where legality matches morality, in a non-coercive way.

And certainly the largest corporate holders of copyright and syndication rights seem to lack moral convictions beyond the minimal legal predicate. For example, look at the 'books2' and 'books3' stacks that are used to train large machine-learning models. They're basically rips of countless books, without regard given to copyright infringement, as it is still a legal 'gray area'. And its hard to imagine a scenario where such mass collections will not be available for dataset training -- as long as its necessary for the creation of incredibly commercially valuable models, my cynicism tells me the legal system will be warped as necessary to enable it.

And perhaps there's a subtle reciprocity there. After all, today books are no longer 'owned' by readers, in the way that tangible media are, but 'licensed', with vague and shifting terms, always to the advantage of the commercial distributor.  And if buying isn't owning, then sharing isn't stealing.  The impending digital omnivore that will eat our brains demands access to every iota of human productive output, every byte of everything quantifiable, and nothing will stand it its way. Quaint concepts of legality will be made to acquiesce, by labyrinth bureaucratic conformity, political subversion, or blatant disregard. What's a few billion dollar fine to, say, Google? Or Meta? Nothing. After all, money is merely the blood of Moloch, a few drops here and there are as nothing to it.

And why shouldn't we enjoy the same disregard? Share away, the pirate ship's sinking into an ocean of blood, matey.  Perhaps we're only getting what we deserve.