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I blame the problem on long copyright, rather than "winnowing" down to the classics. Project Gutenberg has shown that people will preserve just about any books, as long as it's out of copyright. (I have a stack to scan for PG the next time I'm out of a job.)
But copyright keeps getting stretched and stretched. What was 56 years in the US is now 95 years (and it may be stretched ever further). Think of the books released between 1923 and 1954 the Project Gutenberg could have scanned if the US copyright hadn't changed in 1978.
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