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There are a number of books I'd like to reread. A lot of the books I read in paper as far back as the 1950's are now unavailable in ebook format. I keep watching for them and every now and then one turns up.
A good example of that are books by John O'Hara, an extremely popular and critically acclaimed author of the 40's and 50's. Quite a few movies were made from his books. I watched for those for years at Amazon and Gutenberg and other sites for years and then one day Amazon had "10 North Frederick". Within a year they had a lot of his books. That happened a couple of years ago as I recall.
One more recent author that I especially like was Lee Gruenfeld. He was pretty popular 10 or 15 years ago and wrote some excellent novels. Today they're unavailable. I emailed him to let him know there's at least a little interest and I got a reply that it's not up to him. His publisher owns the rights and has no interest in making them available.
That's a major flaw in our system. Books should always be available. We should always be able to buy books. Our copyright system shouldn't give the right to withhold them for any reason whatever.
In the 1980s Michael Abrash published "The Zen of Assembly Language", the first book of it's type; something totally new in technical books. It was a huge best seller as tech books go, which is very little compared to crime novels of course. A larger publisher bought out his publisher and decided to cut out tech books and it became suddenly unavailable. Abrash fought for years to get the rights back but, as I recall, his first objections to them pulling the book angered them and they withheld it. It was a decade before it became available again and by then it was sadly outdated.
I have no objection to publishers having the right to set ridiculous prices, although I may object to those prices once set. I don't accept their right to withhold books. Their profit is important but our culture and our knowledge is on a much higher level of importance.
Barry
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