I think part of OPs point is that you think you can get a copy of any book. I don't mean to sound snarky at all; it's just that you know what you see online now, which is not all that is offline. You don't miss what you don't know.
My experience is of numerous out of print books that might have had small publishers in small editions. Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.
One year the university I was at was in danger of flooding. The priority was moving books that as far as they could determine were the only remaining copies of. You wouldn't believe the numbers of them that were moved. Many used bookstores I've visited were similar, with books selected because they were unusual.
> Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.
Absolutely! I had a paperback copy of Dune when I was younger, that disappeared after being loaned to someone. It was printed on very fine grained paper (think bible paper), maybe ~2cm thick, despite being 700+ pages long, and the fine grain of the paper made the text very crisp. Modern paperback copies are 4.9cm thick, and the text isn't as crisp. The only way I'll ever find a replacement for the higher quality paperback copy is to find an old one at a used bookstore sometime. This doesn't make it valuable in a monetary sense, but it still matters to me.
To add to your point, I recently tried to pick up some of my favorite movies from when I was younger, only to find that they were “out of print”. Some of these may not be lost to people searching around online because the directors are well known, but you’d likely have to search first.
Inland Empire - David Lynch /
The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci /
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw /
La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci /
(I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)
The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.
I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.
Every one of those titles showed up on torrent sites via the in-browser search feature, and a total of two clicks (magnet link, confirmation in torrent app) would've had the movie viewable on my laptop within, at most, a few minutes of downloading.
Ethics of torrenting aside, I can't think of a faster way to get the results you want.
For books, again, ethics aside, usually Library Genesis is equally fast.
Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free.
With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)
However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.
It’s not even just books that don’t exist online... it’s books that you never hear of because you don’t bump into them in a bookstore. The books you learn about online are selected by mechanisms very different to those that you learn about in a used bookstore.
True, but I often find books by looking at cites to them in other books I have.
I found one really cool book that was simply pages and pages of schematics for vacuum tube radios and TVs. It was intended for repair shops. I ran across it as it was a prop used as part of staging a house that was for sale. I didn't buy the house :-) but I did note down the title/author, went online, and found/bought my own copy. The real estate agent showing the house thought I was very weird.
My experience is of numerous out of print books that might have had small publishers in small editions. Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.
One year the university I was at was in danger of flooding. The priority was moving books that as far as they could determine were the only remaining copies of. You wouldn't believe the numbers of them that were moved. Many used bookstores I've visited were similar, with books selected because they were unusual.
It's hard to know what you don't know.