I wonder whether most of the value of buying back rights could be captured by just buying books for people on request. A streamlined process for doing this could have pretty low overheads β it only takes a couple minutes to send someone a book via Amazon β and seems scalable. This should be easy enough for a donor or EA org to try.
This is a good idea as well, though it could have the downside of preventing some of the more creative uses of community-owned digital distribution such as aiding translation and making excerpting easier. I think something closer to a Creative Commons license for digital versions would be best (though the publisher might not agree to that).
This is a good idea as well, though it could have the downside of preventing some of the more creative uses of community-owned digital distribution such as aiding translation and making excerpting easier. I think something closer to a Creative Commons license for digital versions would be best (though the publisher might not agree to that).