People can go on at great length about the tragedy of all the history that’s being lost as a result of digital files (authors not saving drafts, etc., etc.), but it seems to me that the preservation of paper is just as subject to idiosyncrasy and disaster–poor organization, floods, fire, pilfering, what have you.

I’m more fascinated by the question of the motivation of the perpetrators of today’s pirated copies. I can’t imagine taking pictures of every page of a book, particularly when doing so would carry no real reward and could theoretically carry a severe punishment. But clearly not everyone feels that way.