Once again nobody is complaining they can’t get every edition of Shakespeare. The issue is they can’t get any copy of say, Plutarch outside of ILL, and complete copies of such things as the Golden Bough are unavailable even there, and the self-published book high schoolers wrote 50 years ago that documented local history that was not available anywhere else was destroyed.

You are describing how mostly collections should work. They don’t work that way. They work in about the worst way you can possibly imagine. They are in fact junking valuable books for ghostwritten dreck that will itself be thrown away soon.

> every copy of Shakespeare

Sorry, I assumed that was your complaint about the Shakespeare book printed in the 1700’s.

There are multiple orders of magnitude less ghostwritten dreck than self-published books. In publishing the long tail is vast. A library can easily have every book that sold 50,000+ copies from the last 10 years without wasting much space. Simply as a practical measure there just aren’t that many “popular” books.

I am not saying that the tail end of books with 100 copies has no value, but you can’t keep everything for all time. If nobody has checked a book out in a year it’s only so valuable to the local community.

I find nothing wrong with ILL for Plutarch simply on a cost basis. Shipping books around isn’t free, but neither is shelf space. The point where the probability of someone wanting a book is significantly less than the cost of ILL is a real benefit.