Moreover, the availability of pictures of Mona Lisa is a big part of its popularity. Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?
They want to have something that others can't have.
>Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?
Some would, but there are plenty who prefer the obscurity. Most aristocrats are more interested in impressing their friends and immediate circle with off-beat style than in starting a popular museum or being seen as gaudy. Obscurity is hip--and sometimes it can even be affordable.
I'm informing a fellow nerd who asked a question.
Rare book dealers don't read HN so I don't see how I could offend anyone.
This is a video of the Scribe machine that the Internet Archive built for book scanning. It uses two commodity digital cameras to image the pages. The computer driving the process is running Linux and gPhoto. They're also working on a tabletop version, which will be easier for smaller institutions to set up and use.
Using cameras to take pictures of pages seems to be the most "damageless" option.
Private book traders make all their money by selling unique items to rich people. The rich people doing the buying want to own something special that other people can't have.
Bibliophiles are technophobes. They love the paper page, the book binding, the book stacks. They don't love the content of the books, and they don't want to share them. They have "aristocratic" ideas about who deserves to have access to these special items. Every last one of them is a hoarder that wants to have things that others can't have.
They hate book scanners. They hate ebooks. They hate digitization. It just threatens their business, their status, their one-of-a-kinds.
Rare books is all about prestige and exclusivity. Digitization is a threat to this.
I'm a book scanner--someone who loves the contents of books more than the objects--and my kind are scorned like the gargoyles from Snow Crash.