Why do we need to preserve access to so much work? The world already contains more than enough old literature for anybody to read in a lifetime.
There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death.
If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
It's been a long time since I've read anything so abjectly ahistorical and anti-intellectual. There is always an underground, "culture" is not singular but a collective noun, and the barometer of cultural value has never been "the limits of what one person can consume."
"What one person thinks others should have access to," on the other hand, now that one has a long, sordid, and sometimes-violent history.
>If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
Demonstrably false.
Each employee of that small business talks about their job, and/or moves on to other jobs where their previous working experiences are expressed in terms of both job performance and managerial habits. This is cultural dissipation (in your "workplace" context, but also carries to others), the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture.
It took 200 years for most anybody to consider Baruch Spinoza as anything more than some old excommunicated shitbird. Palmyra is currently being reduced to dust and memories. There are more examples.
> This is cultural dissipation [...] the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture.
This.
Tangentially, one of the things I really liked about the film "The Cloud Atlas" is the subtext of cultural dissipation through low-probability events. The implied moral being: "Try to always be the best person you can be, because you don't know which moments of yours are going to end up having lasting significance.
There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death.
If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.