@raven >If the publisher is no longer selling the book, then the publisher and author are no longer receiving income from it.
The publisher imagines that they're making profit because the book is kept proprietary - that's only the important thing to the publisher.

>There is really nothing left to protect, no benefit to the public in protecting a work that is unavailable
I don't really get how restricting the copying of a book it meant to protect anything, thus I wouldn't refer to such government enforced monopoly as "protection".

It's arguably a loss to the public (rather than protection) if the public is being restricted from the ability to freely copy a book in exchange for losing a large amount of money to publishers who do little more than put an order in to a printer for x books with y cover (for physical books) or upload a file to a server (for ebooks) and then proceed to pay the author a pittance even if huge profits are gained (only superstars tend to be able to negotiate merely an unfair contract after years of ridiculous contracts).

>Make an ebook available perpetually. >(No, it's not practical. But it's nice to dream.)
It's very practical to make a file composed of text available for download long term due to the small storage requirements, unless of course ebook has digital handcuffs on it.

Such files are very easy to make available on GNUnet FS, bittorrent, libgen, ipfs etc - maybe a dedicated library of all the PD books could be maintained (hardware replacement/maintenance costs and a internet connection would be all that's required).