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1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal.

2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions.

3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consumers had with physical books, to be specific: a right to re-sell the book, a right to lend the book, a right to make archival copies etc.

Making a copy is not always illegal when it is considered fair use or fair dealing. Part of the analysis for determining the same involves the quantity of material copied. They copied entire books. Your other points are entirely irrelevant. They knew what they were doing was wrong, and they jeopardized the archive by doing it. If you want to change the law, change the law. If you want to break the law, break it yourself... don't drag the archive down with you to do it.
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> 1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal.

I believe I remember this was tried at one point too. The significant difference here is that Google has seemingly unlimited money to throw towards lobbying and court cases

Authors Guild v. Google - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... and https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/authorsguild-go...

> The Second Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling that Google’s digitization and subsequent use of the copyrighted works was fair use. In concluding that Google’s use was transformative, the circuit court found that “Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function . . . augments public knowledge by making available information about [p]laintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the [p]laintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.”

> ...

> Regarding the Google Books project’s potential to impact the market for or value of the copyrighted works, the circuit court held that—despite the search function’s potential to cause “some loss of sales”—the brevity of the snippet search results and the “cumbersome, disjointed, and incomplete nature of the aggregation of snippets made available through snippet view” make it unlikely that Google’s use could “provide a significant substitute for the purchase of the author’s book.”

Google books shows length limited excerpts. That's a huge difference.