(Sorry for the late response.) Well it depends a lot on the site. Since I focus on books and scholarly articles, the ideal way is to find the URL of the original PDF. The website might show you just individual pages as images, but it might hide the link to the PDF somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you might just obtain all the URLs of the individual page images, put them all into a download manager, and later bundle them all into a new PDF. (When you open the “inspect element” window, you just have to figure out which part of the code is meant to display the pages/images to you.) Sometimes the PDFs and page images can be found in your browser cache, as I mention in the OP. There’s quite some variety among the different sites, but with even the most rudimentary knowledge of web design you should be able to figure out most of them.

If need help with ripping something in particular, DM me and I’ll give it a try.

I never said I follow the law, I’m just wondering what the law says ;)

Honestly much of your reply is confusing me and doesn’t seem to be relevant to my questions. This is what I think is crucial:

Just because a file is cached on your device does not mean you are the legal owner of that content forever.

What does being “the legal owner forever” actually entail, either with regards to a physical book or its scan? And what does that mean regarding what I can legally do with the cached file on my computer?

Yeah I’m wondering as well. It seems to save webpages, whereas the issue is with scanned books which may be removed from IA…

What do you mean by “saving a copy”? I still have the .doc file somewhere in my emails. If I told you I’m a serious published writer, and then you asked me where you can read my texts, and I sent you a .doc that hasn’t been proofread, would you take me seriously?

, it’s a salty article

Actually the author himself is somewhat harmed by this situation. I would be salty too. When I wish to write my CV, I can say: my text have been published at X and Y. Especially nice if it’s an important and well known publication. Now a part of his CV is literally erased, he can’t access his own texts anymore (not even on Internet Archive). That’s… utterly ridiculous. It’s a common practice to send the author a copy (or multiple) of the text he has published, he has every right to own a copy of them. Now the copy that was intended to be available to everyone is not available even to him. Something of the sort really has happened to me too when a website I published an article on a site underwent a redesign and now the text just isn’t available anymore. Admittedly it’s still on IA, but it’s an awkward situation.

This so much. Years ago I’ve had it push Moon landing denial videos in my recommendations, even though I’ve never watched videos on conspiracies or anything of the sort at the time. The closest I got were pop-sci channels such as Vsauce, Numberphile… It’s just trying to hook you onto the garbage content and garbage ideas because they have good and loyal viewership.

Man I miss the times when Google used to trick us into helping make knowledge more easily accessible to everyone. Now we just train fucking AI for luxury cars.

Good question. In my country (I’ve had some contact with people who work in the area) apparently they aim to keep films on film stock, as it is supposedly the most reliable format for long-term preservation, though they also have digital copies too. Now, I wouldn’t expect them to retroactively put a digital film on analog stock (anyway, the archive is still primarily working on gathering and preserving the existing film heritage of the country from across the previous century), but the purely digital stuff will hopefully also get whatever is regarded as the most reliable long-term medium. I could personally ask one guy who works there when I get the opportunity, though I don’t think I’d get the opportunity any time soon…

Do not Google “HIV/AIDS in Russia”, do not Google “HIV/AIDS in Russia”, do not Google “HIV/AIDS in Russia”…

I guess they request the distributor/streaming service to send them a digital copy.

Did you know that there are countries out there other than USA, Russia, Ukraine and China?

But how do we know this statistic is not fake news too?

Absolutely the correct stance, nothing dirty about it. At this point, for better and for worse, the Internet is a basic necessity. Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.

No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf…

Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.

I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

It’s going to take a million trouser legs to get some things back on track…

It can vary from place to place…