Most books are lost in time. The ones that survive are just popular enough to stay in circulation.
Like you will most likely always have some kind of access to something like GTA 6 in some way. Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.
> Most books are lost in time.
And that's a bad thing.
> Only obscure titles get truly lost.
We can do better.
> Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.
They can be obscure for many reasons, only one of which are it's quality as a piece of art.
There was an album, "Begin", released by a group of session musicians calling themselves The Millennium. Released in 1968, it was a borderline experimental sunshine pop rock in the vein of Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, with songwriting and production in the same ballpark. It completely flopped, having landed a bit too late, and made virtually zero impact on music history. It only started to get rediscovered by the public after some CD releases in the early 90s, but that mostly got it out of total obscurity into being an extremely deep cut.
But it's fantastic and in spite of it being out of it's time when it released in terms of genre, did a lot of cool experimental stuff that makes it sound shockingly modern. It's seen some greater recognition in recent years, but we're in literally another century. I found out about it through a Spotify recommendation and based on searches, so did a lot of other people. When it got recommended to me in the late 2010s the play count for most of the songs was in the low thousands, but it's gotten a bit higher now.
The album didn't get re-issued because of it's quality, but because CDs were booming and labels were looking for any old junk. There was also a resurgence of interest in baroque pop in that era. If the circumstances weren't just right, it would never have been re-issued, it'd likely have continued to be completely forgotten and I wouldn't have ended up listening to it and loving it.