I think comic book scanners, especially those scanning long out-of-print work, can be the perfect example of the trials and tribulations of digital preservation:<p>-The works they are trying to preserve are copyrighted and still trademarked, making it illegal to make copies and distribute them, but a lot of the rights holder themselves see no value in preservation or even reprinting them.<p>-They use P2P technologies to distribute the scanned copies, since it does not require them to host their content on a server. However the tech they use primarily is DC++ a stopgap between Gnutella and BitTorrent, which has a pro that as long as people keep connecting to each other(even momentarily) the comics can be distributed. However it requires a network of &#x27;hubs&#x27; to connect users, creating pseudo-centralization. The secondary tech is of course BitTorrent, which is far more widespread and quite easier to use than DC++, but as with every torrent, there is a huge attrition rates and a lot of preservation comics are sitting with very few or no seeds at all. Most of them have even lost their trackers, Demonoid being the biggest one.<p>-There is tertiary level of distribution; Cyber-locker sites. People upload these scans to zippyshare, tusfiles, Mega, etc. and post them on forums. Most of these forums have blocked crawlers in their robots.txt. The biggest source of these is the 4chan board &#x2F;co&#x2F;. 4chan threads have very short half-lives, doubly so for threads with these links, because the admins want to pay lip-service to copyright holders, and to be frank, most of the links posted there have no preservative value, but are really a source of pure piracy. 4chan does have third-party archives, but just last week I learned that the archive I used to use has folded. Most cyber lockers themselves don&#x27;t have long life-spans, and Link-rot is more prevalent in their case.<p>-The fourth level of distribution is imageboards&#x2F;chans themselves. Some user would &#x27;storytime&#x27;, post each jpeg in a scaned comic in sequence, a comic if they feel like it, but they too are subject to the imageboard thread half-life.<p>Despite the effort and complexity, DC++ remains the best way to discover old comics lost to time, but one day maintaining a hub would be too expensive or the imminent crackdown on IP infringement would shut them down.<p>This is just for American comics. French&#x2F;Franco-belgian comics, a far more bigger market, face similar problems. Same goes for Manga.