I scanned my grandmother's books - mainly autobiographical, she was a medical missionary in China and India, and children's - for this very reason. She had five

I scanned my grandmother's books - mainly autobiographical, she was a medical missionary in China and India, and children's - for this very reason. She had five children, who all had families, grandfamilies, and in some cases great-grandfamilies, meaning that copies of her books became rare. As silly as it sounded, as a child who grew up with Trek and TNG, I wanted some far-flung descendant to be able to generate her in a hologram, and to read her words. As such, I made the decision to destroy my own copies of her books so that they could be scanned for this purpose and stored on the Internet Archive. It was the only practical method at that time. But it would be wonderful if somehow technology advanced quickly in this area so that it was easier to scan books non-destructively. (The one issue I find dissatisfying about the process is that I could not substitute my own OCR of her work (some done, more planned) for the Archive's often substandard automated OCR. No disrespect to the Archive by this, and hopefully at some point they will re-scan with better software..) In case anyone would like to check them out: https://archive.org/details/@mollyrealized/uploads https://archive.org/details/@mollyrealized/uploads (A warning for those who do: my grandmother describes people as small - her Chinese cook and her Indian patients (she was a nurse), yes, but also her own daughter, her husband, and an upstate New York appliance salesman who calls her a pretty little woman. Applied to an elderly Chinese woman it carries a weight it doesn't carry applied to an American one. She also uses "coolie," ordinary in the 1930s and not now. Overall her writing, and the work it records, shows an ongoing desire to be warm to, to respect, and to understand people who weren't American. She and my grandfather went out to build and upgrade hospitals. They helped first and preached to those who wanted to hear it. As her grandchild, I believe I can accurately say that love and respect were what was in her heart.) My grandparents were Americans in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. My grandfather was shot at by an inebriated Japanese soldier. If the gun hadn't jammed twice in a row, you wouldn't be speaking to me.