An Engineer Imagines is the autobiography of Peter Rice, one of the preeminent structural engineers of the 20th century. He worked on the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre, I.M. Pei's pyramids at the Louvre, and the Lloyd's of London building, to name a few. According to the reviews, it's a fairly inspiring look at the creative design process. I've been particularly interested over the past year in the intersection of structural engineering and architecture, and how innovative forms become physical realities.

Unfortunately, whatever knowledge is in this book is a casualty of modern intellectual property, and, for all but the most determined scholar, lost to the world.

It was last reprinted in 1998, but only three copies are available on the web: one at Amazon for $1,752.80, and two at AbeBooks for $900 and $2,818.60. Mind you, the book is not bound in solid gold with diamond dots on the i's; it's a simple paperback.

Google Books has only the dreaded snippet view and points me to WorldCat, which shows that there are copies at several libraries in the region. Sadly, the Mid-Manhattan's copy, the only one at a public library, has status "Lost." So I'm left trying to gain access to Columbia's library, which requires me to first go to the public library and convince them of the situation so they can give me a special permission card.

So to sum up, because someone might at some point decide to try selling this book again, no one can read it without unreasonable effort or expenditure until that does happen or several decades pass and the copyright expires.

Yet there is hope. Google's recent settlement of the lawsuit filed against them by publishers includes measures designed to solve precisely this problem by enabling the electronic purchase of out-of-print but in-copyright books. It will be a happy day if this pans out.