PC Master Race

And all of those books are printed with the permission of the author or their estate.

The books are being preserved with the rights holder’s permission, not preserved in spite of them. And yes, plenty of books have gone out of print over the centuries and been lost to time or obscurity. That is unfortunate, but it doesn't give consumers the authority to decide that someone else's intellectual property is now theirs to distribute.

Games are no different. Once the rights holder decides they no longer want to sell a game, that's their decision. You don't have to like it, but you don't get to override it simply because you believe the work should remain available.

There is a reason copyright and intellectual-property law works this way. Authors, painters, musicians, developers, and publishers legally own the rights to their creations. Those rights include the ability to decide how, when, and whether their work is reproduced or distributed. The alternative would be giving the public the authority to make those decisions on the creator's behalf, and that is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of owning intellectual property in the first place.

And believe me, I have very little sympathy for large corporations and their endless pursuit of profit. But even I have to acknowledge that giving a rights holder control over their own property is the more consistent and ethical position. We don't get to discard someone's ownership rights simply because we think the public would benefit from having access to their work.

You can absolutely argue that copyright terms are too long, that abandoned works should have a legal preservation exception, or that the law should provide some mechanism for orphaned or commercially unavailable works to remain accessible. Those are legitimate arguments for changing the law.

But that's fundamentally different from simply deciding that because a company stopped selling something, consumers now have the right to copy and distribute it.