It is actually going a bit deeper than that. We are living currently one of the largest book burning period of the entire human history.
Who is are the perpetrators? Publishers, online shops such as Amazon, Barnes&Noble, etc.
Their greed is unlimited and they are doing anything in their power to make sure books cannot be in the public domain, and if they cannot pull them under, they are making sure they simply disappear from the internet.
The Berne Convention, signed in 1886, stated what are the conditions for a book to be released into the public domain: Death of author+ 50 years. It is already too much for any generation to read i tin time to make a difference for them, but then the governments extended that to 70 years and in the case of Mexico, 100. Not only that, but publishers made another important change, with the cohort of governments they added another piece of legislation where it says if the original book is retranslated, interpreted, the new interpretation even with tiny changes is again under anew copyright.
Only a few countries refused this abomination, and you might be surprise to know whom among them: Malysia and China. Yes, China!
While the collective west is forcing people into endless money extraction schemes, those two countries decided to enhance out cultural heritage.
In regards to censorship: every single country does censorship, for one or another reason.
In the past 14 months I have been building two pieces of sovereign software: a novels/Books Writer and an Book eReader, all free to use as Local-first, no subscription models, 100% privacy assured.
And I had a lot of time to investigate these issues as I wanted to offer people optiosn to read the 100 classics of all times. Impossible to do it without biting the dust due to the greed of corporations and corruption of governments.