I can see your point. From my perspective, the "let's collect it because what if I need it later" mindset is not wrong at all times, but I think we're selectively blind to those 95% in which case it's a miss (i.e. in our case, you'd download an ebook and forget you even have it in like a week).
In ebooks, this doesn't really create a bad outcome, but I think this mindset can manifest in other aspects of our lives as well and that's where it's very much less desirable.
It was just an offtopic remark uttered with no judgement, but it's something I've been sensitive in my own attitude.
I collect every book that I come across, and I can't count the number of times it's been helpful (one month, or five years later). It doesn't matter if you can't remember the book after a week, fzf is here to help you. If you got interested in a new topic (like the aforementioned Rust), press Ctrl+T and type "rust".
Or you can suppress the impulse and skip getting the book, then either forget the site altogether, or visit it five years later and find that it got shut down four years ago.
There have been plenty of instances where you could get lifelong legal ownership of something very valuable only if you got it at a certain time, and that time often ends abruptly without warnings.
In ebooks, this doesn't really create a bad outcome, but I think this mindset can manifest in other aspects of our lives as well and that's where it's very much less desirable.
It was just an offtopic remark uttered with no judgement, but it's something I've been sensitive in my own attitude.