Alexandria was strongly anti-copyright. Not that copyright existed, but they allegedly forced visitors to donate copies of any books they had to the library (scribes copied them and gave back the copies).
As of last year, someone on reddit determined that l--g-- had 2.7 TB of fiction and 40 TB of nonfiction, and double that size of scientific articles and magazines.
It's missing a fair amount of books, which would make the true total size larger, but it also has a lot of duplicates and scans that are unnecessarily large compared to true ebooks, which would make the true total size smaller.
In an age where books had to be hand copied, copyright really doesn't even make sense to apply as a concept. They weren't anti-copyright, since that concept doesn't even make sense from their viewpoint. The physical book itself was what was valuable, and wasn't separable from the 'work' of the original author. Since they were craft-made objects, the skill of the scribe & bookbinder was as important as the original text.
This is much later historically, but in medieval conception 2 identical texts could be worth vastly different amounts based on the quality of the binding and the illumination in the book.
This is an example of why applying modern thinking in a historical concept can lead us astray. The Library of Alexandria wasn't pro or anti copyright; that makes as much sense as saying they were pro x86 and anti ARM. It just wasn't even a concept that had been developed.
Edit: upon rereading, my tone seemed a bit combative. Not trying to call anyone out, just wanted to point out that applying modern sensibilities to history can cause distortions. It is a pet peeve of mine that people consider ancient people's stupid, and this is one of the major reasons why. We forget that we have the benefit of thousands of generations of previous people improving their understanding of the world, and what seems obvious to us is only obvious in hindsight with the benefit of that prior knowledge.
I agree there were all kinds of other considerations. The education required to write, and the cost of hand-copying books, meant that the market was nonexistent and those who wrote anything worthwhile were intellectuals and had some other job or patronage. The cost of contacting most authors might've been impractical, even more than the cost of the scribes to copy books, even in cases where the authors were still alive. Still, there was a thriving intellectual culture, and nobody thought about this modern "moral right of the author" to extract rent from the transmission of knowledge.
By modern standards, there's hardly anything more anti-copyright than forcing someone to let you copy their personal library. It disrespects not only the modern rent-extraction copyright by the author, but also the idea that written material in any form is anyone's property at all.
As of last year, someone on reddit determined that l--g-- had 2.7 TB of fiction and 40 TB of nonfiction, and double that size of scientific articles and magazines.
It's missing a fair amount of books, which would make the true total size larger, but it also has a lot of duplicates and scans that are unnecessarily large compared to true ebooks, which would make the true total size smaller.