>Ahh, but that is the beauty of law. I'm certain I could register as an archive or library if I had a certain number of books, allowed public access, etc. With the small scale here i'd say it could be arguable.

You wouldn't have to allow public access, there are plenty of private archives. I used to work at a university library that had one. But there is definitely a difference between an archive and a random private collection of books. The issue is not the number of books nor the degree of public access but rather the question of the historical nature of those books and the methods you use to preserve them (and the methods you make others use to read them. At the archive in the library where I worked, for example, everyone had to have gloves on at all times and no one was allowed to have a pen or any other kind of ink-containing device anywhere near a book while reading it). Also you can't just like, put a book on a normal shelf and call it an archive. Books age, paper yellows and gets brittle, etc. and archives are often specifically designed to counter or slow the effects of this aging. There's a whole science to it. (and fwiw you can't just "register as a library" either. You have to go to school and get a degree in library science to become a librarian, it's not trivial and it's certainly not the same thing as just being a person who owns a bunch of books and lets others borrow them)

Also, you'd have to have set all that stuff up *in advance* of making whatever extra copies you are entitled to as an archivist. The OP didn't mention anything about doing any of that stuff and has not indicated that they are an archivist of any kind.

Again, one person downloading (or making) one copy of one book is unlikely to end up in a courtroom at all, not because of what the law says but because it's incredibly unlikely any authority figure will ever know about it, so the question of whether it's legal is purely academic anyway, but I do think it's an interesting discussion. My issue is less with the OP's actions and more with your claim about the level of "access" that one purchase entitles you to.