Not only that, but the logic of the whole thing was weak anyway and I'd argue it didn't achieve any of its goals.

There are plenty of places to torrent books online. If people are desperate for a book and savvy enough to know about the Internet Archive, chances are they would have found an available copy online anyway. It's also not as though downloading an illegal copy from IA put the user at any less legal risk than downloading from elsewhere (other than giving publishers a bigger target to go after, which is exactly what happened).

It's a shame, because IA felt like a true public good on the Internet, and now it looks like it's going away. Sigh.