Very true, I see >56,000 English-language books that seem to be available for free ( http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2... ).

Is there a way to scrape these programatically? I feel like it'd be a useful repository to have stashed away for whatever future reason.

Why? I can understand downloading a few that look interesting, or asking for permission to mirror them, but blindly downloading all of them seems like hoarding.

Call it "creating a local cache in case the service goes down" (and it most definitely will). "Hoarding" is the normal thing you do when dealing with digital stuff.

Seems like? No, it is hoarding. :)

And...they are no longer available. Hope someone saved them.

They programatically disallow that if you try.

Maybe it would be possible to scrape the ISBN's and get them from Library Genesis?

You could have done that at any time in the past few years tho.

http://scrapy.org would almost certainly work.