That's how I feel about publishers and ebooks....that are decades old. Give me book 1 in a series free......or not. But that's what I'd do, occasionally. Especially for books that don't sell much.I kinda wish they would make each of the older edition's PHB's free. I think that'd go a long way towards garnering interest for DMs to pick up older edition material because they could get their players involved "for free", but they could still make money on other products and sucking both players & DM's into having a wider experience with more book options.
Sure, they have the watermarked PDFs, but those are pretty hard to display on my bookshelf and they are unsatisfying to share with my nieces and nephews. I want the hardcopies, and I'm standing here with cash in hand ready to buy them. I wish I understood what the holdup was, or how I could formally request them.