Well, the problem is that you lose then all the semantic information that was encoded into the HTML or ePub versions. Those tend to be better for assistive tech users.
That’s only the case for works published after the mid-70s. For works published before (which is all current PD books in the US), it’s 95 years after the date of publication, with a few exceptions where people failed to file renewal notices.
Gutenberg is nearly all books that have lapsed into the US public domain by dint of being published 95+ years in the past. Which broadly explains why you hit nothing for 3d printing.
PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels.
SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist.
Both are valuable, but they serve different segments.
To be precise, the vast majority of SE is from Gutenberg, but we also source from Faded Page, Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource and occasionally do our own transcriptions.
Skagen to Flensburg is 7 hours? It’s a painful number of connections, sure, but hardly multi-day. Even going on to Hamburg only adds another couple of hours onto the journey.
Getting to 200 was mostly a matter of upgrading tracks that needed maintenance anyhow in the 90s, in the 90s however cargo traffic wasn't causing as many disruptions and congestion as today and the talks about "new exclusive" lines is mainly meant to shift air-traffic to faster AND non-congested lines, but new lines are far more expensive/prohibitive both due to new land requirements and making it a "big-bang" build.
