Not to defend the AI crowd, but ever go to a Goodwill Outlet store? They usually have at least 1 gaylord box (the giant box on a pallet watermelons come in) full of books. Not sure how often they cycle those out, but I’m guessing pretty regularly. Multiply that by every semi major city Goodwill has a presence in. Add in other thrift sores with a similar quantity of books. You’re talking ALOT of books. SO MANY books are thrown out everyday. Including by libraries. I don’t really have a problem if some of those get diverted for a bit to be scanned. Yes, it’s sad to see books getting destroyed. But there’s alot of stuff people just really don’t want. And, if you REALLY want a villain, maybe you can blame copyright law? That’s part of the reason AI companies destroy the books - it helps to make their scanning efforts more legal. Absent that, they could probably be convinced to spend just a little more for nondestructive scanning, assuming they could find a home for the books they scanned (the sellers of these things couldn’t, so good luck).

If the AI companies were simply picking up books that were already going to a landfill, I don’t think that would bother anybody. That isn’t what we’re talking about here, though. These books are coming from booksellers, so it’s fair to guess that most of them are at least a notch or two above what you’d find in a Goodwill bargain bin.

Bibles. There are so many fucking bibles. When I worked for a church we probably had 20 people a year buy a while new set of new bibles for the church. Like - we already had like 3,000 bibles with a weekly attendance of about 500. We didn’t need new bibles, but people just kept giving them to us.

It’s the most-printed book of all time, and they just don’t stop making them. It’s insane.