Comment by kmeisthax

You don't need to shred books to scan them. They make book scanners that will "rip" a fully-bound book no-problem, and even correct for the curvature of the page and binding to give you an equivalent image. In fact, the Internet Archive specifically built nondestructive book scanners[0] for exactly the purpose of which AI companies are now shredding books. The smart / savvy thing to do would be to buy those machines off IA and use them to read the books they're interested in.

The reason why AI companies don't do this is that they're cheap and desperate for training tokens. Same reason why they have scrapers that will happily overload web interfaces for Git repos following links to everything, even though you can just Git clone the repo with far less stress on the host. The AI people are ultimately there just to pillage as much knowledge as they can as fast as possible. Their scraping practices are slap-dash garbage.

[0] https://ones-and-zeroes.ghost.io/scanning-all-the-books-the-...