We throw away nearly a billion books every year. They're not sacred, and scanning a few million isn't a tragedy. People just don't like AI and want to be outraged about it.

ars from a month ago is a bit less emotional about it:

"The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers"

but also brings up a reasonable point that there are good ways to do this type of scanning non-destructively.

And if their inherent value was so great, regardless of supply or use, wouldn't we be able to churn out infinite value by just printing enormous nunbers of copies and storing them?

This absurd consequence shows the outrage here is without rational foundation. It's feelings run amok. Feels are not a good way to think, people.

Please, give me one example of an interesting and unique book that the AI companies have destroyed.

These are books that were sitting in some warehouse waiting to be destroyed until it was discovered that AI companies would buy them in bulk. Most of these books are 'rare' because no one bought them, so they didn't print many, and the ones they did print weren't sold so they sat in a warehouse.

I feel like people are imagining some rare, handwritten book transcribed by some 17th century monk. That is not what these are, they are part of the millions of published books that never get any traction, are barely sold, and then are destined to fade into obscurity as they are eventually cycled out of the warehouse and into the incinerator.

But now that AI companies want to add a 'scan them first' step before destroying them, they are suddenly precious and must be preserved?

Even if the person running the scanner treated every book with utmost love, museum-level care, and holy sanctity... copyright law would still require them to shred/burn the pristine antique book at the end anyway, or else they get sued for bazillions by the modern companies that "own" the book's contents.