Anthropic destroyed the books, they can't donate them again.

Yes, but surely the problem isn't that the law requires anything in particular, but rather that a bunch of books are getting bought by an organization that is likely to systematically destroy them and that there among those books are a niche books or unusual books that would end up disappearing, and thus that cultural artifacts and knowledge might be disappearing due to this.

I would argue that books are sacred & anyone destroying books is a bad person.

History seems to agree - bad people did usually destroy a lot of books.

False dichotomy. The books could have been digitized WITHOUT being destroyed.

There’s no reason to assume that digital ebooks/documents will be accessible or readable to anyone in say 75 years. A physical book will be just as accessible today, as it will be practically forever. Okay there’s the acid paper thing but still… there’s no reason for Anthropic to destroy the books.

I actually didn't mean it literally, more just the general sense that any job you're doing that isn't sufficiently evil will eventually be rolled up. But that's interesting that there is now a literal connection between these two stories!