The closest they got was admitting that the rare books weren’t anything that someone might care about in the sense that people assume when we hear “rare books”
> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
Okay? But then why exactly where they considered valuable enough to warrant an entire article about them going to a book scanning facility? Without revealing anything about these books I have no idea if they were classic literary works that were underappreciated, or if this was some old guide about How to Use Microsoft Office 97.
There was a more balanced take on Twitter (which I’m unable to find again, because Twitter) from a book seller who said it was more of the latter type: Books that were rare because they were no longer in demand and most everyone had thrown their copies away. Some parts of the media are doing backflips to try to imply that these are cherished literary classics being fed into the shredder to deprive humanity of something valuable, but the book seller seemed happy to be making sales for useless old books that no human was interested in buying.