It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.
Half the reason the books get trashed in this process is because the first sale doctrine keeps copyright from strangling all the freedom in this narrow area.
But they won't share them because they don't want their competitors to have the data.
And if the books are not in the public domain, then they should not be allowed to train their AI models with the material without some kind of license or agreement with the owner of the copyright.
That'd be an easy fix with new law -- if you are an AI company with book data, you have a burden to make openly available (or require your suppliers to) all public domain book scans.
Emphasis mine. Just provide a digital copy, no questions asked. They will distributed to various archives globally. I'll pay for the drives and shipping. I understand and can appreciate the potential liability, and am willing to launder it to preserve the subject collection(s) and dataset(s).
It seems a little short-sighted to destroy an artifact to get the text.
Perhaps the genetic material that remains in books from the people who handled them, or the pollen from plants in the environment that the book existed in will have value in the future, but we won't know what we lost because some people foolishly destroyed it in a bizarre quest to make AGI that the creators argue could potentially destroy humanity.
The more and more I read about these kinds of people the more I'm starting to realize that they're in the "here for a good time not a long time" group of people and those are the last people you want making long-term decisions.
They don't care about the R.L. Stein Goosebumps series or Louis L'Amour pulp fiction. They want the stuff that isn't digitized and they're willing to destroy original artifact to do so with no guarantee that even the digitized text will ever be made publicly available.
It's foolish and selfish.
That was something that someone on Twitter made up and then got quoted in an article. All of the books being scanned have ISBNs, meaning they're from 1970 or later. The books being sold off are rare in the sense that there aren't many copies in circulation, but they aren't priceless artifacts. If they were, they'd be being sold individually at high prices by boutique booksellers rather than being sold by the pallet by wholesalers. It's going to mostly be stuff like "The Best Places to Eat in Milwaukee, 1992 edition" or "The 2006 Guide to the Stock Market" or "Teach Yourself Visual Basic 3.0 in 28 Days".
I think the more important part is to define what "rare" actually means and save/digitize set copies of those books that are actually at risk of being lost completely (rather than letting them rot away somewhere or get bought up to be privately destroyed). I suspect many of them are just not at all interesting enough to justify the expensive though.
As a general rule preserving historical artifacts for continued future analysis and appreciation by people who have yet to be born is a noble cause that's considered worthy in and of itself without the need to justify it. We're talking about the richest group of people who have ever existed with the means to preserve them but decline to do so and instead act like the Taliban blowing up statues of Buddha.
I think this is intuitive to most people. If a prerequisite for the birth of AGI was that a humanoid robot had to sit down in the Louvre and eat every single painting there with a knife and fork while occasionally stopping to wipe away historical detritus with the Mona Lisa that it's wearing as a bib people would by and large express a visceral and justifiable outrage.
The people who are doing this know how this looks so they're trying to do it all behind closed doors, through cut-outs and intermediaries.