TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.
For me if it is not possible to scan something non-destructively then it is acceptable to destroy one copy to share with many. It is not acceptable to destroy a book for non-preservation purposes.
Also they are probably destroying many copies of the same books over and over.