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But that's the point, if you're hoovering up books by the bushel, why use destructive methods and not simply scan them and hand over the discards to people who care about conservation?
Besides the legal obligation to do the stupid thing, of course.
Do these exist? Conservation as in, at a bare minimum, being willing to take the pages (we can leave off "and use appropriate conservation techniques," because that will make an already small group dwindle to literally nothing). And, to be explicit, "post an angry rant about evil AI companies on Reddit" does not count as caring about conservation for the point of this exercise.
Jason Scott is a real person, yes.
And yet, he also resorts to debinding for scanning (or "destructively" scans).
Understand I don't regard the artifact itself to have much value (when it comes to glued magazines anyways, old hardcovers deserve to live even if they're cookbooks). The difference here is the public gets the damn content for free, not a shadow filtered through a subscription based statistical model.
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Unfortunately, I think we live in a world where some legal obligation is the reason for a lot of stupid, destructive things happening, and this is just the latest in a very long list.
I don't know the details, but I heard that destroying books while scanning is cheaper due to the logistics of opening the book and holding it open page-by-page, but also I heard that it was the opposite, so I don't know. If the former is the case, then that provides a good non-legally-mandated-stupidity reason for the destruction as well.
That said, I imagine we're not too far from having the image processing tech required to have something akin to Futurama where Bender (a 30th/31st century android) just flips through a book in 5 seconds like a flip book and then declares that he's read it. Taking a distorted, side-angled photo of a bent/curved page of a book and converting it to a perfect copy of the original page that is literally indistinguishable, even by an AI, from an actual proper scan of the page after it had been removed from the book seems like it will be within the realm of possibility pretty soon, if not already (depending on how literally you take the word "literally"), and once we have that, it's just a matter of having cameras with sufficiently high fidelity and framerates.
We're probably already there if we were to invest in expensive machines to do so.
I'm not sure it'd make a difference, the people who complain about the destructive scanning would pivot to complaining about so many ressources being spent that could be used for taking in more refugees being used just to feed the AI slopmachines, and what about all the water being wasted to cool all those scanners?
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OP goes over this. Destroying doesn't mean they destroy the page, but scanning works best and fastest if you can get the pages very flat against a scanner. Book spines get in the way, sometimes the text get warped as the spine won't allow the page to lay fully flat against the scanner. Not to mention that you need someone (or a way more complicated machine) to manhandle all these books and spines to get the page to lay as flat as you can for scanning. Scanning a whole book of hundreds of pages that way is a job that would take someone many hours. Compare to cutting the spine, making all the pages loose and stacking them in a document feeder to feed them all one by one, perfectly flat against the scanner. It's not only the fastest, least annoying way to scan, it's the highest quality one. BUT it needs sacrificing the spine.
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