Comment by ktm5j

I think you're missing the point. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're trying to point out that this book scanning doesn't need to be destructive. I'm not sure if AI companies are using a scanning method that damages the book or not, but they destroy the books after scanning to avoid copyright issues (ie they aren't duplicating the books). This Google project seems to demonstrate that this isn't actually necessary, and that the AI companies are just doing it out of laziness.