> Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.

No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!

Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.

This was my issue as well. It seems like they tip toed around it in one paragraph saying usually these are books with isbn numbers so not truly collectible or very rare and then in another paragraph plainly stated that it could be foreign language or low volume books that are rare. Rare expresses a different meaning to me and I think it amounts to exactly what you said, manufactured outrage.