> Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago

Most paper books don’t make it a thousand years, let alone a hundred. Your local library is probably purging piles of books every year and nobody sheds a tear.

> I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them

It would be cheaper to buy a second copy of the book and put it in a different warehouse where it can continue to go unread as it did before the AI companies bought it. The cost of non-destructive scanning and rebinding books is crazy high.