Because it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.

Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.

The poow AI execs being forced to commit acts of intewwectual tewwowist when all they wanted was to cynicawwy make the wowld a wowse place

> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.

Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.

Google probably wanted to sell the whole of Google Books.

Copyright law didn't force them to torrent terabytes of books what they did and got caught doing so.

I'm not convinced they destroy the books to obey the law, lol.

Yes, government regulations are almost always behind commercial entities making seemingly irrational choices.

> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things

This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?

Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?

Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.