You can't compare an island or food to books though, because the former are only really valuable in their atomic form. Like if you take detailed pictures, people can't live on or eat those pictures.

You scan books though and all the value they provide is still fully available in bit form, because books merely contain information. And of course being in bit form means they can be trivially copied, technically. But there's also the legality, which determines how many copies it's legally permissible to retain. The latter becomes the bottleneck for your preservation of "culture" because said culture could be made trivially available to anyone with an internet-connected device, if only rights holders weren't screaming foul (remember what happened with Internet Archive during/after Covid?[0]).

Ultimately there's no destruction involved when books are scanned, just a change of format which helps to ease management and for legal compliance.

[0] https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/internet-archive-loses-...

It's culture. These scans are of course not distributed, so the value doesn't quite continue to exist.

You say "culture", but is is culture, and culture that was interesting enough to write down. Writing a book in the 70s isn't a trivial thing, there are gatekeepers, editors, publishers etc., even for your little book about local history, and the information is valuable to the community it's about. It affects their internal cultural transmission.