I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.

Do you think that you are somehow special and unique in needing these books? If the books cost in the 10s of thousands, then there's obviously value to other people. I've seen no evidence that Amazon or others are buying $10k books to scan into their corpus. All evidence I've seen is that they're scanning cheap books with no current value and no clear use to people today.

I have volunteered with a library, and probably threw hundreds of books over a couple week engagement from a university library into a shredder at the direction of a professional, academic librarian. Libraries are constantly culling books, the EXACT category books we're talking about here (old, never-read). This is happening at a much larger scale, so I would recommend railing against university librarians in addition to the AI juggernauts.