Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them.

Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's TV Guide pristine has had over 30 years to procure and protect their copy.

These particular buyers are converting their copy to a digital one that's getting some kind of use, which is better than the fate of 99.9% of the other copies.

It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.

When applied to ordinary mundane objects, this is the mindset that leads to pathological hording behavior. Ultimately I think it's rooted in a fear of, an attempt to deny, mortality and the passage of time.