alt Hacker News> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.
It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits.
You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?
Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning?
I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.