The digitization of books is a worthy endeavour, preserving the contents of a medium which is intrinsically at least somewhat volatile by its nature. But not like this. Very much not like this.

There are millions upon millions of book-lovers across the world who would happily invest in a digitization library for the preservation of literature, especially rare and lesser-known works. There are, however, more responsible ways of doing so, which do not destroy the physical media (which themselves can be rather important -- the history of a book is a tale in itself!)

And certainly not just to feed the contents of the books into a slop engine, then discard that data. Is there any possibility whatsoever that the data can be recovered in a reasonable fashion? Any chance that we'll see those works of literature in unbutchered form ever again?

For those with a love of knowledge and learning, that is the ultimate crime. Impoverishing our world to feed an engine which will never deliver anything but bullshit, but in the hopes that it will deliver a higher grade of bullshit.