Actually im not. I deal with old books every day. What youre talking about is the modern publishing space where books get pulped by the millions because they are textbooks that weren’t picked up by enough schools. Or theyre no longer the latest edition. Even regular consumer books get pulled for not having enough sales.

The used market is still full of these books even after being abandoned by the publishers. But even that market is still driven by demand. Used bookstores only buy books if they think they’ll sell. But the thing is they still bulk sell those books that dont have market value because people will buy huge pallets of books for pennies on the dollar.

Yes libraries also recycle books that have been on the shelves too long. And it’s hard to sell old library books because of the extreme use they are put through. They do library sales for old books pretty regularly. Most of the time they are pulping books that are worn out. Which still suggests a demand, worn books are read books.

What they’re doing is taking old texts from warehouses that are known to be abandoned copyright, since stealing modern writing has proven to be unpopular. And so unknown old works are basically free game. And at best they are saving it digitally, which is good, but then selling access since after destroying the physical copy so as to have a monopoly on the data. And moatly theyre selling it to ai companies to use as training data. So basically theyre squatting old rare text that they have no actual right to.

Ive got over 350k on my 05’ Toyota. I dread trying to buy a newer car.

Popular doesnt always mean good. Unpopular doesnt always mean bad. There are countless little poetry books that only circulated through clubs. Texts circulated through writing groups that contain works of authors before they were famous.there are rare books you’ve never heard of that a collector would pay thousands for because they are one of the few people who know its value. Old folios that crossed oceans as the libraries behind them burned in petty wars that sat in attics for generations before the family found it only to send it up wholesale in an estate auction.

The point is that these assholes buy it all up by the truck load and process it indiscriminately. All to avoid copyright, and to feed their environment destroying hallucination machine.