What do you think the market is for people who want to read books or articles condensed into lines of text suitable for model training?

I think it's 0. Maybe a handful if pirate libraries of readable ebooks and papers didn't already exist, but even a handful of copyright violators wouldn't be a serious commercial threat to the publishers.

So far, governments have been unable to do anything about pirate libraries. Complaining about AI datasets, poorly formatted for human consumption, seems misplaced.

Criticizing this as "stealing" or "piracy" is a vote for a future where only big tech, or the major publishers themselves, can train models on good datasets. Nobody else will have the money or market power to license that much material.