If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
Sample:
> Thou shalt commit adultery.
> What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
Not destroying them. By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else. Maybe even a library that specializes in rare books.
Good news, there's hundreds or thousands of copies that continue to exist. Anthropic, Google et al only need a single copy.
And shockingly, for all this talk of rare books, we don't see the other owners of said books stepping up and offering to have these books scanned non-destructively. I won't hold my breath for them to do so in the short or long term.
FURTHERMORE, the books aren't being scanned for no reason, they become part of new model training data. Meaning that whatever insights these books contain might be available to users in the future. Again, more valuable than all the copies rotting away on someone's bookshelf that might be scanned and made available some day.
They raise the price and print more copies?
Same answer? They raise the price and print more copies.
You can just print even 1 copy, just the cost per print will be higher.
In fact publishers getting some profit on the tail end of books is the best thing that could happen to authors and publishing industry.
They're often books tied to a region, i.e. stories about a local fisherman's life and how they overcame adapting a boat to local feedstock, or the engineering that went into building the local train station. That's to say they can have little value to those outside the area but are still a rich read for locals, tourists, and those who move to the region or have a love for a place. I expect we'll see a concerted effort to organise to get these kind of book sent to regional mueseums for scanning now that people are aware they are actively being destroyed and they realise the timeline isn't how long the book can last.
How? Like, do you think a book published 100 years ago has a digital file sitting around a publishing house that might even exist anymore? Re-publishig of old books are often based on scans (the originals were literally pressed into paper by metal, not printed off hard drives), and if the books don't exist, they can't re-scan.
I own some antique Japanese books that have very few copies in existence. You couldn't get them re-printed if you want to if the physical book didn't exist anymore. For a few books, I've actually purchased incredibly high-quality scans that cost me hundreds of dollars because to produce the re-issues, people had to go to museums with high-powered cameras to photograph the pages under supervision of a curator. There's no digital file to print from the publisher. If those books were gone, there's no bringing them back.