I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.

But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.

I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.

I need a name for people who dismiss an entirely new and revolutionary class of technology without even trying it, so much so that they'll not even read about any new ideas that involve it.

I zgrep my epubs, is that a problem too?