This is the opposite of a book burning. These books which only a few would ever know the names of, let alone find, let alone read, are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches.
> being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches
You make it sound like they are running a second Project Gutenberg. They most definitely are not making these available for electronic searches. At least not searches the public can participate in.
And knowledge from these books can be "imprinted" into a model to be used by much more people or even survive this planet once sent into space in a probe.
> are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches
What guarantee do we have that the book contents will be served unfiltered and unaltered?
Are they being digitised? That word implies that the book would have a digital representation of the original, which is not what an LLM is. Can they be found in electronic searches? I mean I kinda get what you mean, the knowledge was potentially forgotten and now it might not be, but also the authors who created that knowledge get no credit, no reward.
They aren’t “digitizing them” as if they are making them available online.
They are creating embedding vectors and training documents - changing whatever they want - and destroying the original copy so nobody knows what was actually said.
It is just like book burning.