> What is the point of destroying the source material? I don't buy the copyright thing.

It is the copyright thing.

Despite what people say about scanning, the fact is, non-destructive scanning machines have been built and perfected long time ago. This was preferred in the past, back before some major kerfuffle with the publishers during COVID, but that incidentally happened to be before LLMs became a thing, so AI companies never had that option available.