Millions of books are dumpstered every day. MILLIONS. Ever go to a library used book sale? Ever notice that - in MOST cases - 75%+ aren't purchased, even at 50-cents a book?
Sure, some get donated but a lot of book donation places are filtering as they don't need a 100th set of Encyclopedias from 1981.
I know of at least a couple of organizations that fill 20' containers and send to some associated groups in Africa to provide books for kids, but "Morning Glory Milking Farm" as well as Chilton's 1999 Pontiac Minivan manual isn't going to make the cut there either. It costs $ to ship them and they don't have money to waste.
Largely...they get thrown away/pulped. For some reason I'd once noticed that a local library (part of a county-wide metro association) was dumpstering books. Like... a LOT of books - talking a half-full 5 yard dumpster EVERY WEEK. I'd look and there were dozens of heavy duty black garbage bags FULL of books, and not just shitty old ones, there were multiple copies of popular fiction titles, NEW periodicals, all sorts of good stuff. I recognized the dumps were clearly by section as one night several bags would be "history" for example. In the bags they were totally clean too.
I probably dumpster dived 1000 books over the better part of a year, before my wife drew the line bringing home 1-2 shopping bags (eventually i just left a heavy-duty recycling tub in my car for it...) every week. I'm a big reader but that's a lot.
This was a library in an extremely wealthy suburb of 50,000. So I called them and asked about it. IMMEDIATELY the library *insisted* they only threw away damaged books. When I provided pictures, they claimed they were moving to a new facility and someone was just being a little overzealous in their cull.
Their new building was - I shit you not - MAYBE 50 yards away.
Anyway, the point is, I am saddened by the loss of any book, but let's not cry fake tears over this just because it's AI and people are 'shocked' to find out that the public doesn't give much of a shit about books anymore. Because they don't.