re you sure they’re digitizing Book By the Yard quality material?

They were more than happy to gobble up Reddit posts and Twitter farts and the worst of 4chan. You don’t need to ingest Ulysses exclusively to train a system.

Doing anything physical, especially at scale, is slow and expensive.

Which is why you get people paid pennies an hour to break the physical copies down and feed them into scanners.

would guess a good portion of these books, perhaps an outright majority, have simply never been digitized.

Possibly not. But that’s a sign it isn’t great literature or coveted texts.