I remember reading a scene where this exact thing was going on in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End: there, the books were being shredded and scanned as tiny bits and stitched together in software similar to shotgun genome sequencing.

At any rate, I ought to pick it up again and finish reading it...

A story as old as time.

My beef with birds has always been that they treat the entire world as their toilet. Woe betide the creature who finds himself beneath a bird.