They're not destroying the books "after" scanning 'for the evulz' to deprive the world of them. They're destroying them before scanning because cutting the spines off with a bandsaw lets them drop the stack of pages in a sheet-feed scanner and get the job done a lot faster than using a book scanner.

Similarly, I'm sure they've got some actual rationale for their crawler behavior that makes sense (at least to them) and isn't a conspiracy theory.

Nobody is a mustache-twirling villain in their own mind, even if they turn out to be so from everybody else's perspective.