It is difficult to destroy books because they may not have as many lives as a cat, but they surely oppose the change. It is also difficult to get a gallows for them.
Yesterday, an Australian blogger named S Peter Davis wrote a piece for Cracked (the surprisingly interesting online offshoot of the old comedy print magazine) called "6 Reasons We're In Another 'Book-Burning' Period In History." It's not about the destruction of books based on content or community objections; it's about the destruction of books because libraries (and sometimes bookstores) don't know what to do with them, or don't know what to do with them that makes economic sense.
The situation as Davis describes it is basically this: Libraries have a certain amount of space and a certain amount of money. The careful culling of books is painstaking work. Perhaps the pithiest part of the discussion is where he says this:
Imagine you're the manager of a library, and some accountant tells you that you need to get rid of 100,000 books, and do it in a week. You really have two options. One, you can get a bunch of academics to scour your collection and painstakingly rate each book according to its value and importance. Then you can hire a bunch of people to take down the 100,000 least important books and painstakingly stamp and debug them, one by one. Your second option is to get the computer to spit out a list of the 100,000 least borrowed books, and hire a few people to walk down the aisles with their arms out, throwing those books in a shredding machine.
That second option is much quicker and much cheaper. Sometimes you can find a paper recycling centre that will pay you for the pulp, so destroying the books leads to a net profit. Nobody likes it, but for a librarian it's like your best friend just got bitten by a zombie and you're the only one with a gun.