Tech is far larger than publishing and there's potentially more money to be made organizing/consuming the world's information than in owning it. Some people have been pointing this out for 20 years.
For example, Apple could buy News Corporation (the parent company of HarperCollins, one of the litigants) with a single quarter’s profits. Not revenue, profit.
They could use all the books as a loss leader for the Apple ecosystem, similar to how Google Maps spends billions on data that is made available for “free”.
News Corporation enterprise value: $11bn
Apple quarterly profit: $25bn