If you all want to nerd out about how eyeballs works that's cool, this is the place for that kind of thing, keep it chill, etc. But the law absolutely does not agree that looking at a painting equates to creating a copy of that painting; under the Copyright Act, the colloquial term "copy" means fixing a work into some physical media from which others can recall it.
So if you stream a movie from a hard drive over the Internet without "fixing" it anywhere, so that the viewer cannot "recall" it, but only watch, then you are not making a "copy" and not breaking the law?
There was a SCOTUS case remarkably like this, except for radio, and the answer is no, but the truth is it was complicated.
So what if the book is never scanned, but there's a video stream of a camera pointed at the book, and a robot turns its pages? If we make a video streaming jukebox for books, is it 'distributing copies'?