You mean sentience? Of course that's where moral value begins. Almost everyone holds that position.
And people who say they don't almost always are roleplaying that they don't for the sake of argument and can be immediately exposed as holding a contradiction in their values with the most basic pressure/consistency tests.
Your belongings aren't sentient and I'm sure that if they were to be wiped out almost everyone would hold the position that they couldn't be bothered to care.
That's not a comparable argument because your belongings have a material effect on at least one sentient entity.
Instead what if you were given the power to expunge everything in the universe outside of our solar system. Would that be acceptable?
That's not a comparable argument because you haven't been properly compensated as authors of the printed word are. If you received a dime for every snuffed-out star, would it then be acceptable?
Of course if you were to argue that downsizing the universe represents an intangible loss to humanity as a whole, we are have returned to ground zero in which it is ironic that exterminating trees provides a net benefit to humanity.
And people who say they don't almost always are roleplaying that they don't for the sake of argument and can be immediately exposed as holding a contradiction in their values with the most basic pressure/consistency tests.