Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”

  • Atomic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    22·
    2 days ago

    Buddy, how many books do you think are written every year?

    If you started today. And did nothing but read until you died. You would not even have finished all the new books that were published last year.

    Point being. There’s an enourmous amount of books printed every year. Most of them doesnt sell very well. So they are sent back to the publisher. And the publisher does not have room to keep every copy. So they’re destroyed. Maybe recycled into other paper products, maybe burned for energy. Regardless. What AI companies are buying is but a drop in the ocean.

    And it has nothing to do with people “not reading”

    • Jax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      It has everything to do with not reading you muppet, any literate person understands that you don’t need to destroy a book in order to gain the information from it. A child could understand that there’s no reason to destroy the books other than laziness or malice.

      My god, tech people need to be beaten regularly.

      • Atomic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        To scan every page manually is going to take hours. Where as if you remove the spine and separate the pages, you can feed it automatically in minutes.

        And since they want to process hundreds of thousands of books… well, you’re literate so in sure you can do the math.

        They’re just books… And again. For the fifth time probably, publishers destroy more unsold books than these companies. And have been doing so for the past 50 years.

        No one seems to care publishers destroy old unsold books. But as soon as it’s AI companies then all of a sudden it’s a crime against humanity.

        • Jax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11·
          1 day ago

          Publishers aren’t going out to old bookstores to buy up their old books to destroy.

          Every argument you’ve made is halfbaked at best, tell me - what’s the longest time something can be stored in a computers memory?

          Now what’s the longest time a book can stay intact?

          Yeah, you know the answer - shut the fuck up now.

          • Atomic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            No, publishers don’t go to the stores. The stores send the books back to the publisher.

            What are my arguments? Can you even tell me?

            Because what I’ve said. Is that we already do destroys millions of unsold books. And the various filings, rapports, inquiries, and fucking weather data, isn’t sold at bookstores to begin with. So the risk of those being bought and destroyed are zero.

            So… you have not cared one bit, that publishers destroy unsold books for well over 50 years. But when these companies do it, it’s somehow terrible.