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.”
Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
Then stop selling rare and out of print books to an AI company, you fucking doorknob.
Greed knows no bounds.
How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time
What’s the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?
Have you ever tried scanning a book? It’s a huge PITA.
They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.
Copyright. They mustn’t make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it’s okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that’s why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one’s charging you rent for using some data, then it’s “unethical”.
The Internet Archive absolutely does not destroy books. They scan them the hard way with the binding still intact.
I was misremembering. Google won the precedent, when they were suing over Google Books. IA had only 1 big lawsuit and were forced to settle. The non-destructive scanning is dicey.
