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Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
No, the core problem is that keeping a scan is legal if and only if you destroy the physical copy.
It would have made more sense for them to be required to store, maintain, and never sell the original.
What if taking the first picture of the Mona Lisa required it to be destroyed?
This is probably coming from the music/film industry lobbying. They are generating artificial scarcity. Not unlike the diamond industry.
The actual problem is that copyright lasts too long. Imagine if copyright was only 13 years. There's obviously no need to destroy anything that's out of copyright. Anything newer than 13 years should either still be in print, or the original author consciously decided to take it out of print, as is their prerogative.
Book buyers will buy because they see other people reading that authors books (more copies in the world means more sales in this case), they will buy special editions of their favorite books they already own, they will buy copies of books that they intend to read once and give to a friend even when the library is a block away and has copies, they will pay extra to have a hardcover new release even though there are effectively infinite other books that could entertain them until the paperback is released. Rational economic choices are actually not a given at the consumer level.
I fully agree about copyright. As a wild example, unless jk Rowling dies in the next three years, Harry Potter will have US copyright that started in the 20th century, and extends into the 22nd century.
but nah they're destroying very rare, out of print books in the process.
then after - when you ask their stochastic parrot some fringe question it won't answer cz of 'safety'. when literally one could buy a book and find the answer.
Don’t be a Luddite for the sake of being “edgy.”
As an aside, a lot of old things like “Memphis guide” are useful to a variety of researchers.
Hopefully someone will leak these archives so at least the knowledge isn’t lost.
the article mentions it
https://annas-archive.gl/donate
I can also find decades' worth of quality books for prices that sometimes drop below $1 (though popular / rare books are frequently sold for more than their original asking price now, but inflation-adjusted, that is still a good deal, and much less than a new book). There is no reason to expect that just because something was just published recently that it is worth many multiples the cost of an older book. I will still buy new books to support authors I particularly like, but as prices keep going up, I find I am becoming more and more selective.
And finally, physical books do not spy on me or show me ads, or otherwise try to coerce me into an abusive relationship, like every other form of entertainment seems to attempt to do these days.
Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy. A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.
A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.
Could be the makings of a dark age.
I don't see how these companies are not already bankrupt given how much they subsidize
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-valuation-hin...
The whole point of investment in private companies is to subsidize u profitable operations. If companies came out the gate being profitable they wouldn’t need investors.
You are on a VC website at first place, what question is this?
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
Yeah, I emotionally felt a little upset because books are being destroyed and I don't like that. But rationally, this seems very much like a win-win.
The second hand bookstores are getting revenue that they otherwise wouldn't be which means they have an easier time staying in business. AI companies get their materials legally. And it possibly pushes a second publishing run which ultimately benefits authors.
I think the only way this is possibly "bad" is if a rare/hard to get book is destroyed from these ventures. That would be horrible. But I doubt that's very likely as there's almost no such thing as a rare book that AI trainers would be particularly interested in.
No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.
They are being bought by the pound and/or container.
It’s really a totally made up thing to be upset about, since it’s at least giving these books a chance at being archived somewhere and one last productive use.
Apparently many are surprised that libraries, thrift shops, used book stores, etc. destroy books by the ton every year. There is a small boutique industry that buys them in bulk, sorts through them to find books that still might have value, and discards the rest.
Yeah, a few rare and/or valuable titles will get mixed in. Just the law of large numbers. But no one actually wants to read that Programming Perl 1.0 book from the 90s anymore. They just like the idea of someone else paying for it to exist on a shelf somewhere. And someone else doing the curation to sort that 1 rare gem out of 15,000 titles just dropped off by the truckload from the local library system.
Yeah people (including me) tend to hoard books they buy and never toss them. All that does is force your estate to buy a larger dumpster when you die.
It's probably already been done. But if it hasn't, do it and upload it to a shadow library.
You can also check if Internet Archive has scanned it or has a copy in the scan queue.
Are you out there rescuing them?
Books get thrown in the trash every day. It may be offensive but then you should be collecting them I guess.
Books are lumps of cellulose carrying information. Destruction of excess copies is no more outrageous than discarding excess packets off the internet.
I don't think you know what that word means. But that aside, everybody is making a lot of assumptions about what books are being destroyed. Excess copies, outdated user manuals, etc etc. I'm sure there's some of that, but there's also probably lots of other books that are most certainly not that.
Anyone who isn't even a little concerned that millions of books are being blanket destroyed without any hint of concern about what those books are - they are just being blindly scanned and pulped by the truckload - is revealing themselves to be a bit soulless imo. There's really no other way to put it. Things have meaning outside the material. And I certainly don't trust these AI companies to have the best interests of humanity in mind when it comes to any of this. The fact that some or maybe even most of these books may be unworthy of preservation isn't the point. We don't know what's being blindly pulped. And neither do they. And neither do they care. There's just something gross about the whole thing.
even my small town in my not particularly environmentally-conscious country has had those boxes for paper recycling since the 90s. I personally dumped a metric ton of pristine condition books into them after my grandparents died, because I had neither space nor desire to store a cubic meter of that utterly obsolete medium.
there's nothing sacred about paper, just like there was nothing sacred about clay tablets and sheepskins it had replaced. a nail-sized SD card can hold more books than the largest libraries in the world. venerating paper and libraries, at this point, is an irrational fetish.
and contrary to what all these activist/ragebait articles attempt to convince the uncritical intellectual majority, it is astronomically unlikely that any of these destroyed books were the only ones in existence. they are copies. you could buy a truckload of copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, wipe your ass with each one and then burn them, and while that act could be spun into "Local Man Burns a Thousand Books, Just Like the Nazis Did", it wouldn't actually make any fucking difference, would it?
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
If there are only 25 copies and it's impossible to buy a new copy from the publisher, who's actually getting hurt if you "pirate" that book? How can anyone claim losses if they clearly don't want your money for a new copy.