A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

The other day I watched a news clip from somewhere in Chicago, around 3 dumpsters full of books and learning materials.

Apparently, a chain of charter schools had been merged into a public Unified School District (elementary). So when this branch of the school closed for the summer, officials went through their inventory and storage, and trashed a lot of stuff. Especially textbooks and novels that were deemed unfit by the new cirriculum they were adopting. There were other materials, including unused and still-wrapped items, markers, pens, etc.

And an informal council of neighborhood women had gathered to weep and wail and bemoan the loss of all these precious materials. They were jumping in and sifting through the treasures of the dumpsters, trying to "rescue" as much as they could (this is dubious in legality, as the trash of a place does remain as its private property, and they may have been trespassing to do it.)

And the news was so sympathetic about this tragic loss. But I have no sympathy for this. School materials are quickly outdated. The onward march of curriculum revisions demands that there is waste. No textbook lasts more than a few years, or even more than a semester in colleges, for sure. Also, here is a big point: storage costs. A school or any institution cannot afford to store worthless items or keep them around beyond their useful life. Storage space must be reclaimed. Furthermore, if you're sifting through unusuable stuff and you're on the clock, you may not have time to re-home donations and sell the good stuff. You just toss it and get on with business.

And these women didn't seem to comprehend the ongoing costs of storing outdated stuff, and they were berating these schools for discarding good stuff, and crying injustice.

And I think that intellectuals today worship books. The books are their gods and the libraries are their temples. And they are unduly outraged about damage to their poor, precious books, and they don't care what subject they are. Some of these rare books, folks, are software manuals that are 30 years old. Some of the rare books that AI ingests are also these outdated textbooks that nobody could use.

So here is my attitude: most used-book stores today with a storefront are essentially hoarders with a business plan. They get a cat or two, they unleash their personal book-hoard onto commercial property, and then they struggle to keep their litterboxes empty and their doors open, because nobody wants books anymore.

The disconnect here is that plenty of people are willing to cry injustice about destroying books, but are they willing to store them, curate a collection, catalog the books, read the books and share the books with others? I know that I am not. I converted to an electronic collection and I will not look back. I think others need to come to terms with that. It's not your books.

Any bookstore receiving an order for 5,000 books needs to shut up, take the money, ship the books, and laugh all the way to the bank.

> “None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” German booksellers are not convinced. They are sure, based on the vast orders, that the process is happening anyway via third-party service providers.

There are non-destructive automated scanners.

yea have seen many books just recycled because of lack of space. scanning would at least preserve them before their ultimate fate

Why would any company keep evidence of their illegal operations after the deed was done? I'm baffled that you are even considering such hypothetical scenario. None of the LLM corpos are paying the copyright owners even a cent for using their IP for profit. Of course they will shred any remaining scraps and hide or delete all digitized data in the deepest illegal offshore possible.