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https://SourceLibrary.org has about 16,000 rare books translated — most for the first time. 50,000 books archived (will be translated when we have $$ for it). More tokens than English Wikipedia and about .75 petabytes. Not sure if we will qualify for a bounty, but happy to share! Btw, we are looking for funding from small or large donors who want to help us translate the Renaissance…
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https://send.djazz.se/ This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.
Thanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here. I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.
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>the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out. Most of the best literature in the English language was written before modern IP law was even a thing. There's very little good literature written by authors primarily motivated by money.
How much of that literature was written by wealthy landowners who already had little need for money?
I can only think of one writer off hand who wasn’t a wealthy landowner, although it is a particularly notable example; that of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wasn’t poor (his parents seem to be of upper middle class standing), he was able to get a basic (but not a university) education and then pursue an acting career (with perhaps a side hustle as a teacher). Whatever the case he certainly wasn’t independently wealthy before he started writing, he needed to earn a living.
He did seem to be in it for the money (and fame) since he wasn’t just a writer he was an actor, theatre owner, and something of a celebrity, and he did make enough money to become a wealthy landowner by the time he died.
So AA is a front for openai?
No, but they openly make a lot of money from selling their library to AI companies. Fast enterprise access to Anna's Archive starts at $100.000
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That’s misunderstanding why these models are behind. A large part of why they’re behind is they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps that takes a pre-trained model and turns it into a frontier model like GPT 5 or Opus. Instead they do their best to recreate these models using distillation. Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not adva…
> you can never distill your way to being the teacher Are you sure? What if you distill from 10 teachers?
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No, but they openly make a lot of money from selling their library to AI companies. Fast enterprise access to Anna's Archive starts at $100.000
A lot? I would be kind of interested if there were any known figures. Do companies want to be implicated in AA-cooperation in any capacity?
Who is behind Annas archive, there is a lot of english speakers involved in the team and forums! Anyway as long as buying isn´t owning no issues here.
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> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect. Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a…
Can you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.
(Archiving culture alone is not the same as also enabling universal access to the culture and knowledge one is acting as custodian for and serving to global citizens)
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - September 2024 (793 comments)
https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation
Totally unrelated: Dweb camp 2026 is coming up for those interested: https://dwebcamp.org/
(no affiliation with any person or entity mentioned in this comment)