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AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

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Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#151

Post by userbinator »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #65

Google Books was a great resource until the lawyers got involved. I was able to find and download (one screenshot at a time) a rare family history. The author died 100 years ago. The published disappeared 80 years ago. But now Google has locked it behind a limited preview. Google probably has the best collection of high quality scans, followed by the Hathi Trust. None of which are useable by anyone outside of those s…

Does Anna's Archive have it now? They scrape tons of sources, Google Books and HathiTrust included.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#152

Post by ivell »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28
zmmmmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights. I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to for…

There is a whole legal saga here that is often misunderstood. Googling "Project Panama" should give more information. The legal ruling from Judge William Alsup declared that if AI companies purchased the books legally and then copied them to their servers, it was fair use as a "transformative" operation, but the originals had to be destroyed in that case, because then there was only one copy still in existence (the o…

Can they keep backup of the digital copy?

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#154

Post by imperfect_light »

tptacek wrote: post #31

These stories are weird, because actual professional specialized book dealers pulp books by the millions . People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Even if they were literally burning these books to spite you, they'd be destroying an infinitesimal fraction of the books the book trade already destroys. It is not natural in the industry to…

I don't know how it works today, but 20 years ago bookstores wouldn't return unsold books (too expensive to ship) but would simply tear the covers off and throw them in the garbage.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#155

Post by Ekaros »

scarmig wrote: post #146
soperj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're buying the books from resellers, not rescuing these books from dumpsters. Stop being an apologist.

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

And they should not even be needed. In many places the issue is solved at start. Copy or copies of each commercially produced book is send to national library. Which with tax payer money keeps an archive. Meaning that at least one copy exist for research purposes if needed.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#156

Post by customguy »

fenomas wrote: post #102
tptacek wrote: post #31

These stories are weird, because actual professional specialized book dealers pulp books by the millions . People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Even if they were literally burning these books to spite you, they'd be destroying an infinitesimal fraction of the books the book trade already destroys. It is not natural in the industry to…

More and more I feel like anti-AI is a bigger bubble than AI. It seems like every week it expands into a new dimension - anti-Flock protesters tearing down years-old traffic cameras that were used for research into auto accidents, etc. Like, the current thing in the news cycle is a poll that young people are now more worried than hopeful about AI. Which sounds scary, but my first thought is that one could find simila…

> my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction..

There are were polls about people being "more worried than hopeful" about satanic cults or alien abductions? With the youth being the most worried about satanic cults? Just like that knee-jerk "it's the bigger bubble", that makes zero sense.

As per the GDC 2026 State of the Industry poll, "52% said gen AI is bad for the industry, nearly double the 30% who held that view last year". But sure, everybody but HN, LinkedIn, and X bros are just luddites clutching pearls in their tiny bubble. They're the weak and stupid ones, and that is why the stupid shit said about them, day in and day out, isn't actually stupid. It all checks out.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#157

Post by red75prime »

asaddhamani wrote: post #125
scarmig wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one, it just goes to the trash. At least here it gets scanned by the AI company.

But that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.

...because it is illegal to copy copyrighted material. 70 years later they might do it.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#158

Post by soperj »

scarmig wrote: post #146
soperj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're buying the books from resellers, not rescuing these books from dumpsters. Stop being an apologist.

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

How many times can you post the same thing in a thread?

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#159

Post by ivell »

eru wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #31

These stories are weird, because actual professional specialized book dealers pulp books by the millions . People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Even if they were literally burning these books to spite you, they'd be destroying an infinitesimal fraction of the books the book trade already destroys. It is not natural in the industry to…

And the solution to the water issues can be found in any introductory textbook on the subject: a water price. > People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Please pardon the tangent: that's what always bothered me about the Borg in Star Trek. Why do they need to assimilate whole species? I'm sure there are enough volunteers in the federation…

Knowledge of every member of a species is better than few samples? LLM became better due to its huge dataset instead of just few samples.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#160

Post by Ekaros »

jacobo37 wrote: post #7
ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

Many of them don't have current publisher because no one wants to buy them. I would bet that vast majority of these books have no commercial market.
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