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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

#501

Post by famouswaffles »

dbspin wrote: post #443
mistercow wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most old books that are rare and unpreserved are so because their value is marginal, so nobody has bothered to collect and preserve them. But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end?

This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable. To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - w…

>Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.

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

#503

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

Mudbugs wrote: post #428
hypendev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. How tho? Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take t…

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books ins…

They should be happy to have a job at all in the Republic of Liberia.

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

#504

Post by eloisant »

fortran77 wrote: post #467
starkd wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.

They are destroying them because it’s easier to scan them if you slice the binding.

I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.

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

#505

Post by dataflow »

wmeredith wrote: post #388
dataflow wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you see they tend to buy all the copies? This comment is the first time I've heard of this.

I'd also be curious about the provenance of that statement. Why would they buy all copies? What would be the purpose of scanning multiple copies?

I could see buying multiple copies being useful to mitigate problems, like damage.

But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text?

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

#506

Post by sergimansilla »

starkd wrote: post #404
hypendev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. How tho? Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take t…

Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.

No, they are destroying them because that’s the way that they can keep a digital copy legally.

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

#507

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #473
embedding-shape wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do they have to do this at all? If it's a shit idea, and you cannot do something without negative side-effects of it, can't you just not do it? Why these companies absolutely have to do this?

What's shit about it ? They're buying books that would be headed for the pump or trash heap anyway. Millions of books are trashed or pulped every day .

[deleted]

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

#508

Post by titzer »

thread_id wrote: post #494

I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from a…

Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space.

It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.

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

#509

Post by thuuuomas »

Is there any evidence the books are truly "destroyed" & not merely "disassembled"?

It's common practice to cut the spine & binding off a book, scan the loose pages, & drop the rubber-banded loose pages in a box somewhere. The book still exists, just without its binding.

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

#510

Post by p-e-w »

WarmWash wrote: post #448
Mudbugs wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books ins…

I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing. The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.

The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.

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