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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

#681

Post by yipinwong »

The post reads like a propaganda. Evoking feeling over metrics or results

(e.g.

> but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

Who are you that you consider it a serious crime against humanity? What are you a saint?

> Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

Throughout human history, it's the knowledge/info that provide one with wealth and advantage over others.

With the author's logic, every single private knowledge the author is not sharing is an extremely serious crime against humanity.

The logic of the writing is not correct.

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

#682

Post by svachalek »

partiallypro wrote: post #73

The hysteria around AI and data centers has hit a precipice. It's actually a bit embarrassing now. I am pretty sure there are foreign adversaries that are trying to stop the US, but I also really blame the AI companies for doing the most horrendous job imaginable in pitching AI to the public. Not a shock that people are against something that tech bros have claimed will destroy everyone's lives in the next 5 years. T…

It's weird what happens when you keep warning everyone you're building a product that will probably end human civilization.

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

#683

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

n4r9 wrote: post #479
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…

A quick search suggests that most "weeded" books are sold on or donated rather than burnt or sent to landfill. Do you have sources that say otherwise?

Ours has a volunteer run used bookstore that sells a few for pennies on the dollar. Vast majority are shredded

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

#684

Post by allturtles »

ndiddy wrote: post #643
probably_wrong wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included. I therefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day…

At one point Google Books was supposed to act as a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. You could have purchased a scan of any book on the site for a reasonable price, and libraries could subscribe to a service where the full text of all books was available. This settlement then got shot down because some research libraries and authors argued that this was anti-competitive, and instead wanted Congress to pa…

Yes, this was a great tragedy. I was very sad to see academics at the time arguing against Google providing what would have been one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world, in favor of an imaginary alternative that didn't exist and never would.

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

#685

Post by [deleted] »

shagie wrote: post #676
toomuchtodo wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet Archive version: https://openlibrary.org/ Info on where to send books not yet in their collection: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat... Mobile apps to determine if they need a book: https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a... Web app: https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book For example, I donated a copy of Systems Bible (out of print, hard to find imho) and…

As an aside... https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Systems_Bible/mrOsb... (and I haven't hit any "you can't read this" limits yet). While the hard copy is a bit pricy for my shelf of curious books, it's also available on kindle. https://www.amazon.com/SYSTEMANTICS-SYSTEMS-BIBLE-John-Gall-...

[deleted]

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

#686

Post by tingletech »

Mudbugs wrote: post #561
smallerize wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you're appealing to librarians: "Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on. Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...." https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...

I don't get the point of this one. We not talking about "retiring books", we talking about "rare but still fine books". I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.

I don't know what Liberia has to do with it.

Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.

The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.

If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.

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

#687

Post by brainwad »

JohnFen wrote: post #623
brainwad wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.

> Let us not forget they own the books. That's rather beside the point. I don't think anyone is arguing that what they're doing is in some way illegal. > no modern book I'm less concerned about modern books.

All the books being destroyed are modern enough to have deposited copies, or they wouldn't be still under copyright. The destruction is happening to satisfy judges that no illegal copying is happening, only a transformation of medium.

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

#688

Post by alightsoul »

yipinwong wrote: post #681

The post reads like a propaganda. Evoking feeling over metrics or results ( e.g. > but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity. Who are you that you consider it a serious crime against humanity? What are you a saint? > Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers. Throughout human history, it's the knowledge/info that provide one with wealth and advantage over others. With the author's…

Isn't this what Dario does?

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

#690

Post by kasey_junk »

runarberg wrote: post #574
dukeyukey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?

Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying. If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to fin…

This is not what most public libraries do with donation books. They mostly just recycle them.

The very act of cataloging donation books takes a huge amount of resources that the collection managers don’t have.

Many public libraries don’t have a collection management department at all! They outsource that function entirely to vendors and those vendors mostly source new books and spend resources preparing them for the hard use of a library (changing bindings, uploading and cleaning metadata, tagging, etc).

Decommissioning is done by volunteers who just look at the condition of books and chuck the bad looking ones in a bin for recycling.

My wife worked in this industry on the vendor side, your model of public libraries is closer to a small subset of certain big city libraries narrowed to their rare and research departments. The median book bought by a library is a Danielle Steele romance novel packaged for library consumption and sent to a small town library system that will be lucky to have a single professional librarian for the whole system.

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