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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

#691

Post by alightsoul »

Mudbugs wrote: post #542
n4r9 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning). It is pretty standard procedure.

The difference everyone is missing, is that now there is commercial incentive to burn books aka destroy them after scanning. It's now a profitable business to do so, not something that only has to be done to clear up space

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

#692

Post by chungusamongus »

jacekm wrote: post #660
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…

> The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome I don't think they were overcome. As far as I remember Google couldn't make the books available so they abandoned the project. They possess the scans (if they didn't delete them) but they won't be made public.

IIRC the courts ruled that because it would be implausibe for a person to use google books previews to read an entire work (you'd have to make a whole bunch of separate accounts to do so), it could not plausibly impact the market for that work.

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

#693

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#694

Post by alightsoul »

mjdv wrote: post #513
chrisjj wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned But unreadable by humans, right?

They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.

That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.

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

#695

Post by tingletech »

beering wrote: post #552
sergimansilla wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is not true. Google Books does not destroy books. No court has ruled that you must destroy books to legally keep a digital copy.

I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.

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

#696

Post by michaelsbradley »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #663
michaelsbradley wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the point being made about “historical precedent” and the lessons to be drawn from such. Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.

My take was generally: the loss of Alexandria's collection represents a calamitous loss to our collective culture. (But my knowledge of Alexandria extends only to episodes of "COSMOS" and "Connections").

It's a fair point. I honed in on "the burning of" (original comment) versus more generally thinking in terms of "the loss of", because parent context here is "AI companies destroy…".

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

#697

Post by waffletower »

This reads as bad propaganda. Surprised that they left the "translated from Chinese" disclaimer. There is the false implication here that the AI companies are somehow tracking down all copies of a particular book and destroying it. AI has spawned a global freak-out.

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

#698

Post by alightsoul »

shagie wrote: post #572
andsoitis wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism. Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.

While not an authoritative source... https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... (and not actual book titles) > Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We'…

That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit

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

#699

Post by runarberg »

svachalek wrote: post #672
frm88 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are…

Given no information, would you assume companies that are buying "huge quantities" of "rare" books are getting first edition Jules Verne by the crate, or 1989 Highlights magazines recovered from dentist offices?

Both. I think they are just buying whatever they can get their hands on most of it is going to be junk, but one in a million is going to be a rare and valuable book which we didn’t even know existed.

After scanning and destroying 10 million books, AI companies will have destroyed 10 such books.

(I am obviously assuming a Poisson distribution here where I pulled the parameter p = 1/1000000 out of thin air; point is p is non-zero; and at this scale the undesirable event is bound to happen a bunch of times).

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

#700

Post by fluoridation »

margalabargala wrote: post #652
fluoridation wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to use the Socratic method to show that the havingness of the book is a spectrum, and I'm taking the position of a hardliner who considers that "having the book" means having the original string of symbols from beginning to end, and anything besides that is not having the book. I'm trying to show you that your line of argumentation is uncompelling to such a person.

I was never using the Socratic method. I was asking rhetorical questions, and then gave the (my) answer at the end. We just have different opinions about what it means to have a book. I think that having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is more like having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice", than having no book at all is like having a copy of that book. You disagree and that's fine.

Asking rhetorical questions as a form of argumentation is the Socratic method.
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