Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

annas-archive.gl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 961 posts

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

#731

Post by dblohm7 »

titzer wrote: post #508
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.

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

They never should have been trusted in the first place.

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

#732

Post by jimmaswell »

al_borland wrote: post #531
nazgulsenpai wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?

They could use them as training data, without providing access the actual books.

At least we would all benefit from the books this way, so long as legal nonsense keeps the scans unavailable to the public.

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

#733

Post by qarl2 »

NishanStepak wrote: post #725

Nondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on…

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter.

I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

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

#734

Post by p-e-w »

nmz wrote: post #639
p-e-w wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.

I can’t believe that in the multipolar world of 2026, where hundreds of conflicting world views coexist, where universalism is being disproven on a daily basis, it’s still possible to read things like “there is agreement on what the right thing is”.

This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.

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

#735

Post by mo1333 »

tescreal wrote: post #659

A few points for people: 1. some books are out of print. 2. some books CANNOT return to print. 3. all books prior to the 21st century are products of human minds. 4. copyright extends over the vast majority of printed material due to acceleration of literacy and printing access. 5. not all people value all books equally. 6. most books have a degree of historical interest (even cookbooks, which can say a lot about the…

[dead]

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

#736

Post by thth123123 »

rcarr wrote: post #611

Does adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head: - Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information. - Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose. You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it doe…

[dead]

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

#737

Post by tptacek »

runarberg wrote: post #710
tptacek wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously that's not true. Newark is literally telling people to talk all their old rare books to thrift stores, which will immediately throw them in dumpsters.

This is a bad comparison. Public libraries are trying their best to preserve rare copies, despite being overwhelmed and underfunded. If they come across a rare copy chances are it will be preserved. When an AI company comes across a rare book, it will not recognize it as such. There is also a fundamental difference in intention. AI companies are seeking out old books and will destroy them. Public libraries are trying…

What comparison? I'm talking about libraries as they actually exist and you're talking about what you think libraries should be doing. I'm arguing positively, and you're arguing normatively.

I'm not "anti-academic". I'm just very involved in my local community and I read the annual reports from our library system. We accept book donations, like a lot of suburban library systems do (from our extremely book-y community), and we are open about the fact that most of those books get trashed. We do not have the personnel on staff you claim libraries generally do.

I would say that between the two of us, I'm the one arguing more respectfully about libraries. I see them as real institutions with real pressures and constraints that do an important public service, and you see them as an instrumentality in your argument against AI.

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

#738

Post by vin047 »

hypendev wrote: post #367
ziyadb wrote: post #299

I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are t…

>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…

>it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge

This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity.

I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.

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

#739

Post by b112 »

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…

If you read the judgement against (I think) openai, the judge said that it was OK to scan the books for LLMs, if they were destroyed afterwards. That is, only one copy of the data existed.

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

#740

Post by akudha »

qarl2 wrote: post #733
NishanStepak wrote: post #725

Nondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on…

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter. I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

Amazon has been getting bad press for years now - union busting shenanigans, poor working conditions, low quality products, customer reviews being gamed etc. Why would they care? Unless bad press directly and measurably affects their bottom line, they wouldn't care. Just this week there was news about a massive datacenter they are planning whose power generators would become single biggest polluter in the country, if it gets built.

If they ever cared enough about bad PR, they have much bigger items to think about, like the proposed data center. Rare books probably wouldn't even make it their top 5 bad-press list

Post reply on HN