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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

#841

Post by merely-unlikely »

pfdietz wrote: post #600
Goronmon wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. What happens when the books don't sell?

Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.

Is that intended as an implicit threat - buy or we trash?

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

#842

Post by merely-unlikely »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #580
brookst wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s the hyperbolic reaction clickbait wants from you. Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria. Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled. Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often g…

If they have no value why are they being acquired and scanned?

A flagship LLM today is trained on tens of trillions of tokens, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of 100k word books. No human has that kind of appetite.

As an aside, the entire Google Books corpus is generally estimated at tens of millions of books.

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

#843

Post by merely-unlikely »

toast0 wrote: post #662
brainwad wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Library of Congress already has a copy of every book published in the US. How would this help?

If the Library of Congress has a digital copy, it would be easier for them to distribute the work after the copyright of the work expires. That would be a public benefit.

In theory the Library of Congress could "lend out" digital copies like some library systems do. This would be especially helpful for rare books since it is less likely multiple people would want the same book concurrently.

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

#844

Post by merely-unlikely »

Filligree wrote: post #324
smalltorch wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely they have the high quality scans, but there would probably be the same legal restrictions to just share the archive.

Obviously. Copyright infringement is settled law.

Copyright infringement has a long and deep bank of caselaw but as Anthropic has already discovered, it is not entirely "settled."

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

#845

Post by theshrike79 »

tentacleuno wrote: post #835
theshrike79 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So trashed, but with a bunch of extra steps then?

I would presume that the extra steps incrementally diminish the possibility of the book remaining unsold, and thus destroyed or sent elsewhere.

And it also adds costs in every step. Someone needs to move thousands of unwanted books from high end stores to lower and lower end stores. Someone needs to store them in the proper environment etc.

I do get the _idea_ of preserving books, but... people don't care. I just threw out well over a thousand books from my grandparents house this spring.

There were ~6-10 "valuable" books there. Two because I personally knew someone who wanted old war-time books and a few 100+ year old bibles. And maybe two dozen books worth saving, mostly because they were from big-name authors or had stuff that nobody would print anymore (I have detailed instructions how to make laughing gas and how to build an underground chemical lab - hobby books in the 50s were ... interesting :D )

I literally couldn't give away the rest. And I tried. It was all just "interesting, but..." - no way to justify using the shelf space for books that, realistically, nobody will actually ever read again.

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

#846

Post by chefandy »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #743
chefandy wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, No, it’s not. Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost, which is a fucking tragedy because they don’t have to be. Even if you’re not willing to take the time to scan every page in a cradle scanner, as rare books should be, (and don’t…

> Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost I understand what you mean but... "permanently lost" sounds dramatic. When I trow away old pictures, old drawings or pieces made by my son at school, they are lost as well. Not that I do that often, but it begs the question, should every 'ip' made by humans be…

It sounds dramatic because it’s dramatic. You’re combining two things — whether something is, in fact, completely lost, and if it is something that should be kept. Something that should not be kept is still completely lost if it’s destroyed. It’s difficult to imagine they’d digitize it if it was worthless.

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

#847

Post by merely-unlikely »

jdiff wrote: post #352
flatline wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cannot scan the books then resell them or donate them under current US copyright law. It’s not clear to me that they could warehouse them if they wanted. In the recent Bartz v Anthropic case the judge ruled this destruction as legal, saying > The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal…

Nowhere in this description did it require destruction of the physical book. This is being done because it's easier to scan a shucked book, and this explanation is circulating because it's easier to blame it on the law and that pesky meddling government.

"Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others)."

"For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.

The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital."

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007 (N.D. Cal. 2025). https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

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

#848

Post by merely-unlikely »

silverwind wrote: post #338
mbeavitt wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.

More importantly: Once Anthropic is gone, all knowlege is lost.

It's already been distilled.

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

#849

Post by jujube3 »

ktm5j wrote: post #801
shagie wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it isn't scanned destructively, is it a liability? Can you do anything else with the book? What are its costs for storage in a way that retains the value of the book? If the assets of the warehouse are sold to another company (see also https://paizo.com/blog/paizo-restructuring-a-difficult-updat... ), what are your obligations for the format shifted copy that you retain? These questions imply that there's a liabil…

Questions don't imply anything, you're just asking things. I don't have the answers to your questions, but the point is that Google was able to scan books without destroying them while still avoiding legal consequences (with some effort).

The answer to his question is "yes." If the book isn't destroyed, it becomes a liability to Anthropic, because then it's no longer format-shifting.

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

#850

Post by merely-unlikely »

odyssey7 wrote: post #624

Big AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public. Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those. Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies. Maybe the…

Anthropic wasn't explicitly told to destroy the physical copies, but it weighed heavily in their favor.

"Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others)."

"For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.

The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital."

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007 (N.D. Cal. 2025). https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

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