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

You understand that what you just said is true of almost every company in the United States... right?

Sorry, but I'm going to save my efforts for the people who are ACTUALLY doing bad things - not just the people who I don't like who MIGHT be doing bad things.

Otherwise it kinda seems hysterical. IMHO.

Again, you're assuming a lot about this situation that we don't actually know to be true. For example, that these purchases are limited to "bargain bin" books that have essentially no market value. These may be cases we know about, that doesn't mean these are the only purchase happening. I would hypothesize that if we know about a few specific purchases there are probably many more we do not know about/haven't traced back to these companies.

You realize "market value" isn't the only kind of value too, right? Even books that are completely obsolete can have inherent historical value insofar as they enrich our understanding of the past and how human beings used to live. Contemporary market value isn't everything. There are plenty of works of scholarly interest that wouldn't command nearly requisite value to a NYT bestseller when you adjust for scale. That doesn't mean these books aren't worth keeping or aren't intellectually important.

Also, these books presumably even have some perceived value, otherwise these companies wouldn't think they were relevant for training, and wouldn't be spending money to purchase and scan them in the first place. The whole premise is that these books are valuable enough such that training on them will make the models valuable and make paying customers line up for tokens. This is an inherent imputation of value to these works on the part of these companies. You can't say, simultaneously "these books are worthless" yet somehow, at the same time, "they are worth something for producing artificial intelligence". Your assumptions don't make any sense.

> They're books that are no longer in print. Doesn't mean there aren't a lot of copies around.

Sure, but there also could be limited copies around. We don't know. We won't know unless these companies are more transparent about exactly what they are buying and scanning. It's that simple. If it's foolish to assume there might be limited copies, it's equally foolish to assume they have plentiful copies. We simply don't know.

> Nobody has an obligation to spend money to preserve every extant copy of every book forever.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. People are bothered because they (in my mind, rightly) recognize that old books are a historical record of human accomplishment and have some amount of cultural value. Letting a handful of companies further plunder the collective output of humanity and now, potentially keep it locked on their servers in perpetuity is something that should make you upset if you have any inkling of interest in the history of humanity or human accomplishment and if you have any sliver of curiosity about these things. If all you care about is the present and getting better LLMs, sure, I guess I understand why you don't care, but then I also think you are very unwise and myopic.

> Millions of books are destroyed everyday.

So what? Millions of crimes are committed every day, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be bothered by the crimes we hear about. Billions of pollutants are spewed into the environment every day. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to combat pollution. That's a pathetic attempt at justification. Also, there are clear distinctions between processes like libraries removing works they can no longer store and companies scooping up books for training and personal gain.

> Are you aware that the publishing industry itself has destroyed more than 500X as many books as Anthropic ever will?

I'm not sure why everyone on hacker news so often falls for the "my friends are jumping off the bridge, so I can too" fallacy. Not to mention, there are clear differences between the processes under consideration, which might bother you, even if the outcome is the same. No, I don't care that publishers destroy books because usually they only do that when the book has proven to fail to sell (not the case here, clearly, since the books were sold!) and out of necessity because of resource constraints and not because they are using them to build a proprietary alternative product they plan on charging me for. I don't understand why people are engaging is such shoddy, shallow thinking here.

I think the difference in our viewpoints ultimately lies in our faith in the companies involved. I have little to no faith that the digital scans of these texts will make it out to the public based on historical behavior of companies and the current legal complications around copyright. As such, I find it grossly unfair for several companies, which have significantly more economic and logistical resources than interested individual buyers, to systematically purchase rare works and thereby prevent individuals from accessing those works, possibly in perpetuity. The point is that even if they were to eventually release these, they are effectively, as of now, as of my lifetime, no longer available. Again, we have little information on the specifics, but it's the principle of the matter, the gross asymmetry here, that bothers me. It's all worsened by the fact that they are doing this so that they can use a commodity which you could have paid for once to train a new utility, tokens, that they want to charge you for on a metered basis.

If I understand you, you seem to be more confident that they might eventually release the works, or you are less bothered by the power asymmetries here. I actually do hope you turn out to be correct, and they find a way to release the material, or at least tell us what they bought. However, I doubt this will happen.

I hope you have a good day too! Thanks for sharing your perspective on the matter.

These books are specific requests. They are sent in lists to booksellers. The booksellers are rejecting some of the rare books in the lists. Many of them are nonfiction books produced before 1990. They are clearly identified requests for specific items. They are not random. Many of them have ISBNS https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/17/nz-bookstores-receive-bul... it is not we are jumping off the bridge. It is we are asking for specific to buy so we can them into LLMs. Some of them are rare and they are being destroyed. The booksellers object to this because many of them believe it is their job to preserve old and rare books. It is not hard if you have a list of items and you know exactly what you want to differentiate between items that should be scanned and items that are mass produced and are readily available. This is a consistent pattern over many months very specific requests for ingestion. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/10/wellington-second-hand-bo... This indicates the companies requesting them know exactly what they are looking for and probably have done some research on the books in question. It creates a further issue, when the rare books are ingested, and the books are hard to acquire or get, they are limited to existing inside artificial intelligence. This gives an advantage to control of information by the companies that have ingested them.

There was no judgment against them, it was a settlement and against only Anthropic. They asked their attorneys and they knew it was wrong. I have no sympathy for them.

It's an insane kind of hubris to do what they did, thinking it would change the world, and that no one would notice what they did. So I don't even really agree with your characterization, as they were convinced what they were doing was a risk worth taking, on the assumption it would be successful.