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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

#941

Post by Bluestein »

I have been doing some thinking about this, and, am trying to combat (within) the knee-jerk repulsion that book destruction causes.-

From what I understand, these, far from rare - though "rare" might get swept along given a sufficiently long tail - are average to obscure books that would otherwise be "gathering dust" on shelves somewhere.-

From that point of view, I wonder:

- Even if under a "walled garden", would it not be more efficient to have the knowledge represented by the book more widely available (of sorts) even if masticated by an LLM, rather than on a shelf somewhere?

- Libraries and other pros routinely destroy books: They take up space on a shelf and they are expensive to keep around, so this might be far from uncommon.-

I guess the objection here is to the "privatization" of a "commons" (the mass of printed books), modulo all the unknowns that the destination technology itself (AI) brings with it.-

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

#942

Post by ezfe »

jscd wrote: post #115
ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense? Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way? Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.

> Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

digitize: no, there's no burden to do this

freely distribute: no, there's no burden to do this

use it or lose it on the copyright: yes; if a work is copyright but a publisher doesn't want to make new copies because they won't make money on it then it should be free to copy

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

#943

Post by qarl2 »

cube00 wrote: post #748
qarl2 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Given all the bad PR Companies are immune to bad PR in this fast news cycle. Everyone has already moved on to the next injustice in less then 24 hours. Surprisingly you'll even get downvoted for "living in the past" if you attempt to bring it up later.

Target.

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

#944

Post by quietsegfault »

etdznots wrote: post #919
quietsegfault wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

> Is there evidence that these mythical low-print-run books are being purchased by Amazon and friends for destructive scanning? Is there evidence that they aren’t? All of the common works are already on libgen, if these books are worthless repetition they will contribute little to the training corpus, labs want high quality interesting texts and they have unlimited budget to spend on it. Paying $300 for something rar…

we're done - straight to genocide, later buddy.

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

#945

Post by stbede »

avidiax wrote: post #821
shagie wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a photographer, do I have to make every photograph that I've ever sold available to anyone to buy forever more? Can I refuse to sell a print to someone? I wasn't famous when I sold one for $20 back in the 90s... if I became famous, would I still need to sell that at $20 (inflation adjusted)? What happens to limited editions of print runs? Can I not make a run of 200 prints anymore because the 201st will be somethi…

Under my proposal, if someone wants to make prints of one of your old photographs, you are getting ~$20, which is ~$20 more than you are getting now. So it doesn't seem like a damage to you. If you get famous and now you could sell a print for $2,000... how is this helping society since the work has already been produced, so no new incentive is necessary? I suppose the rule could make reference to a rival good, i.e.…

In the hypothetical, when he becomes famous, someone making prints for $20 is $1,980 less than what he would be getting now so the damage is $1,980 per print. Both the purchasers of the print and the photographer are part of society. Under your proposal, some purchasers will spends $20 on a print that they would of have been willing to spend more than $2000 for, so the purchaser gained at least $1980 of excess value while the photographer gains $20. In your view, how is a purchaser of art gaining $1980 of value helping society?

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

#946

Post by ktm5j »

jhbadger wrote: post #927
ktm5j wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're a lawyer and a librarian now? If a library really won't take the books for whatever reason you're imagining, I'm sure there are other organizations that would.

Not really. Nobody has the space. Libraries, public, university, and private regularly "weed" their collections for things they view as outdated or just unpopular. If they didn't, they'd have no space for new books.

Do you really think AI companies are seeking out outdated/unpopular books to train their models on?

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

#947

Post by ktm5j »

shagie wrote: post #932
ktm5j wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're a lawyer and a librarian now? If a library really won't take the books for whatever reason you're imagining, I'm sure there are other organizations that would.

I believe you are referring to "The question for an AI company that can't return, sell, or donate the material after it has been scanned - are they then to pay to store it in a warehouse indefinitely?" and that you're arguing that a library could accept a donation. From Bartz v. Anthropic which was mostly about the pirated copies, but included some information about the destructive scanning, format shifting, and use…

Calling a book pirated is a legal issue. If the courts bless the idea of AI companies donating the books then there is no legal issue, and I wrong? The point of my last comment is that I don't think either of us are qualified to act like we have all the answers here.

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

#948

Post by shagie »

ktm5j wrote: post #946
jhbadger wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Nobody has the space. Libraries, public, university, and private regularly "weed" their collections for things they view as outdated or just unpopular. If they didn't, they'd have no space for new books.

Do you really think AI companies are seeking out outdated/unpopular books to train their models on?

Yes.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...

NPR's Juana Summers speaks with 404 Media cofounder and reporter Emanuel Maiberg about his investigation into a shipment of rare books which ended up at an Amazon AI training warehouse.

...

MAIBERG: So I think people obviously have a very negative reaction to anyone destroying books in large quantities. I think people hear the term rare book, and they're imagining a first edition of "Oliver Twist."

SUMMERS: Right. Yeah.

MAIBERG: Or something like this. That is not the case. A rare book is most likely a book that was never printed in large quantities because it is about a niche subject. It is what is called vanity publishing, where someone self-publishes a book. It's an instruction manual for a product that's no longer available. It's really things like this that people at the moment don't really care about. They don't have high emotional value. But we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future.

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

#949

Post by parineum »

freejazz wrote: post #930
parineum wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They was a really good chance they wouldn't have gotten caught before when LLMs were less successful. It was their success that got them caught. Now, if they continued pirating, they'd definitely get caught and the judgements against them would reflect their repeated transgressions.

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 tak…

You're making a lot more assumptions on the inner workings of other people's minds than I am.

I lot of startups do a lot of shady things before they get big because most of them just flounder out. The ones that make it just deal with those problems later. Then, if they make it, they deal with those problems later. Look at Uber, AirBnB, all of these scooter companies, etc. They all just do the thing and deal with it later. "Move fast and break things" includes laws.

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

#950

Post by ktm5j »

shagie wrote: post #948
ktm5j wrote: post #946

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think AI companies are seeking out outdated/unpopular books to train their models on?

Yes. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan... NPR's Juana Summers speaks with 404 Media cofounder and reporter Emanuel Maiberg about his investigation into a shipment of rare books which ended up at an Amazon AI training warehouse. ... MAIBERG: So I think people obviously have a very negative reaction to anyone destroying books in large quantities. I think people hear the term rare book, and th…

I'm so glad we have you and your googling skills to assure us that this is nothing to worry about.
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