AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late • Hacker News Board

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

#631

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

guax wrote: post #167

skeledrew wrote: post #163

Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set. I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be…

I think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people. If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential. I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.

It's destroying books that angers people in general.

Never mind that it's the 200th copy of some 1950's romance novel that nobody will ever care about, every time a library prunes its collection there is outrage.

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

#632

Post by ionwake » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #618

ionwake wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bro if people on HN of all places are concerned of physical media being destroyed boggles ur mind then u need to read more about the damage caused to society by prior happenings. I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion. IE, lets destroy this w…

Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.

Thank you for your reply and request for clarification.

Yes destroying a book is in my opinion identical to a book burning.

One day there will be no hard copies, the digital books are hence vulnerable to patches, whether its due to a new political movement or a sudo abled hamster running on a keyboard... and if that occurs information will be permanently lost.

I would have thought a HN user understand well the importance of backups.

I dont want to sound mean, perhaps you also support keeping some hard copies as backups, but Im just explaining my concern.

To be honest I think everything I am saying is just common sense, I was just making a joke earlier about the architects deciding to do this because they had a bad tuesday.

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

#633

Post by areoform » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

Mudbugs wrote: post #428

hypendev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books ins…

    > The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today

If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.

We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.

And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?

What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?

What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?

Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)

Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.

    > Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

    > The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-kill_shelter

re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,

https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval

And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.

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

#634

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

impossiblefork wrote: post #281

skeledrew wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they buy the books then if they can't do what they want with them? Just leave them wherever they are to rot and eventually be unceremoniously dumped anyway, without being preserved in any form. Some things are just unavoidable.

In order to read them, presumably. Just because they are for sale doesn't mean that no one else would have bought them. Destroying them obviously destroys them, which obviously destroys culture. After all, if the books is destroyed, it will not be read. Think of it like this. If I buy an island, and there are bunch of people who live on it, maybe they're day laborers or whatever, is it right for me to expel them, if…

> Destroying them obviously destroys them

You're ignoring that they're also scanning them. Which means that we're one copyright law change + some minor incentives away from making these archives actually useful, vs. the book silently getting destroyed in the bookshop's dumpster because nobody bought it.

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

#635

Post by cyberrock » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

Looking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?

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

#636

Post by freejazz » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #570

freejazz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's true, then why did they pirate so many books?

Because they hadn't been sued for pirating so many books yet.

Well its not like copyright was invented last year...

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

#637

Post by RaffaelCH » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

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…

From what I understand, to work with copyrighted books they need to essentially format shift (i.e., scan and destroy the physical book). So a book vault would not solve this issue.

A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's not worth it.

At this point my only hope is that in the long run these scans make it to the public somehow (leaks, copyright changes/expiration, whatever), where they can then be accessed and preserved by everybody. Then we could have our true digital library of Alexandria.

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

#638

Post by mmaunder » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

At the risk of angering the zeitgeist, destroying one or two or ten paper copies doesn’t make AI companies “become the only ones in the world with digital copies.”.

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

#639

Post by nmz » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #510

WarmWash wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing. The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

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.

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

#640

Post by p0w3n3d » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #585

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…

Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included. I therefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day…

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

Big companies will read up the books and make their AI recite them from memory, but Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent)