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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

#711

Post by 8note »

pfdietz wrote: post #610
himinlomax wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not destroying rare manuscripts or incunables. They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company. Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine. This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.

Nuclear killed itself (vast cost overruns); there was no need for hallucinated foreign influences. But I understand blaming your energy waifu for its own failure is unacceptable for nuclear bros.

nuclear was killed by russian nat gas money.

running nuclear plants were shut down while running just fine

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

#712

Post by margalabargala »

fluoridation wrote: post #700
margalabargala wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was never using the Socratic method. I was asking rhetorical questions, and then gave the (my) answer at the end. We just have different opinions about what it means to have a book. I think that having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is more like having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice", than having no book at all is like having a copy of that book. You disagree and that's fine.

Asking rhetorical questions as a form of argumentation is the Socratic method.

If one is using the Socratic method, rhetorical questions are one tool they might employ.

The reverse is not true. Just because someone asks a rhetorical question, does not mean they are using the Socratic method.

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

#713

Post by runarberg »

dukeyukey wrote: post #701
runarberg wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying. If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to fin…

Rare and valuable books are not going to be in the giant pallets AI companies are buying. Most public libraries do not have professional archivists or anything like that, not so charity shops, or booksellers.

No, but they are going to be intermixed in boxes from an old estate, or a used books store which is closing up, etc.

> Most public libraries do not have professional archivists

Most reasonably sized library systems do in fact. Even small ones have trained librarians with an some degree in library science who took at least an introductory class in archiving as a part of their degree, and very likely has some idea how to prevent rare books from being destroyed.

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

#714

Post by wrathofquan »

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…

I've worked in academic libraries since 2010. I've always felt like it was a mistake for our digital library leadership to put so much trust in Google Books despite their promises to maintain the integrity of libraries (this mostly happened by the way).

At the time it was obvious and innovative but over time it was clear Google was establishing a technical precedent to corrode what libraries have the power to do. I'm hoping we can continue to do the good work but it's exhausting.

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

#715

Post by TFNA »

cladopa wrote: post #343

It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity. By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there ar…

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units.

Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed.

The shadow libraries have made a lot available to the whole world. It would suck if private corporations scan and shred remaining copies of these before the shadow libraries can get a scan.

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

#716

Post by cyberrock »

tescreal wrote: post #644
cyberrock wrote: post #635

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?…

I have a tidy collection of books that are odd or fascinating to me. They're old. But you mistake people like me for being made of money. Old books shouldn't simply vanish. That is history, art, authorial creation. Once the last copy gets crisped, it is lost.

Some of my books were literal pennies, and they would vanish too if neither of us nor the companies bought them. Again, this is just confusing where these books are with the Louvre. Just because they were available for purchase doesn't mean they were a shared community resource, because the community didn't care about their fate until now. I just don't appreciate the lack of self-awareness.

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

#718

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

gnfargbl wrote: post #399
nloomans wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers” the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies. > If you go to a recycling centre…

> permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent. Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.

Exactly. Calling anything on an SSD permanent is criminal.

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

#720

Post by snickerbockers »

p-e-w wrote: post #520
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?

They are thrown away, which has been happening since forever, and nobody ever gave a fuck until AI got involved.

I think it hits different when you're buying large quantities of used books with an eye towards ones which aren't readily available online, and with the specific intention of destroying them.

If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare or underappreciated books from the pre-digital era which nobody ever made publicly available in a digital format.

BTW destroying them isn't even necessary for scanning. It's the easiest way because removing the binding and turning it into a flat stack of papers solves many problems but there are actually dedicated book scanners designed to hold open the book while its photographed, and un-curling pages in post-processing was already a solved problem long before people were using AI to correct images.

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