Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
These companies need quantity over quality. They’re gonna buy the cheapest books in bulk they can.
Contrary to what some might think. I’m not taking a stance for AI. I’m just pointing out, no one cared about these books 1 month ago. No one wanted to buy them. No one wanted to read them. That’s why they’ve been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse collecting dust.
They’re not valuable in any sense of the word. They’re only “rare” in the sense that they sold so poorly, there was no point in printing more.
This is such a silly thing to glue on the hate-train. “They’re destroying books no one wanted to read!” Oh no… anyway
“Book burning is good actually because no one reads them”
Summarized by biological human intelligence
Typical fucking anti-human attitude. If it doesn’t make money then it’s useless.
You do know that books (the majority in existence probably) aren’t meant to be sold or read by the general public but? Like historical ledgers, accident inquiries, patents, scientific findings, family trees, weather data?
Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
I’m sorry you didnt know the vast majority of unsold books are destroyed and recycled into something else. What did you think we did with them? No one wants to store 10’000 unsold copies of Robert Holms, “The straight circle”
What they’re buying are the cheapest literature they can find. Old unsold books no one wanted for decades.
There’s not a single scientific finding we have not digitalised, which you can buy the originals of. We’ve digitalised every single patent filed. Ever.
And weather data? Seriously? You think they’re buying weather data published on paper only? Where do you even buy that?
Yeah, they sit on shelves because the average person - at least in the U.S. - is steps away from brain death.
If more people were better educated and or literate this would not be happening.
Buddy, how many books do you think are written every year?
If you started today. And did nothing but read until you died. You would not even have finished all the new books that were published last year.
Point being. There’s an enourmous amount of books printed every year. Most of them doesnt sell very well. So they are sent back to the publisher. And the publisher does not have room to keep every copy. So they’re destroyed. Maybe recycled into other paper products, maybe burned for energy. Regardless. What AI companies are buying is but a drop in the ocean.
And it has nothing to do with people “not reading”
It has everything to do with not reading you muppet, any literate person understands that you don’t need to destroy a book in order to gain the information from it. A child could understand that there’s no reason to destroy the books other than laziness or malice.
My god, tech people need to be beaten regularly.
🤣
Popular doesnt always mean good. Unpopular doesnt always mean bad. There are countless little poetry books that only circulated through clubs. Texts circulated through writing groups that contain works of authors before they were famous.there are rare books you’ve never heard of that a collector would pay thousands for because they are one of the few people who know its value. Old folios that crossed oceans as the libraries behind them burned in petty wars that sat in attics for generations before the family found it only to send it up wholesale in an estate auction.
The point is that these assholes buy it all up by the truck load and process it indiscriminately. All to avoid copyright, and to feed their environment destroying hallucination machine.
You’re doing an awful lot of speculating. The texts circulating through clubs, are circulating. These books were not.
Do you have any idea how many books we casually destroy? Books that never got sold, that are just wasting space for the next new book. The only difference is that unsold books being burned for energy isn’t manking the news. It’s just another thursday
Actually im not. I deal with old books every day. What youre talking about is the modern publishing space where books get pulped by the millions because they are textbooks that weren’t picked up by enough schools. Or theyre no longer the latest edition. Even regular consumer books get pulled for not having enough sales.
The used market is still full of these books even after being abandoned by the publishers. But even that market is still driven by demand. Used bookstores only buy books if they think they’ll sell. But the thing is they still bulk sell those books that dont have market value because people will buy huge pallets of books for pennies on the dollar.
Yes libraries also recycle books that have been on the shelves too long. And it’s hard to sell old library books because of the extreme use they are put through. They do library sales for old books pretty regularly. Most of the time they are pulping books that are worn out. Which still suggests a demand, worn books are read books.
What they’re doing is taking old texts from warehouses that are known to be abandoned copyright, since stealing modern writing has proven to be unpopular. And so unknown old works are basically free game. And at best they are saving it digitally, which is good, but then selling access since after destroying the physical copy so as to have a monopoly on the data. And moatly theyre selling it to ai companies to use as training data. So basically theyre squatting old rare text that they have no actual right to.
Yeah, when I had a library close by I’d go all the time and find books I’d never heard of to read. It was great. Just because something doesn’t have a publicst pushing it on everyone doesn’t mean it’s not good or valuable. These ghouls destroying everything to feed their slop machine disgust me.
Yeah, small community literature is extremely valuable to historians of such communities.