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.”
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.