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.”
No, publishers don’t go to the stores. The stores send the books back to the publisher.
What are my arguments? Can you even tell me?
Because what I’ve said. Is that we already do destroys millions of unsold books. And the various filings, rapports, inquiries, and fucking weather data, isn’t sold at bookstores to begin with. So the risk of those being bought and destroyed are zero.
So… you have not cared one bit, that publishers destroy unsold books for well over 50 years. But when these companies do it, it’s somehow terrible.