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Anna's Blog: AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late (annas-archive.gd)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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TL;DR: AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

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[–] 6 points 3 months ago (14 children)

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

Any particular reason why can't you just rebind the book after? Even if it is with a different binding.

(And no, I don't mean I'll take "capitalism" for an answer)

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    I can imagine a couple of reasons.

    The most straightforward one actually is "capitalism", but maybe if I explain it a bit you'll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they're probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they're still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It's like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for "disposal" in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

    The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There's lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that's easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called "signatures", typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn't leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that's a cost that produces a book that's probably worthless for resale anyway.

    Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can't blame them too much.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    After actually reading some of these articles, even the sellers of the rarers books stated that they were sellling stock they otherwise wouldn't. So yes, it's rare but no one wanted it.

    The best case scenario is they just dump the books in full online using First Sale Doctrine. This way we don't lose the texts.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy.

    Well, who's talking about trying to sell them? Once again: capitalism. Rebinding the books would allow them to be sent to a physical archive in a usable way.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    Well, who's talking about buying?

    How else do you think they got the books?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    My understanding is, by buying them. But that does not mean they have to do the same. They are filthy rich, they can afford to rebind and donate the books.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who's going to take them that values them more than that?

    Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Also, these companies are not charities

    AI companies are filthy rich (at our expense).

    They can afford to donate books.

    Once again: "capitalism" is not the answer.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    In another comment regarding these books, you said:

    They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

    So it really seems you're just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don't care about the books or who they go to in the end.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    First, I can not save everyone, nor would I accept the ridiculous moral imposition you attempt that I should to.

    Second, I said they can keep the books and also that nothing (except the invented rules of capitalism) prevents them from not only not doing so but also from donating the books to a party dedicated to preserving them, like an archive. I'm also perfectly aware that just because they could do so, that does not make such a generously receiving party automagically exist. Once again, I can't do all the work. I'd expect someone like them or you would be doing their part, too.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    There's no use, those books barely have any cultural value. They're unsold inventory, why would you pay to rebind them ? Nobody wants to buy them anyway.

    Books (as in the physical object itself) are not rare or particularly precious they're among the most mass produced objects in the modern world.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    This reminds me of a book I read recently. I get like 30 $1 paperbacks at the library used book sale every spring / fall. When I'm done reading them they go on the unit book cart for the patients unless theyre wildly objectionable (and it takes a lot for me, I recently put out some only mildly tasteful furry badger shapeshifter smut).

    Anyway this year I got something called "the king's hounds" where the back summary sounded lit but it turned out to be super rapey (like Sean Connery bond just keep doing it until they shut up rapey). And it's been sitting on my coffee table collecting dust since I finished it because it feels wrong to just throw it away but I'm definitely not giving it to my patients (who like, ALL have rape PTSD for some reason). I probably will wind up throwing it out but. Fuck. It just feels wrong to destroy a book for some reason even though that's probably the only thing to do.

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