I like to buy print books because I hate reading on tiny screens. There's also something about reading from a real book that feels right, the heft of it, the cover art, the occasional errors, and if used, the scars that can indicate that someone like you also cared about reading it once. It's an experience nothing like reading a stream of bits. It's an experience that's probably a lot like what vinyl LP fans get from listening to their analog albums vs listening to streamed music.

If these AI companies destroy books in bulk then we'll have fewer and fewer physical books to read and their prices will go up. They've been hoovering-up RAM for their datacenter computers for years and prices for RAM have been crazy high as a result, hobbling system-builders and driving up prices for consumer electronics across the board. Rare books are already expensive, and if more books become rare just because AI companies are destroying books, then all books will eventually become prohibitively expensive. We'll then be marketed AI-generated text that we'll be assured is "just as good" as those "old" books (we'll also be told that "old" is undesirable and that AI-generated text is better because it's "new" and because AI has improved the originals). Eventually the old books will disappear in any form and we'll only have AI books.

It should go without saying that the AI texts will be polluted with pro-AI propaganda and with propaganda, overt or covert, promoting the views and best interests of the AI's corporate owners. Every text will have within it somewhere a voice speaking for the benefit of the Sam Altmans of the world.

AI companies are buying tons of old books because they can use them for model training, knowing they’re not filled with AI slop.

They’re not buying a whole bunch of copies of the same book (removing the book from circulation) — they’re buying all the unique books available to OCR and include in training data, because that falls under fair use.