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Who says they're rare and nonrecoverable? If they're bought in bulk from used booksellers, they're probably quite common titles. We throw away nearly a billion
by Legend2440 2mo ago
Who says they're rare and nonrecoverable? If they're bought in bulk from used booksellers, they're probably quite common titles.
We throw away nearly a billion books every year. They're not sacred, and scanning a few million isn't a tragedy. People just don't like AI and want to be outraged about it.
- qarl2 2mo agoAnd... at the very most... each AI company destroys ONE copy of a book.
- Retr0id 2mo agoGood thing there are hardly any AI companies these days.
- qarl2 2mo agoI know! This must have lead to the destruction of AT LEAST 10 copies of the Twilight books. OH THE HUMANITY!!!
- Legend2440 2mo agoWell, if they're bought in bulk, there's gonna be some duplicates. They probably don't know what they're buying until they start scanning. But still, the number of duplicates will be inversely proportational to the rarity of the book. Lots of copies of James Patterson and Twilight, probably few or zero rare 16th-century manuscripts.
- pixl97 2mo agoI would assume the very first step would be cataloging the author, title, and revision of the book so hundreds of thousands of hours of time are not wasted scanning duplicates.
- Legend2440 2mo agoThey probably still throw away the duplicates even if they don't scan them, because the wholesale value of a used paperback of the Da Vinci Code is like half a cent.
- qsera 2mo ago>they're probably quite common titles. Old books could have been common back in their day, but they might not be very common today.
- Legend2440 2mo agoThe books you will find on a bulk sale are, by definition, the ones that are very common today.
- tpoacher 2mo agoRead it again. These aren't books that were bought in bulk bt bookstores. They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning. The analogy is imagine someone buying near-extinct animals from any source in bulk, not kittens from average pet shops.
- Legend2440 2mo ago>They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning. Nope! Actually this article has a list of the books they were scanning: https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis... >provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emerald Publishing, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press, and ranging from business and education to engineering, public policy and medicine. So not rare, mostly recent textbooks. The headline of this article is a lie designed to outrage you.
- tpoacher 2mo agoI see. That's good to know, though you could have led with that! I was mostly calling you out because it seemed you were misrepresenting the article's argument, whereas you now seem to have no problem with their reasoning of bulk destruction, but simply question the premise of whether the books are indeed rare in the first place. I have to say though, while I'm relieved we're not destroying in bulk books from the 1900s, nevertheless, just because a book is from the 2020s doesn't necessarily make it a plentiful resource (I've often been in a situation where fairly recent textbooks I wanted are out of print and are only sold in old bookshops, or for exorbitant prices on ebay, for instance). So ragebait quality article or not, I still acknowledge the issue. As I said to another person above, I would still feel more comfortable after this discussion, if the company had made a statement that non-destructive scanning methods will be pursued in books with less than X books in circulation.