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Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- LAC-Tech 2mo agoFor those wondering why she's wearing wool and gloves indoors - New Zealanders typically can't afford electric heating, and wear woolen clothing in doors to to make up for this, when they can't burn firewood or coal.
- jemmyw 2mo agoMore likely a second hand book store in Newtown is an old and draughty building. Running a heater in there would be the same as running one outdoors. Or she just gets cold. My daughter wears those kind of gloves all winter regardless of how warm we heat the house.
- LAC-Tech 2mo agoWhat percentage of New Zealanders do you think live somehwere that isn't cold and draughty?
- enquirewithin 2mo ago[flagged]
- defrost 2mo agoFairly opinionated framing given: as the country grapples with record numbers of citizens leaving the country because of a weak economy, high living costs and high unemployment. More than 60% of those moved to Australia, where average weekly incomes are higher and New Zealand citizens have work and residency rights. The spokesperson did not elaborate on when the family arrived in Australia nor what kind of work they were doing, but noted it was not unusual for former leaders to spend time overseas after leaving office. Jacinda Ardern living and working in Australia after move from US - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/26/jacinda-ardern-living-in-australia-former-nz-new-zealand-pm https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/26/jacinda-ardern... New Zealand has always been a place people with talent leave (and often return to upon retirement or making a fortune). eg: Ernest left in his post grad years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford
- enquirewithin 2mo ago[flagged]
- totetsu 2mo agos/she’s so reviled by New Zealanders/she was targeted by online extremists who threatened her family/
- enquirewithin 2mo ago[flagged]
- jemmyw 2mo agoWell my house isn't cold and draughty so at least 0.0001%
- kiwih 2mo agoOften kiwis can afford it but just choose not to. My own parents are well off and yet still have an absolutely freezing house all winter, it drives me crazy. Just put on a sweater, and another one over that, and a blanket....
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoElectricity was several times more expensive than in the US when we were there, and houses not insulated well. Sock hats and fingerless wool gloves it is.
- AnotherGoodName 2mo agoLol but seriously 4th highest median wealth per capita. The median NZ citizen has 3x the wealth of the median us citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... Of course they have very low wealth inequality so they don’t have trillionaires at all which some people may see as a problem. In fact remarkably despite the median wealth of NZ being so much higher than the USA they have a lower average wealth per capita. They just spread the wealth around making the middle class 3x richer.
- LAC-Tech 2mo agoThat wealthy is all tied up in draughty houses. It's not real.
- loeg 2mo agoWikipedia's (UBS') US figure ($69k) is probably wrong? US median household wealth is ~$193k[1]. I don't think there's a way to square claimed median individual wealth of $69k with that? Even taking into account children (22% population) and assuming 2 adults/household (more favorable to the math than the real 1.2-1.4 figure). I can't find anything on UBS' methodology, just the short 1.5 page paper. [1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
- nl 2mo agoI don't have an explanation for this but I did note that the 2023 UBS report had US Median Wealth per adult at $107K[1]. I wonder if there is a per adult vs per person vs per working person difference in the measurement or something like that? Edit: I've dug into this more, and the closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is that UBS changed its model for 2026 to "normalize household debt" in order to make it more comparable across countries. There doesn't seem to be sufficient information to explain how that change caused such a radical change. [1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230815103944/https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/global-wealth-report-2023/_jcr_content/mainpar/toplevelgrid_5684475/col2/linklistnewlook/link_copy.0357374027.file/PS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS9hc3NldHMvd20vZ2xvYmFsL2ltZy9nbG9iYWwtZmFtaWx5LW9mZmljZS9kb2NzL2RhdGFib29rLWdsb2JhbC13ZWFsdGgtcmVwb3J0LTIwMjMtZW4ucGRm/databook-global-wealth-report-2023-en.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230815103944/https://www.ubs.c...
- potatosalad99 2mo agoThat’s a funny callback to last weeks RNZ article https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/cosy-ways-to-keep-warm-this-winter-without-turning-the-heater-on https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/cosy-ways-to-keep-warm-...
- anigbrowl 2mo agoImagine thinking that wearing a sweater in wintertime means you're poor. Couldn't be me. The gloves are a special kind made of thermal material for people with Raynaud's disease, where narrowing of the blood vessels reduces circulation in cold temperatures.
- LAC-Tech 2mo agoI went to school 3 minutes walk from that bookshop. I know what those draughty sashcord windowed shitbox houses are like.
- anigbrowl 2mo agoThis seems like a weirdly personal issue for you.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- annzabelle 2mo agoHave you ever been to New Zealand? People here don't/can't really heat their houses properly.
- mrbukkake 2mo agoWhat a load of shite
- wincy 2mo agoThis mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years. Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.
- jandrese 2mo agoExcept we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world. Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.
- buildbot 2mo agoMost people do not support the destruction of books - it seems like the issue in both cases is copyright forcing the destruction and non-release of the scan.
- jandrese 2mo agoThey don't have to destroy the books to scan them. There are techniques for doing it non-destructively, but they're slower and more expensive. It's cheaper to cut the spines off and drop the stack of papers on a flatbed scanner with a paper feeder.
- johntb86 2mo agoDestroying the original makes it easier to justify that scanning the books is fair use, because you haven't increased the number of copies. See page 16 of https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar... : "This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"
- kzrdude 2mo ago
- abeppu 2mo agoAll the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions could be avoided.
- qingcharles 2mo agoNo, there are two reasons they are being sliced: 1) It's easier to scan. 2) US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy.
- abeppu 2mo ago> US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy. What's the "sorta, kinda" as you understand it? Has any judge, or law, created a requirement to destroy copies? From what I understand, depending on the purpose, making digital copies may be fair use if it's "transformative". In a decision involving Google's book search feature, the court's decision highlighted that the amount of text displayed in the product was limited and not a "significant market substitute" [2]. The AI firms aren't trying to show you a digital copy of the books, and in a bunch of contexts already, if their product regurgitates too much verbatim text, that's going to be a liability (e.g. educational uses and plagiarism). I've also tried prompting LLMs to finish a paragraph from inside a novel from a well-known author, and they have not been able to get the next sentence typically. You can't easily and with confidence just extract back a book. I have not tried the experiment of seeing how many tokens you need to spend before a books is reproduced and what the cost is relative to the original work -- and you would already need the digital text to recognize when you had succeeded. What's transformative? Previously the courts have said that scanning to offer a search product was transformative, given some limitations on how much of the matching book is shown to the user. I think there's a decent argument that training an AI model is at least as transformative as search indexing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.#Second_Circuit_appeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...
- ChiperSoft 2mo agoHow are they finding these books to order? I can't find used bookstores online anywhere.
- Scoundreller 2mo agoProbably through a “broker” like abebooks (an Amazon subsidiary) or Amazon itself.
- kzrdude 2mo agoLots of used bookstores are online, and I’ve ordered lots of books that way. This website for example may look like a user-to-user book sales platform but most books there are supplied by used bookstores: https://www.bokborsen.se/ https://www.bokborsen.se/
- lucfranken 2mo agoIt’s ugly. When there are still only some copies available of a certain book and they are all being sold the knowledge is gone. Let alone when it’s the only copy remaining. That is of course not totally true, the copies are in private digital stores. But for general public the knowledge is gone. Someone researching let’s say the history of a little village won’t be able to catch it. This happens as well in current private collections. The physical book gets stored in a private book collection. But many also get out by the years when people are moving or die. The amount of companies doing this is the real harm. There will be many companies running this process. It is absolutely not comparable to a single book collection getting burned in a house fire or being thrown away instead of donated to a second hand store. It might feel for some as a not really big issue but actually it is in time.
- readthenotes1 2mo agoThey got in trouble for violating copyright so now they are somewhat spitefully showing the alternative
- lucfranken 2mo agoYes, that's a horrible way of applying the rules. Sometimes things are done according the rules but the outcome is terrible.
- x______________ 2mo agoRules don't... sorry, cannot apply for both people and corporations with endless bankrolls. That is not a realistic approach. What's stopping say next year's billion or trillion dollar company from going into x market for used y, or vacuums up z limited natural resource? Should people have to suffer for the whims of a board of directors?
- johnsmith1840 2mo agoThey are digitally scanning them? What knowledge is being lost here?
- Scoundreller 2mo ago> A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects. Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.
- johnsmith1840 2mo agoI mean aren't thry literally just digitally scanning books that basically nobody else has? I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost. Rumors of rare books being destroyed would be the bad part of this but if "rare" is the tourist guide to a local cave why should we care? Feels alot like the water argument
- sofixa 2mo ago> I can morn paper but it's not like the contents are being lost Unless they're sharing the scans publicly or with the Internet Archive or equivalent, they are being lost.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoOne copy! A single copy of the book is destroyed and physically inaccessible. The same effect would be if a hoarder purchased the book and never sold it or showed it to another soul. Same effect if a toddler purchased it, dropped it in their spaghetti bowl, and tore it apart. But a copy of a book is a copy of a book! Books were designed for multiple copies being printed. Perhaps we recall Gutenberg and that whole controversy of easy printing from a press. So, the thing getting people all in a tizzy is that a single copy of a book that has, perhaps, become rare in 2026, a single copy that languished on a shelf somewhere, is being purchased and consumed. Honestly, folks, books are really in no danger here. If you know any rare books that are irreplaceable, and with only one extant copy, just buy it yourself. For God's sake! Not rocket science.
- rob74 2mo agoDon't you think that if the books that Anthropic orders from New Zealand were available (online) anywhere else, they would order them from there rather than from New Zealand? So yes, I would say there's a pretty big chance that those books are really rare, as those are apparently the only copies you can buy online. The actual reason to get angry about this is copyright law, which would rather have all surviving copies of a (niche, old, rare but still covered by copyright) book in private hands and inaccessible to the public, rather than make it public domain.
- nullbio 2mo agoIf the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.
- rob74 2mo agoNot sure copyright laws allow that?
- kzrdude 2mo agoThen we should change the law
- nullbio 2mo agoWell that's a big problem that needs solving. Copyright law really needs a refresh given how AI works and to cover the incentives that have been created. Including laws on how AI companies can use your data. For example, it's legal for them to claim they don't train on your data but using your data to generate synthetic data and training on that is legal and does not need to be disclosed. Most people are unaware of the fact that this is being done. Your IP is not actually safe.
- brailsafe 2mo ago> If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies. Ah yes, the old "if you can't beat the ruthless type A sociopathic American capitalists who literally don't give a shit about anything other than money and power, then you should join them and make a quick buck while the world burns". A tale as old as time really; we must mirror the behaviour of people who'd tell their self-driving car to drive over a gaggle of baby geese in order to continue working on the important task of privatizing the world's knowledge. \s Hell no. Small town bookstore owners probably have the best job in the world; if they're smart, they'd continue doing exactly as they're doing.
- nullbio 2mo agoThis has nothing to do with sociopathic American capitalists. It would be a good idea regardless of the AI scenario, because it makes the rare books accessible to everyone instead of just the people who are fortunate enough to buy the hard copy.
- protocolture 2mo agoIf only they could legally access the cultural heritage of mankind digitally.
- jiehong 2mo agoIn the UK, each book published on the market must have a copy sent once to the British Library for preservation (and maybe other legal deposit libraries). That’s a good built-in way to ensure public preservation of knowledge IMO
- m4rtink 2mo agoSame here in Czech Republic - also true for most printed periodical. I've been on a tour of one of these repositories - it is super impressive & the staff takes it super seriously.
- tmnvix 2mo agoWe have this in NZ too. The trouble is those books are not lent out. You have to go to the book. Also, with the proliferation of small print runs, self-published autobiographies, etc, I think the National Library no longer attempts to collect a copy of all publications. If these AI companies were creating public repositories where researchers could access digital copies then I would not have such a problem with this, but that is not what they are doing. The ability of researchers to cite these books as sources is being snuffed out.