6 ms·

I really have trouble getting worked up about this. "Rare books" is thrown around regularly but my gut feeling is that's not the case. These are used (often? al

I really have trouble getting worked up about this. "Rare books" is thrown around regularly but my gut feeling is that's not the case. These are used (often? always?) books and while I'm sure there is waste, in general they just want 1 of every book. While I wish there was a repository of every book that was already digitized (it pains me this is the best solution), there isn't one and so I think this is not a real problem. It'd be a different story if they had furnaces that ran only on rare books that they had to continually feed books to but that's not what's happening here. And that 1 destroyed copy will "live on" in a way that it otherwise might not.

nemomarx 2mo ago
It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.
- Teever 2mo ago
  The problem is that we're ignorant of the true value of objects and we don't know what will be valuable in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest It seems a little short-sighted to destroy an artifact to get the text. Perhaps the genetic material that remains in books from the people who handled them, or the pollen from plants in the environment that the book existed in will have value in the future, but we won't know what we lost because some people foolishly destroyed it in a bizarre quest to make AGI that the creators argue could potentially destroy humanity. The more and more I read about these kinds of people the more I'm starting to realize that they're in the "here for a good time not a long time" group of people and those are the last people you want making long-term decisions.
  - MaybiusStrip 2mo ago
    Millions of books go in the trash every day. Should all private property come with such an asterisk that it ought to be preserved for whatever unlikely contingency you can imagine? I don't know, AI actually seems like a much more worthwhile pursuit.
    - Teever 2mo ago
      In one of the first articles that I saw about this topic they were describing a scenario where a botany manuscript from the 19th century that only had three remaining copies was being digitized and then pulped. They don't care about the R.L. Stein Goosebumps series or Louis L'Amour pulp fiction. They want the stuff that isn't digitized and they're willing to destroy original artifact to do so with no guarantee that even the digitized text will ever be made publicly available. It's foolish and selfish.
      - ndiddy 2mo ago
        > In one of the first articles that I saw about this topic they were describing a scenario where a botany manuscript from the 19th century that only had three remaining copies was being digitized and then pulped. That was something that someone on Twitter made up and then got quoted in an article. All of the books being scanned have ISBNs, meaning they're from 1970 or later. The books being sold off are rare in the sense that there aren't many copies in circulation, but they aren't priceless artifacts. If they were, they'd be being sold individually at high prices by boutique booksellers rather than being sold by the pallet by wholesalers. It's going to mostly be stuff like "The Best Places to Eat in Milwaukee, 1992 edition" or "The 2006 Guide to the Stock Market" or "Teach Yourself Visual Basic 3.0 in 28 Days".
  - DSMan195276 2mo ago
    On its own that seems like a pretty weak justification, at that point we would need to preserve every copy of every book forever because you never know what what useful physical material it has on it even beyond its text. That extends to non-book items as well, and while I understand the idea it's just not realistic in any sense. I think the more important part is to define what "rare" actually means and save/digitize set copies of those books that are actually at risk of being lost completely (rather than letting them rot away somewhere or get bought up to be privately destroyed). I suspect many of them are just not at all interesting enough to justify the expensive though.
    - Teever 2mo ago
      My comments on this subject aren't some sort of justification for any particular course of action; they're more a disapproval of the course of action being made by people people who have more dollars than sense. As a general rule preserving historical artifacts for continued future analysis and appreciation by people who have yet to be born is a noble cause that's considered worthy in and of itself without the need to justify it. We're talking about the richest group of people who have ever existed with the means to preserve them but decline to do so and instead act like the Taliban blowing up statues of Buddha. I think this is intuitive to most people. If a prerequisite for the birth of AGI was that a humanoid robot had to sit down in the Louvre and eat every single painting there with a knife and fork while occasionally stopping to wipe away historical detritus with the Mona Lisa that it's wearing as a bib people would by and large express a visceral and justifiable outrage. The people who are doing this know how this looks so they're trying to do it all behind closed doors, through cut-outs and intermediaries.
- ronsor 2mo ago
  They are literally not allowed to publish those scans. Half the reason the books get trashed in this process is because the first sale doctrine keeps copyright from strangling all the freedom in this narrow area.
  - fabian2k 2mo ago
    The books get trashed because loose pages are much easier to scan.
  - beej71 2mo ago
    Depends on the book. I'd wager the majority of the rare books are in the public domain. But they won't share them because they don't want their competitors to have the data.
  - UtopiaPunk 2mo ago
    If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. How many books are in the public domain but have never been digitized and shared in a public archive? And if the books are not in the public domain, then they should not be allowed to train their AI models with the material without some kind of license or agreement with the owner of the copyright.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ethbr1 2mo ago
      > If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. That'd be an easy fix with new law -- if you are an AI company with book data, you have a burden to make openly available (or require your suppliers to) all public domain book scans.
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    > They are literally not allowed to publish those scans. Emphasis mine. Just provide a digital copy, no questions asked. They will distributed to various archives globally. I'll pay for the drives and shipping. I understand and can appreciate the potential liability, and am willing to launder it to preserve the subject collection(s) and dataset(s).
hinkley 2mo ago
Rare books tend to be out of copyright, true.
legitster 2mo ago
We run a little library in front of our house. It's amazing how many people dump boxes of old books off in front of it hoping that they will find their way back into someone's collection. The sad truth is the vast, vast majority of printed literature is neither interesting nor useful. People are not dumping off stacks of Umberto Eco. We frankly have to toss a lot of awful cookbooks, self-help books, trashy mass-market "novels", and sketchy religious works. As it is, even the stuff that makes it to the library is not very impressive.
- nemomarx 2mo ago
  Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that. It's all interesting for something, even if it's just a meta analysis of culture during a certain period or what kind of trashy romance novels were popular in 198X. At least in my view.
  - hereonout2 2mo ago
    If only the Roman's had digitized their self help literature!
    - nemomarx 2mo ago
      This is most of what we have for the great philosophers - half "why is the world like this" and half "how do you live a good life", right? some original plato lectures would be interesting to have.
  - BeetleB 2mo ago
    > Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that. It would be great, but it's a bit off topic here. The point the parent is making is that most of these works are going to be trashed regardless of Amazon's behavior. If Amazon (or any other company) is digitizing it, they're at least preserving it in some form. The alternative may well be that many of these books never get preserved. Now would I prefer the government or an entity like The Internet Archive do this? Sure.
paulddraper 2mo ago
> they just want 1 of every book. That's the point I come to. Books are not original manuscripts. Even in low volume cases, they are usually printed hundreds of times. (And usually low volume works aren't all that great...hence the low demand.) That is a fraction of a percent for books that at some level weren't all that wanted.
fabian2k 2mo ago
Do we know if they actually buy one copy of each book here? Or are they indiscriminately buying books in bulk and just processing all of them? The latter seems inefficient, so my first assumption would be that they would avoid that. But while I suspect they'd check if they know the book before scanning, I could imagine them not caring that much before buying them and just focus on volume.
pbreit 2mo ago
Agree. Couldn't care less. There are some neat aspects to "rare books" but overall quite insignificant.

nemomarx 2mo ago

It'll live on if they publish those scans or contribute them to a national archives or something. Proprietary data has a habit of being lost over time though.

Teever 2mo ago
The problem is that we're ignorant of the true value of objects and we don't know what will be valuable in the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest It seems a little short-sighted to destroy an artifact to get the text. Perhaps the genetic material that remains in books from the people who handled them, or the pollen from plants in the environment that the book existed in will have value in the future, but we won't know what we lost because some people foolishly destroyed it in a bizarre quest to make AGI that the creators argue could potentially destroy humanity. The more and more I read about these kinds of people the more I'm starting to realize that they're in the "here for a good time not a long time" group of people and those are the last people you want making long-term decisions.
- MaybiusStrip 2mo ago
  Millions of books go in the trash every day. Should all private property come with such an asterisk that it ought to be preserved for whatever unlikely contingency you can imagine? I don't know, AI actually seems like a much more worthwhile pursuit.
  - Teever 2mo ago
    In one of the first articles that I saw about this topic they were describing a scenario where a botany manuscript from the 19th century that only had three remaining copies was being digitized and then pulped. They don't care about the R.L. Stein Goosebumps series or Louis L'Amour pulp fiction. They want the stuff that isn't digitized and they're willing to destroy original artifact to do so with no guarantee that even the digitized text will ever be made publicly available. It's foolish and selfish.
    - ndiddy 2mo ago
      > In one of the first articles that I saw about this topic they were describing a scenario where a botany manuscript from the 19th century that only had three remaining copies was being digitized and then pulped. That was something that someone on Twitter made up and then got quoted in an article. All of the books being scanned have ISBNs, meaning they're from 1970 or later. The books being sold off are rare in the sense that there aren't many copies in circulation, but they aren't priceless artifacts. If they were, they'd be being sold individually at high prices by boutique booksellers rather than being sold by the pallet by wholesalers. It's going to mostly be stuff like "The Best Places to Eat in Milwaukee, 1992 edition" or "The 2006 Guide to the Stock Market" or "Teach Yourself Visual Basic 3.0 in 28 Days".
- DSMan195276 2mo ago
  On its own that seems like a pretty weak justification, at that point we would need to preserve every copy of every book forever because you never know what what useful physical material it has on it even beyond its text. That extends to non-book items as well, and while I understand the idea it's just not realistic in any sense. I think the more important part is to define what "rare" actually means and save/digitize set copies of those books that are actually at risk of being lost completely (rather than letting them rot away somewhere or get bought up to be privately destroyed). I suspect many of them are just not at all interesting enough to justify the expensive though.
  - Teever 2mo ago
    My comments on this subject aren't some sort of justification for any particular course of action; they're more a disapproval of the course of action being made by people people who have more dollars than sense. As a general rule preserving historical artifacts for continued future analysis and appreciation by people who have yet to be born is a noble cause that's considered worthy in and of itself without the need to justify it. We're talking about the richest group of people who have ever existed with the means to preserve them but decline to do so and instead act like the Taliban blowing up statues of Buddha. I think this is intuitive to most people. If a prerequisite for the birth of AGI was that a humanoid robot had to sit down in the Louvre and eat every single painting there with a knife and fork while occasionally stopping to wipe away historical detritus with the Mona Lisa that it's wearing as a bib people would by and large express a visceral and justifiable outrage. The people who are doing this know how this looks so they're trying to do it all behind closed doors, through cut-outs and intermediaries.
ronsor 2mo ago
They are literally not allowed to publish those scans. Half the reason the books get trashed in this process is because the first sale doctrine keeps copyright from strangling all the freedom in this narrow area.
- fabian2k 2mo ago
  The books get trashed because loose pages are much easier to scan.
- beej71 2mo ago
  Depends on the book. I'd wager the majority of the rare books are in the public domain. But they won't share them because they don't want their competitors to have the data.
- UtopiaPunk 2mo ago
  If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. How many books are in the public domain but have never been digitized and shared in a public archive? And if the books are not in the public domain, then they should not be allowed to train their AI models with the material without some kind of license or agreement with the owner of the copyright.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ethbr1 2mo ago
    > If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. That'd be an easy fix with new law -- if you are an AI company with book data, you have a burden to make openly available (or require your suppliers to) all public domain book scans.
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  > They are literally not allowed to publish those scans. Emphasis mine. Just provide a digital copy, no questions asked. They will distributed to various archives globally. I'll pay for the drives and shipping. I understand and can appreciate the potential liability, and am willing to launder it to preserve the subject collection(s) and dataset(s).

hinkley 2mo ago

Rare books tend to be out of copyright, true.

legitster 2mo ago

We run a little library in front of our house. It's amazing how many people dump boxes of old books off in front of it hoping that they will find their way back into someone's collection. The sad truth is the vast, vast majority of printed literature is neither interesting nor useful. People are not dumping off stacks of Umberto Eco. We frankly have to toss a lot of awful cookbooks, self-help books, trashy mass-market "novels", and sketchy religious works. As it is, even the stuff that makes it to the library is not very impressive.

nemomarx 2mo ago
Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that. It's all interesting for something, even if it's just a meta analysis of culture during a certain period or what kind of trashy romance novels were popular in 198X. At least in my view.
- hereonout2 2mo ago
  If only the Roman's had digitized their self help literature!
  - nemomarx 2mo ago
    This is most of what we have for the great philosophers - half "why is the world like this" and half "how do you live a good life", right? some original plato lectures would be interesting to have.
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  > Imagine if we had bad cookbooks, cheap popular novels and stories, tracts on diet and self help from old Rome, or old eras in China, or the equivalent from ages before that. It would be great, but it's a bit off topic here. The point the parent is making is that most of these works are going to be trashed regardless of Amazon's behavior. If Amazon (or any other company) is digitizing it, they're at least preserving it in some form. The alternative may well be that many of these books never get preserved. Now would I prefer the government or an entity like The Internet Archive do this? Sure.

paulddraper 2mo ago

> they just want 1 of every book. That's the point I come to. Books are not original manuscripts. Even in low volume cases, they are usually printed hundreds of times. (And usually low volume works aren't all that great...hence the low demand.) That is a fraction of a percent for books that at some level weren't all that wanted.

fabian2k 2mo ago

Do we know if they actually buy one copy of each book here? Or are they indiscriminately buying books in bulk and just processing all of them? The latter seems inefficient, so my first assumption would be that they would avoid that. But while I suspect they'd check if they know the book before scanning, I could imagine them not caring that much before buying them and just focus on volume.

pbreit 2mo ago

Agree. Couldn't care less. There are some neat aspects to "rare books" but overall quite insignificant.