5 ms·
If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
by pohl 2mo ago
If there’s only 3 copies in existence, and everyone on the frontier wants it in their corpus, what do you think will happen?
- YetAnotherNick 2mo ago> what do you think will happen? They raise the price and print more copies?
- ipsum2 2mo agoWhat if the book has been out of print for 50 years? This isn't a contrived scenario, most of the rare books are like this.
- YetAnotherNick 2mo ago> What if the book has been out of print for 50 years? Same answer? They raise the price and print more copies. You can just print even 1 copy, just the cost per print will be higher. In fact publishers getting some profit on the tail end of books is the best thing that could happen to authors and publishing industry.
- ipsum2 2mo agoDo you understand that many of these publishers do not have the original copy anymore, and may have gone out of business entirely? 50 years ago text was not backed up to the cloud.
- YetAnotherNick 2mo agoIf there are very few copies and no one wants to even spend $100 to scan it, likely the book wont be bought by anyone in any case and it would rot/thrown away in another 50 years if AI companies had not digitized it.
- ipsum2 2mo agoSorry, that "just-so" explanation is not how the world works.
- greycol 2mo agoWhich is what has happened over time now that humanity has the ability to digitize them. The problem arises when we are purposefully picking books where we know those scans aren't yet available and purposefully destroying them. There'd be less outrage if any of these companies made statements about guaranteeing the survival of the scans they are taking and the release or planned guaridanship in the case they can no longer maintain the data.
- YetAnotherNick 2mo agoWho is digitizing the books which are rare? Isn't it even more valuable to digitize for them now that they have new buyer which can pay 100s of times more.
- greycol 2mo agoAnna's Archive is a controversial example with that as a stated goal. But more to the point most of the people doing it aren't seeking to profit from digitizing these books so the 'monetary value' of them is not the yard stick or motivator. A higher monetary value could actually make it harder for these projects as they can rely on donations of books or even waiting for someone who wants a book they bought so they can spend that on the next one (which is less useful if the next one on your list was bought to destroy by the same person who bought the book you finished scanning). They're often books tied to a region, i.e. stories about a local fisherman's life and how they overcame adapting a boat to local feedstock, or the engineering that went into building the local train station. That's to say they can have little value to those outside the area but are still a rich read for locals, tourists, and those who move to the region or have a love for a place. I expect we'll see a concerted effort to organise to get these kind of book sent to regional mueseums for scanning now that people are aware they are actively being destroyed and they realise the timeline isn't how long the book can last.
- chomp 2mo agoYou are not understanding how the market works. Rarity and value do not always correlate with demand. Otherwise I have some beanie babies to sell.
- ipsum2 2mo agoI doubt that your beanie babies are very rare.
- KPGv2 2mo ago> They raise the price and print more copies? How? Like, do you think a book published 100 years ago has a digital file sitting around a publishing house that might even exist anymore? Re-publishig of old books are often based on scans (the originals were literally pressed into paper by metal, not printed off hard drives), and if the books don't exist, they can't re-scan. I own some antique Japanese books that have very few copies in existence. You couldn't get them re-printed if you want to if the physical book didn't exist anymore. For a few books, I've actually purchased incredibly high-quality scans that cost me hundreds of dollars because to produce the re-issues, people had to go to museums with high-powered cameras to photograph the pages under supervision of a curator. There's no digital file to print from the publisher. If those books were gone, there's no bringing them back.
- xienze 2mo agoI think the term "rare" might be a bit loaded. DOES it mean "only a handful in existence" or more like "1000 copies?" And at any rate, at least by scanning the book they're theoretically making its contents available to the public. What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf?
- JohnFen 2mo ago"Only a handful" is a precious or extremely rare book. 1000 copies of a book total would certainly qualify it as rare. That's not a lot of copies. > What are the other people who own these books doing besides having them sit on a shelf? Not destroying them. By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else. Maybe even a library that specializes in rare books.
- xienze 2mo ago> By continuing to exist, it keeps the possibility that the books will eventually go to someone else. Good news, there's hundreds or thousands of copies that continue to exist. Anthropic, Google et al only need a single copy. And shockingly, for all this talk of rare books, we don't see the other owners of said books stepping up and offering to have these books scanned non-destructively. I won't hold my breath for them to do so in the short or long term. FURTHERMORE, the books aren't being scanned for no reason, they become part of new model training data. Meaning that whatever insights these books contain might be available to users in the future. Again, more valuable than all the copies rotting away on someone's bookshelf that might be scanned and made available some day.
- card_zero 2mo agoIt's hard to describe what happens to the book's contents, or determine whether it would be more valuable intact. Insights are the result of a person interacting with a book, they aren't like juice that can be squeezed out mechanically.
- card_zero 2mo ago
- olalonde 2mo agoThis is a problem whether it's AI companies buying them or three random dudes. The real solution is to get the copyright owners to keep distributing copies, or to change copyright law.
- techpression 2mo agoThe three random dudes will probably not destroy them, quite a significant difference.
- Tangurena2 2mo agoIf there are only 3 copies, then each copy is going to cost thousands of dollars. Sample: > Thou shalt commit adultery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible