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AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- josefritzishere 2mo agoDestroying history is a crime against humanity.
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- ezfe 2mo agoI dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.
- breezybottom 2mo agoThey don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
- tptacek 2mo agoTo do what?
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- runarberg 2mo agoTo not destroy rare books.
- tptacek 2mo agoWhen you read "rare books", what are you thinking these are? The 404 article that spun this story up goes into more detail. These are like vanity press books. They're rare because nobody cares about them. The book industry already destroys these books.
- runarberg 2mo agoI am thinking about a long essay Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson wrote to his pals abroad, and were left abroad. I am thinking about a photo book by an Indonesian naturalist who is famous on Bali, and took amazing photos of wildlife on Sulawesi in 1926, and colored in, and somehow ended up in New Jersey in the 1980s. I am thinking about a collection of essays written by a teenage J.D. Salinger who he left unsigned at a café thinking nobody would want to read them but just leaving it up to chance. Or maybe a Jackson Pollock sketchbook he lost at a party which ended in the host’s bookshelf, and finally at an estate sale. Plenty of such unknown unknown exist, and the AI machine will inevitably destroy a bunch of them at this scale.
- tptacek 2mo agoYou're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. This is all such a special-pleading argument. You know what other institution snatches up books and destroys them at huge scale? Public library systems. People clean out their attics and basements and drop off huge boxes full of books at libraries; libraries take the things they know will circulate, and destroy the rest. Take a guess as to how Þórbergur Þórðarson fares at the Newark Public Library. Wait, bad example, they stopped accepting book donations because nobody wants your old books. They tell you to give the books to thrift stores instead. Guess what the thrift stores do with them? You know how many times I've read stories about the grave damage libraries are doing to human culture? Zero, zero times.
- parineum 2mo agoThey are "forced" to do this because that's what they have to do to abide by copyright law. They can't create a digital duplicate without destroying the original.
- breezybottom 2mo agoSince when do AI companies care about copyright law? They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them.
- alightsoul 2mo agoSince they had to pay 1.5 billion for it
- freejazz 2mo agoYou'd think they could've negotiated something better than $3k per work if they had actually gone to the table first.
- eru 2mo ago> They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them. That's pretty silly. My competitor can't ride my bike either, and I didn't have to destroy the bike for that to be true.
- gpt5 2mo agoA little meta - I want to point out demagogic/populist comments like these that try to clear all nuance and brush a topic in black and white tend to come from a really small portion of the users here, but the same user (whose account is only 4 months old), dominates posts like this by posting many many bait-like comments in the same post that deviate the discussion away from meaning and insight. This is just one example, but it has become unfortunately common across all social media platforms.
- freejazz 2mo agoIf that's true, then why did they pirate so many books?
- zmmmmm 2mo agoIt is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights. I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to force AI companies back to e-books where they can force them into licensing deals.
- alightsoul 2mo agoAi companies don't use ebooks, because they are more expensive than second hand books
- breezybottom 2mo agoThey absolutely do. Meta torrented 81 terabytes of ebooks. They just have no incentive to pay when the law looks the other way.
- alightsoul 2mo agoI meant paid ebooks. That's probably what the commenter refers to, because that's what publishers want. Obviously ai companies don't want to pay so they try to use pirated ebooks
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo agoThe entire ironic thing here is that a huge part of those 81 terabytes of ebooks that Meta torrented were directly pirated books from Anna's Archive.
- bawolff 2mo agoi imagine its because the doctrine of first sale does not apply to ebooks.
- warkdarrior 2mo agoOn Amazon right now, retail prices for e-book copies are higher than for the corresponding paperbacks.
- jacobo37 2mo agothis is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...
- rpdillon 2mo agoWait: the entire premise of copyright is to prevent someone from publishing a book, and a competitor buys a copy, clones it, and sells copies way cheaper because they don't have to pay the author. Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make available for print-on-demand. The uncomfortable reality is that most of these books are nothing anyone cares about. Even the book sellers in the 404 story call them dead inventory. Can we get some actual book titles into the discussion so we can focus on facts rather than speculation?
- alightsoul 2mo agoThis is not a technical problem at all. This is a copyright problem. Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem until they had to pay 1.5 billion after they lost a copyright court case Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and publishes it, risking copyright violation when done at large scale due to possible exceptions to this rule
- Sha1rholder 2mo ago> Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem Did they? Then why did they "don't want anyone to know about this"? Or do you think their lawyers are dumb?
- dukeyukey 2mo agoI imagine they know the public would react like the public is reacting. Like obviously this is not worse than what libraries and thrift shops do daily, but it is bad optics.
- HedonicEscal8r 2mo agoIf only this complaint was being posted by an organization ideologically opposed to copyright itself!
- RajT88 2mo agoThe articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.
- runarberg 2mo agoAt this scale, there are no guarantees of anything. There very likely will be unique copies in there. If these were expert archivists a lot of damage could be prevented, but given the malice and indifference of AI companies, there very likely will not be an expert archivist involved, and unique copies will be destroyed unceremoniously.
- eru 2mo agoMy personal wastebook at home is so rare, it's unique. That doesn't mean it needs preservation.
- runarberg 2mo agoLike I said, at this scale, there are no guarantees for anything. Very likely will there be a unique copy of an invaluable book or letter an the person feeding it to the scanner will not know and the book get destroyed. Like did Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson ever write an a book about Esperanto, and send the only copy of it to Halldór Laxness when he was in Los Angeles? I don‘t know, but it is certainly something he is likely to have done. If such a book exists it would be invaluable to both Icelandic culture and to Esprentists. It likely would have stayed in Los Angeles where nobody would know the significance of it until it ended up in an estate sale, a used book store, and then finally destroyed by an AI company never to be discovered. My hypothetical is just one of trillions of possibilities. At this scale very likely several of these possibilities will unessiseraly remain unknown unknowns forever.
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- raincole 2mo ago> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap. Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.
- remus 2mo ago> ...AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap. There is also a legal element. If they kept the physical copy around after scanning the argument is that they're making copies of the book which puts them on tricky legal ground. By destroying the physical copy they can argue that there is only one version of the book that now exists solely in digital form, so this usage is better protected under fair use.
- cm2012 2mo agoYes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.
- wesleywt 2mo agoThey are scanning "rare" books. I presume there are not a lot of copies left to throw out.
- joshstrange 2mo agoRare by whose definition? I’m not aiming this at you directly by: ISBNs or STFU Show me which “rare” books they are destroying and _maybe_ I’ll care but so far the pearl-clutching over this leads me to believe it’s people worked up about the idea of destroying (except it’s not destroying, it’s transforming, a fact often ignored) books, books that it’s not clear at all there is any strong demand for. People want to invoke things like F451 but it doesn’t compare in the slightest. It’s like when people get mad about libraries throwing away or otherwise liquidating books that no one is reading in order to bring in books people want to read. People get all up in arms about that as if a book itself, in isolation, is inherently valuable or worth protecting. It’s not. If no one wants to read it then what value does it have? The impetus is on the people that think the book has value, it’s on them to carry the torch, to preserve what they think is worthy. It would be like a company going to a yard sale and buying unsold/unwanted items to 3D scan them and destroy them in the process. This isn’t breaking into the Louvre and destroying one-of-a-kind artwork.
- squidbeak 2mo ago> Show me which “rare” books they are destroying and _maybe_ I’ll care but so far the pearl-clutching over this BBC good enough for you? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's. "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century. "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
- ls-a 2mo ago[dead]
- sophacles 2mo agoIf you're buying second hadn books by the lot, you'll get a lot of duplicates and its eaiser to scan wholesale and dedupe in the computers than it is to try to run a sorting operataion on "things".
- jscd 2mo agoSorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense? Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way? Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.
- scarmig 2mo agoRelinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work. Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.
- jeroenhd 2mo agoAI companies are buying the physical books, they can turn them into confetti if that's what they want to do. If the physical books are running out, the authors can print and sell more. Or they can sell digital copies so the information is not lost. The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them.
- jscd 2mo ago> The law is currently forcing these companies to destroy the books after scanning them. No, the law is stopping them from digitally sharing their scans. They are perfectly capable of reselling or donating or storing the books they buy. (Wasn’t Amazon originally a book seller?)
- ezfe 2mo ago> Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense? digitize: no, there's no burden to do this freely distribute: no, there's no burden to do this use it or lose it on the copyright: yes; if a work is copyright but a publisher doesn't want to make new copies because they won't make money on it then it should be free to copy
- wotamess 2mo ago"want to ingest" Not "need to ingest" Copyright holders are capitalizing on laws on the books just like Jeff Bezos companies buying their own copies to shred So in the end it's really a Congress problem as usual
- customguy 2mo ago> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.
- postepowanieadm 2mo agoBy destroying them they don't copy only convert them into another format.
- hparadiz 2mo agoThere was a court case where they said that if they copied the books it's not fair use because they didn't own it but if they bought physical copies and then destroyed them then somehow it was fair use because it fell into the niche of personal backups. I forget the details but basically they buy one time prints and destroy them immediately.
- customguy 2mo agoI had no idea about that, or how fucking bad this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama So I stand corrected: at least some don't do it because it's cheaper (than to buy a license, or simply forego some things), but because they're fucking evil, or so stupid that it effectively is the same as being extremely evil.
- skeledrew 2mo agoThey do it because, for each work, they bought one copy, which they scan and no longer need the physical version of, and would be in copyright violation if they keep more copies than they bought.
- annapanna 2mo ago>and would be in copyright violation if they keep more copies than they bought. They can contact the copyright holder and ask/buy a license to make multiple copies.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoCopyright holders are certainly responsible for keeping unavailable works inaccessible, but shredding is mostly an industrial scanning decision, not a copyright requirement
- ezfe 2mo agoIt’s the outcome of a US court case that requires destruction of the original work
- wesleywt 2mo agoI was wondering what the pro book shredding take was going to be. Why destroy the book after scanning? You can create a beautiful library of rare books with all the AI debt bubble.
- watwut 2mo agoCopyright allows you to sell book you have and does not force you to shread it. They are not forced to shread them by copyright.
- signa11 2mo agomr. vernor-vinge's "Rainbows End" is oddly prescient ! Highly recommended nevertheless.
- bondarchuk 2mo agoWe the people in the society who have the power to make laws through democratic means are the ones locking these books up.
- ctm92 2mo agoThey also only scan books that are easily and cheaply available, which means they are either not rare or have no significance. Books that are rare of have historic significance will surely be in museums or libraries and not going away for pennies.
- ajsnigrutin 2mo agoIt's also the regulation, where most systems still look at "one pirate copy" = "one sale of lost profits", especially when pirates end up in court. If the book (or game or whatever) is not sold anymore in any way where you could give the copyright holder money in an easy accessible way (eg. buy it on amazon, or a local bookstore), they shouldn't be able to claim losses from piracy, since they clearly don't want your money. On the other hand, there are grey zones here, the lord of the rings books (still copyrighted and easily obtained pretty much everywhere) have been translated into my language many decades ago, and many of us read and liked those translations, but when the movies came out, a new translator did a new translation, where they changed a lot of things, including the last names of bilbo and frodo (Bogataj->Bisagin) and the Shire (Grofija->Šajerska), and the old version is sadly available only in paper form on second hand markets. On one hand, copying that if you only want this specific version would not cause a lost sale, on the other, you can get new translations (or english originals) pretty much everywhere.
- asdefghyk 2mo agoRE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...." Why are AI companies forced to shred books?
- jeroenhd 2mo agoThey want to have a digital copy and the judge ruled they can only keep one copy.
- drtgh 2mo agoYou do not need to shred books to scan them. This only happens if you don't care about preserving the integrity of the books and you want to scan more cheaply.
- jeroenhd 2mo agoBut their legal framework for being permitted to scan the books en masse (they are "transforming" the book from physical to digital) requires destruction of the original. Otherwise it wouldn't be transforming, it would be duplicating.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- asdefghyk 2mo agoOK that action allows them to do the transformation. But how about the importing into the AI tool? Does this "transformation" somehow override the authors complaints of AI taking their book and not compensating the authors for its mass usage in the AI tool.
- drtgh 1mo agoThen, should we hope they do not do backups, as they would be duplicating. And that they delete the files (zeroing from the disk) when such books are loaded into memory as technically it would be duplicating also. The same if they use different machines simultaneously.
- ranit 2mo ago> Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy. The OP article sounds quite opposite though - that AI companies are doing exactly this - destroying books so only they have the scanned content.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2mo agoNot the copyright holders, "we the people": Copyright is an artificial legal construct that was repeatedly ratcheted up over and over again. Unfortunately 50 years after the death of the author (or 50 years after publication for corporate owned works) has been locked in as a minimum term through international treaties, so it'll be somewhat hard to lower it beyond that, but many countries (including the US) enforce much longer terms, so that would be a first lever that could be applied quickly. Maybe countries could could also establish an exception for out of print books offered to the public for free, or a general "library exemption" for public archives after a certain number of years? I'm sure one of the AI companies would be willing to host a LibGen style library as a PR measure if legally allowed (with sign up required for rate limiting and as an extra benefit for the company to get daily active users).
- lkbm 2mo agoWith many old books, a big part of the problem is that it's non-trivial to determine who owns the copyright. Sometimes the contract would say the copyright reverts to the author after a certain amount of time out of print,but you have to go dig through old contracts to figure out whether that's the case for any given book.
- imperio59 2mo agoGetting 10 million people to do anything is really, really hard. Getting 10 million people to spend hours scanning a book (which takes a really long time with a home scanner) sounds impossible :(
- alightsoul 2mo agoNo it is not. https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1vrvt9e/athome_scanning_recommendations https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1vrvt9e/athome_s...
- userbinator 2mo agoIn the context of books, "scanning" is now more commonly something that should be called "camming" --- you simply point a camera at the book, and take a picture of every page.
- qingcharles 2mo agoNot everyone should scan stuff. If you spend any serious time looking through stuff that randos on the Internet have scanned the quality fits the Bell Curve perfectly. Biggest problems: - scanning items that are bigger than the scanner platten so the start/end of every line is cut off. - becoming an "editor": scanning only the pages you think are interesting and skipping intros, forewords, title pages, copyright pages etc I work in this space. I now require that before scanning a video is made carefully flicking through every page of the item so it can be checked after scanning to ensure all the pages are present and in the original order. Even the big libraries fuck up. I wanted an intact copy of Harper's Weekly from 1900 that has a big fold-out map in it. It's not clear to the libraries scanning this issue that the map is missing from their copies. None of the copies for sale from dealers have the map. Even when it is still glued into the middle it gets missed by industrial scanners. Google's scan only includes the (blank) back of the folded map. Luckily GPT was able to track down a copy in a university special collections and fired off an email asking them to scan it. I just got the scan today: https://imgur.com/a/vgMkM7b https://imgur.com/a/vgMkM7b (preview size, they sent a 500MB TIFF) Now I can reassemble the issue and upload it. I spend a lot of tokens getting LLMs vision tools to find the missing pages in vintage items and then try to reassemble them from other scans where available. I'm also splitting up volumes to reupload. A lot of periodicals are only available online as giant multi-gig volume PDFs with all the issues in one file. I have a separate app I wrote to scan all the pages looking for covers so they can be split into PDFs and then identifying the volume/issue/month/year data from the cover or title page.
- xvxvx 2mo agoPretty funny that they just took Anna’s archive and ingested it. As for the story: they make it sound like AI companies are buying up all existing copies of rare books and stealing the knowledge, which isn’t the case, as far as I know.
- HedonicEscal8r 2mo agoThe piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art. I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.
- Cider9986 2mo agoYou can donate with over 20 different payment methods after making an anonymous account. https://annas-archive.gl/donate https://annas-archive.gl/donate
- Levitz 2mo agoIt's an excellent play by them, using moral outrage to the benefit of the project. When life gives you lemons...
- tene80i 2mo agoPlenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.
- guax 2mo agoOr not being able to. Regional licensing, missing and shuffling content. To watch the world cup I had to spin up a VM in Brazil to watch it with Portuguese narration because the free transmissions are region locked. I would gladly pay 5 bucks for it if it was possible otherwise and avoid the hassle.
- tene80i 2mo agoThere was no way in your country to pay and watch it? FIFA will have sold the tv rights there to someone, surely. In which case your complaint is what, that it was expensive?
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- shakna 2mo agoI wholeheartedly believe the AI controversy on destroying books is being stirred up by the companies themselves. Copyright law requires you destroy a book, if you format shift it. If you digitise, you need to ensure its not a "copy" but that your one license went with the book. So... If enough people complain, they get to pressure for copyright changes. Which will just so happen to have massive carveouts to let them do whatever they want.
- breezybottom 2mo agoSince when do AI companies care about the law? Most of their training data is pirated.
- shakna 2mo agoThe headlines about destruction came not soon after they got rapped on the knuckles and told "no more pirating".
- tkel 2mo agoNo, the destructive book scanning was happening before that.
- shakna 2mo agoRight. Because that's the easiest way to comply with the law. I'm not arguing that. I am, arguing that they're using it to make headlines, and stir up anger, as a wedge to trigger changes to copyright. Easier to make more than one change, once the door is opened up.
- blooalien 2mo ago> Since when do AI companies care about the law? Most of their training data is pirated. I imagine since the law recently cost one of them truckloads of money for their violations of it?
- altcognito 2mo ago
- landgenoot 2mo agoIsn't this a matter of regulation? I'm not sure about US, but in EU you have old houses/buildings that are protected. Sure, you can buy them, but you can't modify or destroy them (being cultural heritage).
- eru 2mo agoMost old books aren't worth protecting, and the publishing industry destroys oodles of them as waste that no one wants.
- mycall 2mo agoAren't AI companies all about the rare book auctions now?
- whycombinetor 2mo agoIt's giving Vishnu, but the world cannot exist without Shiva.
- c0lpan1c 2mo agothat's ironic, the url annas-archive.gl is blocked by my local DNS category for AI Threat Detection.
- alightsoul 2mo agoUse a vpn
- tptacek 2mo agoThese stories are weird, because actual professional specialized book dealers pulp books by the millions. People keep pointing out, and it doesn't seem to sink in, that model trainers only have use for a single copy of a book. Even if they were literally burning these books to spite you, they'd be destroying an infinitesimal fraction of the books the book trade already destroys. It is not natural in the industry to preserve books! It's tricky to even give most books away. Our library has big donation boxes, and my understanding is: most of those books are destroyed. The copyright thing I get, sort of (I mean, it's galling, because it's such a total special pleading argument from a cohort of people who otherwise have absolute contempt for copyright on anything other than code). The model trainers are getting away with something other people haven't gotten away with. OK, sure. But this seems like the AI water use story, where the reality is that existing industries do whatever the bad thing is at scales cosmically larger than AI ever could, and we're zeroing in on this weird little slice of it that AI does. Like, let me know when we stop growing pecans in the California desert, and then we can talk?
- Levitz 2mo agoThe outraged people don't care. They hate AI, and so anything surrounding AI that can be evil is evil. Books are good, AI destroys books, AI is bad. Furthermore, they like that AI is bad. Because they think it's bad, and being right feels good.
- tptacek 2mo agoI think people genuinely don't get that book destruction is like a pretty natural part of the book lifecycle.
- Levitz 2mo agoIt doesn't matter if they get it, because they wouldn't care either way. They would just pivot to "but more are destroyed this way" or "but these have value or they wouldn't buy them" or some variant of it. There is no logical train of thought. It's not about logic.
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- glimshe 2mo agoThe very first paragraph is fascinating: "Several AI companies are acquiring large quantities of secondhand books through intermediaries, scanning and destroying them, all to obtain training data “untouched by machines” from before 2022." Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time? Also, how useful old books really are for AI training besides helping AI acquire knowledge about history?
- eru 2mo ago> Is the corpus of human knowledge useful for high quality AI training now essentially frozen in time? No. They also use lots of other methods to get training data.
- npn 2mo agoNo but with 100% clean data you can easily train a model to filter ai generated content.
- ACCount37 2mo agoAs a rule: all high quality text is useful. There's no "2022 split", and the "untouched by machines" bit came from the marketing blurb of a company offering book scanning services - not the AI labs themselves. At the AI lab level: the book scanning seems to be driven by copyright concerns, not data contamination concerns. There was a concern about AI contamination, but there's no measurable performance loss from ingesting post-2022 data with minimal filtration, and some tests attribute small but persistent performance gains to post-2022 AI contamination. It's unclear where exactly do those gains come from. Why is all high quality text useful? The "inverse problem" framing is that all text reflects the thinking behind it, somewhat, and by learning to reproduce it, LLMs implicitly learn to reproduce some of the thought process too. They don't just memorize the dry factual knowledge, but also learn how that knowledge fits together, and how to reason about that knowledge - both in the specific case and in general. And that "in general" then surfaces in an LLM's ability to generalize. Which is very desirable.
- TiredOfLife 2mo agoAlso there was a highly discussed paper talking about how “touched by machines” content will kill llms. About a month after the papers first llms trained with “touched by machines” content appeared an the capabilities of the models got huge upgrade by using that dirty content
- Cider9986 2mo agoThe AI companies should work with the Internet Archive to release the digitized copies once the copyright expires. Unrelated: So with this one copy BS are you not allowed to have backups of the data?
- 0x0000F8_ 2mo agoI entirely believe the litigation brought against Internet Archive was secretly sponsored by these exact organizations, because they want to monopolize information to train models. No data => No models => No competition.
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo agoIA was in hot water already even before ChatGPT came out. > ChatGPT […] originally released on November 30, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT > On March 24, 2020, following shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive opened the National Emergency Library, removing the waitlists used in Open Library and expanding access to these books for all readers. More than one user could borrow a book at the same time. Two months later, on June 1, the National Emergency Library (NEL) was met with a lawsuit from four book publishers. Two weeks after that, on June 16, the Internet Archive closed the NEL, and the prior Open Library CDL system resumed after the 12 weeks of NEL usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachette_v._Internet_Archive
- visarga 2mo agoYeah, great logic, that way they are sure there are no extra copies around.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- globnomulous 2mo agoIs this a reference to Fahrenheit 451?
- BrenBarn 2mo agoIt's not a bad idea but we need a multi-pronged approach, with at least one other prong being "destroy the companies that are doing this".
- WillAdams 2mo ago"Whoever destroys a book destroys a link in the chain of human knowledge" -- Thos. Jefferson
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- pkaye 2mo agoPublic libraries destroy unsold book donations all the time. I often tried to give away some old books I have online and nobody wants them. Some of these books have some nostalgic value to me so I hate to see them just get destroyed so they just lie in my shed.
- winrid 2mo agoI have a copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (it's like 1k+ pages) with DESTROY written in red on the sides. I appreciate that someone saved it and sold it to me for cheap :)
- pkaye 2mo agoI have one of those I got second hand also. :)
- userbinator 2mo agoThat's an example of a "very much NOT rare" book, as you can easily find dozens of sources of scans online.
- winrid 2mo agoI wanted a physical copy, good ones are a few hundred bucks.
- WillAdams 2mo agoWhich is something I argue against constantly (and at least my local library tries hard not to) --- discarded books are placed on tables near the children's area usually and folks are free to pick them up (it might be that a few of them are sold, I certainly get a lot of ex-library books when buying on Thriftbooks and Better World Books). A partial solution there is of course a larger budget and a "last copy" policy where the last copy of a text at least is stored away in deep storage against a future loan. The local libraries also accept book donations for an annual fund-raising sale.
- jupp0r 2mo agoI highly doubt they destroy digital copies of the books after scanning. They will want to train their future models on the same content. So what prevents them from making these digital copies available to the public? Copyright!
- ColdStream 2mo agoThe question I have is, do these companies keep copies of the scans after they have finished training on them? If so, then it isn't the worst outcome. Not great but at least the information is not completely destroyed forever just the original physical being of it. Deeper thought however, eventually this will all be lost to time and I suspect that about 99% of all printed materials probably would never be read again simply due to the huge volume of it and sheer obscurity. Ernest Becker and his work 'The Denial of Death' might have some thoughts on this. go to any second hand book store and just pick out something at random from the 1950's for instance, something about pottery or bird watching or whatever. The history of Bisbee Arizona, I don't know. Look up the author, see if they even left a trace of their work and the vast majority of the time they have already been forgotten to the great void of the universe. In the end, it all goes away. Clinging only creates pain. I'm not saying that we should let them just do this, I am just saying that long term it is a tough battle to fight only to lose the war.
- SanjayMehta 2mo agoGoogle Books was a great resource until the lawyers got involved. I was able to find and download (one screenshot at a time) a rare family history. The author died 100 years ago. The published disappeared 80 years ago. But now Google has locked it behind a limited preview. Google probably has the best collection of high quality scans, followed by the Hathi Trust. None of which are useable by anyone outside of those systems.
- userbinator 2mo agoDoes Anna's Archive have it now? They scrape tons of sources, Google Books and HathiTrust included.
- qingcharles 2mo agoA lot of Hathi is locked behind university and library access restrictions. I sometimes have to track down students or someone who has a local library card to get items I need.
- SanjayMehta 2mo agoNot that I know of, I did upload the PDF to the original libgen but that particular domain has disappeared now.
- qingcharles 2mo agoI agree they're the best currently available, but a lot of their scans are straight garbage and need to be redone.
- SanjayMehta 2mo agoA garbage scan is better than no book at all. Fortunately the book I needed was a clean scan.
- altcognito 2mo agoWhat evidence do we have that they are "destroying" books? I'm not saying this in their defense, but as someone who has worked at companies who has scanned books at scale, and generally speaking, I wasn't on site there, but I knew we/they were pretty delicate with the books. And while the kneejerk reaction might be "hey, why would they go through the effort?" -- my guess is that they are following or even hiring people that have done this process in the past (out of laziness) and just follow what works easiest. The literal machinery is not designed to destroy the books for various practical reasons. Books that are bound are easier to be kept in order and work with. Getting a flat scan is done with specialized tools, you don't need to put it on a plate (it would be too slow that way anyway) All of the above is just to justify my question: Who knows that the books are being destroyed? (I also agree with the general sentiment that there's a good chance these books are just cheap and bulk, they aren't pulling one of a kind rare books.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rackp 2mo ago[dead]
- knowaveragejoe 2mo agoYes, we know they're destroying the books. Whether this is actually a problem or another convenient "AI bad" trope remains to be seen. https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-books-lawsuit?hl=en-US https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-boo...
- altcognito 2mo agoThank you! I wanted something beyond an article, but this was a perfect launching point for getting to the court case information: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v-anthropic-pbc/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v...
- mplewis 2mo agoCan someone name a rare book that was destroyed as part of AI scanning? I want to know what kind of thing we're losing.
- TomK32 2mo agoI've read a few of those articles in recent months, both in English and German, and I did read any book title that was rare. The Rare Book & Special Collection Div at the Library Congress considers books published before 1801 as rare. Searching for old books on abebooks is surprisingly hard but I didn't find any for less than 10 Euro and nothing in those articles suggested they were buying up anything but cheap books.
- partiallypro 2mo agoThe hysteria around AI and data centers has hit a precipice. It's actually a bit embarrassing now. I am pretty sure there are foreign adversaries that are trying to stop the US, but I also really blame the AI companies for doing the most horrendous job imaginable in pitching AI to the public. Not a shock that people are against something that tech bros have claimed will destroy everyone's lives in the next 5 years. These books were probably going into a landfill without AI companies getting them, regardless. Tons and tons of books go into the garbage every day.
- svachalek 2mo agoIt's weird what happens when you keep warning everyone you're building a product that will probably end human civilization.
- tamimio 2mo agoI can imagine 100y from now, most if not all books and knowledge are in electronic format or even just as part of an AI, then a wild solar flare wipes out all electronics in a minute..
- qwertytyyuu 2mo agoI'm sure the AI companies will retain scans of the books for training on newer models
- thuruv 2mo agoI am baffled at these practices and somewhere confused on what's the end game here? monopoly on information? altering data? exclusive subscription based knowledge? Feels like we have welcomed the AI era with open hands hoping( at-least assuming) that data democracy will be there, yet feels like its a long road!
- Cider9986 2mo agoThey likely would not destroy the original books after scanning but apparently it's the legal way to do things because of copyright.
- jsphweid 2mo agoTo clarify: Are they scanning and destroying a single copy of Book X or are they buying up all copies of book X, scanning it once, then destroying all copies of book X they can get their hand on?
- Ekaros 2mo agoThey are ordering books with ISBN. So I take that they are tracking what books they have scanned or pirated already and only picking up what they are missing. As just ordering mass bulk and getting 20 of the same encyclopaedia would be waste. And I guess something like encyclopaedia would be good example of book they scan. At one point popular, but with most copies destroyed as no one actually wants them anymore.
- bawolff 2mo agoThis whole situation is such a disgusting consequence of copyright law. The most frustrating part is that its so artificial. It is 100% the consequence of stupid laws.
- blooalien 2mo ago> It is 100% the consequence of stupid laws. More like the consequence of being unwilling to change stupid laws once the stupidity of them is discovered. Nope. Gotta double down on the stupidity instead...
- derektank 2mo agoI mean, everything about intellectual property is kind of inherently artificial tbf.
- silcoon 2mo agoAs much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge. On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create something themselves. Artists need some form of reward. On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors. This is scary, and it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451. Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write. But even more importantly, do not believe AI companies will help you discover and access knowledge. We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free, and LLMs capable of writing entire books for us. But there would be no human writers left. In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
- Cider9986 2mo ago>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read? Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.
- msftgreed 2mo agoThe human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history. People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.
- silcoon 2mo ago> Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction). > People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money. Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food. Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap. > they created literature before copyright was a thing. Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...
- ohthanks 2mo agoBeing purchased and juiced for model weights is about as noble of an end as any book could hope for.
- emtel 2mo ago“Rare books” usually refers to rare editions of books. Any books out there where there are only a few extent copies of the text itself, are probably not of very much interest or social value, since almost no one is able to read them, by definition. If you think there is priceless knowledge locked up in books so rare that it is on the verge of being lost forever, then AI labs are not really the problem!
- zahlman 2mo agoThe object itself is the valuable thing, not necessarily the text. Why are so many in the discussion overlooking something so obvious?
- jambalaya8 2mo agoSome people take used books and bleach out the text. Like that? I am pretty sure both have value, depending on whom you ask, but it seems dangerous to enable a sort of thought process that suggests if someone decides "humankind" needs something of yours, they can just demand you hand it over or let other people use it or have it even if you want to toss it. Like far worse than eminent domain law. Like, what if someone decided your personal diary was one of those books? Shiver.
- protocolture 2mo ago>It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible No its not. >but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity. Its only a crime if they dont also upload the scans to the internet. >After AI companies massively scan and destroy physical books, they become the only ones in the world with digital copies. Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers. This Law on the other hand is a crime against humanity. >Anna’s Archive needs a plan to combat the destruction of physical books by AI companies. No it doesnt. >If every person scans a book, and there are 10 million volunteers worldwide, we can obtain 10 million pieces of invaluable wealth. This however is an unvarnished good. Look, piracy is the only realistic media archive we have. We should be inviting, and working to eliminate opposition to, AI companies to assist in piracy. This US v Them mentality is weird. If Anthropic has 10 million books scanned, get a copy. Thank them for the copy. Spread the copy.
- wotamess 2mo ago[dead]
- sieve 2mo agoPhysical books and digital content is special in that you can mostly archive their content almost permanently for cheap. Buildings, paintings, idols, living things, natural features of the environment ... not so much. So the solution is: - mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired - a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books etc and keep the data on their servers. They should be able to issue digital membership cards for a fee so that patrons can access the archives. Any work that is "live" based on the registration database will be locked. All "dead" material can be shared with members. In this way, a hundred digital preservation societies can bloom.
- skeledrew 2mo ago> copyright This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.
- sieve 2mo agoI completely agree. IPR as a concept is suspect. But it is the world we live in, with timelines extending like crazy. There are works produced before I was born that will remain under protection till long after I am dead. A targeted modification to the laws could produce most of the benefits for a minor cost.
- theshrike79 2mo agoCopyright should be globally determined so that if I cant pay fair market value for a piece of content, it's deemed out of copyright protection and I can use whatever means to get it digitally. Like if a game isn't available for sale anywhere in my region, I can get it without breaking any laws. A book is out of print and I can't pay money for it digitally -> free game. (Why "fair market value?": So that skeezy publishers don't have an online shop with one physical copy of every book they own for $1Trillion just to fulfill the law)
- imperfect_light 2mo agoPeople keep repeating the "rare books" without providing any evidence that they are rare. Anyone who has collected books knows there are massive volumes of old books that can be bought by the pound.
- Ekaros 2mo agoI feel they are thinking first printing of some mega classic or hand drawn book from antiquity. I am thinking of some generic romance or thriller from no name author bought at airport... Or some generic book on say birds or animals... Stuff that they would not take if given a full box for free.
- tokai 2mo agoAny named book I have seen in the coverage of this are cheap crap books, that are available somewhere in the word from a public library. Its literal trash.
- skeledrew 2mo agoMaybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set. I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be outraged at AI companies and scan books now. What about before when they were still mostly locked away from the world? It's only when they're actually being made available to - at least a part of - the broader world that they're a "cultural heritage" worth preserving. Shame.
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- guax 2mo agoI think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people. If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential. I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.
- skeledrew 2mo agoShouldn't they be allowed to do whatever they want with the copy they bought, and so legally own? Isn't that the entire purpose behind "copy right"?
- xvilka 2mo agoIt would be nice if we have some "tracking" e.g. 30% of all known books are scanned. So far all information I searched in the Internet about the progress has been patchy. It's also impossible to understand if exact book was ever digitized or not.
- Cider9986 2mo agoAnna's archive estimates that they have preserved 16% of the world's books. https://annas-archive.gl/faq https://annas-archive.gl/faq
- philipswood 2mo agoI'm interested in learning/teaching technologies. Naturally science fiction examples are interesting. I have found that often LLMs are familiar with the contents of SF books. But I feel poorer, almost deprived, by the fact that all the LLMs I've checked with have NOT been trained on the contents of Eon by Greg Bear.
- Alifatisk 2mo agoDoes it exist in the web at all? Could be the contents have not been scraped for the dataset yet.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoA genuinely useful project would identify publications that are actually rare, poorly catalogued, or held by only a few libraries, then prioritize those for careful preservation
- Gander5739 2mo agoSee https://annas-archive.gl/blog/worldcat-editions-and-holdings.html https://annas-archive.gl/blog/worldcat-editions-and-holdings..., nearer the end
- Cider9986 2mo agohttps://annas-archive.gl/isbn-visualization https://annas-archive.gl/isbn-visualization
- fmajid 2mo agoAren’t publishers required to deposit a copy with the Library of Congress (in the US), or the British Library (in the UK) etc. to claim copyright?
- lazzlazzlazz 2mo agoAren't the AI companies just buying one copy of each book? And this is supposed to be concerning?
- tkel 2mo agoThe blog post is about rare books. Meaning, AI companies scanning and destroying rare books.
- lazzlazzlazz 2mo agoYes, read more carefully: one copy. Do you panic when the "wrong person" buys a single rare book? The issue is that the copyright holders and book publishers make it hard to make more copies, not that somebody bought a single copy of a book, no matter how rare. If you could print any book on demand (paying for it), the issue would vanish instantly. And who makes that decision?
- finn888 2mo agoThe scan existing but staying locked inside a training pipeline is barely better than the book going to a landfill. At least make the raw scans available.
- jeroenhd 2mo agoLossily stuffing books into a model through a training process has so far been deemed legal. Enabling piracy by giving away digital copies is not. The internet archive tried to give away digital copies and they got sued to hell and back (which they should've seen coming from miles away). I'm sure they have some repository available somewhere. They can even sell the digital copies down the line if they're done with them (only once, of course).
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago>Lossily stuffing books into a model through a training process has so far been deemed legal Not in the EU, UK, or US. "AI" companies were already forced to settle their piracy cases, but often they get a free pass by law enforcement via regulatory capture. The problem is a book author contracted publisher does not assign legal rights of duplication to a company/individual that buys a legitimate print. It can take over 70 years in some places to become public domain. The core issue is "AI" firms have so much borrowed cash around, that getting a $1.5B fine for being a pirate is taken as a cost of doing business. The law is simply not equipped to handle this type of hyper-scaling criminal act. =3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
- jeroenhd 2mo agoThe piracy lawsuits have so far only deemed that obtaining books through pirating is a violation of copyright. Training the models on them and reselling model access has yet to be ruled illegal, from my understanding, even though there has been plenty of opportunity to. Anthropic's crime wasn't stealing the contents of books and making a derivative work of it, but torrenting a shitload of books. Had they bought all the ebooks, I don't think the lawsuit would've gone anywhere.
- jiaosdjf 2mo agoBOYCOTT. It's that simple, these corps have once again broken the social contract, you must not reward them. OpenAI and Anthropic especially, both owned by schizo sociopathic elites. Just use Chinese open models on 3rd party providers or more ethical companies. This is literally the only power you have outside of Luigi, you're not going to fix anything with a letter writing campaign. We are entering a fight for survival so you really need to step up your game and stop letting elites run over you. Today it's just books and manipulating society, tomorrow they will track and punish your behaviour and the control will only get worse. These people are pure fucking evil and we need to start acting like it while we literally still have the freedom and privacy to organise.
- christkv 2mo agoDo you mean rare as in old? I doubt they are destroying old books because most of them are out of copyright and probably available already as text. I imagine this applies to in copyright works and I do NOT condone it but the way this is told it sounds like they are raiding old libraries to destroy first editions of Cervantes.
- everyday7732 2mo agoHow long until someone starts making fake rare books to sell to AI companies?
- warkdarrior 2mo ago> Our ideal is to scan and upload all the world’s publications before publishers completely block knowledge, and before AI companies scan and destroy all the world’s books and papers. Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.
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- torh 2mo agoAt least there will be a copy left for us. The AI companies won't share these books in their original form.
- brainwad 2mo agoBecause it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things. Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.
- xandrius 2mo agoGoogle probably wanted to sell the whole of Google Books.
- naasking 2mo agoYes, government regulations are almost always behind commercial entities making seemingly irrational choices.
- Paratoner 2mo agoThe poow AI execs being forced to commit acts of intewwectual tewwowist when all they wanted was to cynicawwy make the wowld a wowse place
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
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- eulgro 2mo agoWe've been seeing that headline for a few weeks now and I really don't understand the problem. Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays. Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable. So what's the problem here exactly? Also from the article: > It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity. I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.
- josem 2mo agoI think the problem is precisely that for some books there are not too many copies around like you described and if they destroy them we might eventually lose access to them directly. It might sound too extreme, but I understand the fear behind this.
- FartyMcFarter 2mo agoThe problem is we don't know what we're losing, due to lack of transparency.
- xandrius 2mo agoThe problem is that you probably do little research or read very few old books. There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past. You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that. Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.
- ZoomZoomZoom 2mo agoThe main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Trying to keep an edge with their training sets? Isn't it ridiculous, considering the sheer size of them and statistical insignificance of the set differences?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Why on earth would they? Ultimate point for these companies is to make a ton of money, obviously they won't shoot themselves in the foot and give away whatever advantage they have, especially not to a free archive which is about doing good in the world, which probably isn't profitable enough for a company to care about.
- Filligree 2mo agoBecause that’s illegal.
- onionisafruit 2mo agoExactly. They set up this operation specifically to comply with the letter of copyright law and defend against publisher law suits. “Leaking” to Anna’s Archive is the last thing they’re going to do.
- ZoomZoomZoom 2mo agoThe illegal part is (or ideally should be) using the books in their training. The morally right action is to make it public afterwards.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? How is this a question at all? They’re scanning books because the courts determined that it’s the only way to use that data. They are forbidden from using digital copies found on places like Anna’s Archive. They must acquire and scan the book. They cannot redistribute the book. The Internet Archive tried that and the courts shut it down. You cannot scan a book and share it without violating copyright law.
- ziyadb 2mo agoI was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are the most important things that we must ensure continue. From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available. As stated in my first paragraph, they are not the exclusive stewards of humanity despite them anointing themselves as such. Granted, a lot of these books might not be that useful, but still a relic of times pre-machine generated text, which makes them valuable if only for their archival value.
- smalltorch 2mo agoSurely they have the high quality scans, but there would probably be the same legal restrictions to just share the archive.
- Filligree 2mo agoObviously. Copyright infringement is settled law.
- merely-unlikely 2mo agoCopyright infringement has a long and deep bank of caselaw but as Anthropic has already discovered, it is not entirely "settled."
- JKCalhoun 2mo agoI'm only one person, but I scan old books that had an impact on me growing up, and upload them to archive.org. Thankfully there are others that do the same. (And to be sure, FWIW, these are books that have not been printed for about 50 years—I suppose the software community would call them abandonware.)
- m00dy 2mo agoSince when books have become a supply limited asset ?
- JsonDemWitOster 2mo agoEver since someone dredged up this old nothingburger of news from 2024 and made it the latest outrage bait.
- simmerup 2mo agoTry and read a book that’s been burnt and find out
- ForHackernews 2mo agoProject Unica is an initiative by the University of Illinois Libraries to scan and preserve publications that exist as only a single known copy: https://news.illinois.edu/u-of-i-librarys-project-unica-preserves-books-so-rare-they-exist-in-only-one-copy/ https://news.illinois.edu/u-of-i-librarys-project-unica-pres...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2mo agoWhat often gets missed is that they are buy one physical copy and turning it into a digital copy. They have done zero to destroy the durability. In fact, it’s probably more durable. If the physical copies are scarce, that is due to the publisher and copyright laws and not them buying and converting a single copy.
- JohnFen 2mo ago> turning it into a digital copy. Are they? Or are they just using it for training and not keeping the digital copy afterwards? And even if they are keeping a digital copy, does that actually matter if they never release it?
- Filligree 2mo agoThey are. They can’t release it; that would be copyright infringement. But they’re absolutely planning to make further use of the book later.
- SkyBelow 2mo agoThe data of such a copy is nothing compared to the wider picture and the data can be used for future training, so even from a purely self interest perspective, they should be keeping the copy. As for long term benefits, it could one day be sold as a service, once copyrights have expired on the works. We can't see it today, but that is purely the result of the law and what the law intended to do from the start, you don't see a copy unless you pay for your own.
- tsukikage 2mo ago> Or are they just using it for training You’re making a distinction here, but training is something you repeat for every new point release, so you need to keep the data if you want to use it for training.
- nijave 2mo ago>that is due to the publisher and copyright laws Agree. While it certainly isn't the most environmentally friendly to render huge stacks of paper into waste, the real issue is copyright creating scarcity (inability to copy the thing).
- pmoriarty 2mo agoBecause of copyright issues, countless books between around the 1930s until about 2000 were never digitized. After around 2000 books started coming out in digital format, so at least there are digital copies of many of those, even if they are still under copyright.
- azatom 2mo agoI dunno, that "at least" worries me, digital actually more easier to be lost if it is under copyright, they just got deleted if they can not produce enough money. Physical may have higher chance to survive.
- CamelCaseName 2mo agoYou ask "Why destroy physical books?" I ask "Why save physical books?" If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere. Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless. I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.
- vasco 2mo agoI agree with you for the same reason I think McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world!
- ainiriand 2mo agoThat's what state libraries are for, although I understand that sometimes is hard to wrap around the concept of using public money for something different than producing money.
- tele_ski 2mo agoSo these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory
- grammarisking 2mo ago[dead]
- ryandvm 2mo agoIt seems like it would be well within the charter of the Library of Congress to archive a complete scan of every book published in the United States. At least then we wouldn't lose the information. They can figure out distribution and copyright later.
- JsonDemWitOster 2mo agoThe US Library of Congress is already a book depository, i.e., it has a copy of every book published in the United States. Same for the British Library for the UK and Ireland. Similar depositories exist for most other countries who care for their culture. Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.
- hoppp 2mo agoShould be illegal to burn books for this reason. Burning 1 book as a protest, fine. But burning a lot to destroy information? Hell no.
- carlosjobim 2mo agoI would suppose that most of the rare books in the world aren't for sale, so run no risk of being digitized and destroyed by Anthropic? They are probably forgotten somewhere on a shelf or in a box, slowly rotting. The reason these books are rare being that nobody wants them.
- cladopa 2mo agoIt is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity. By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books. If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.
- brightball 2mo agoWhenever my wife wants to visit antique stores, I always look for old books. I have found several 100+ year old gems.
- pshirshov 2mo agoRead more about this. Depends on the definition of the "big deal" but from what I can understand the problem is that they buy rare things - which exist in just several copies - and they tend to buy _all_ copies.
- spwa4 2mo agoThe problem is the choice made here: this is the world's 2 major governments choosing to give very large legal advantages to AI models, over actual people, in copyright. US and EU governments obviously want AI models to make everything from books to movies in the future, and this is a conscious choice both governments are making without consulting people. Here's another question: The exact reasoning for copyright is made clear in the constitution: "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor. Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore. If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system? But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good. Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front. To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all? But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models. I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law! The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law. Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations: a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition. b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights. Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making. [1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa-4b01-9605-669b634f3007_en?filename=Commission-internal-use-of-AI-factsheet.pdf https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa... [2] in their source you can see what models they were likely using internally 2 years ago: https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client
- shrubble 2mo agoAI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change. I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...
- dqv 2mo agoThe other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered. It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.
- phoronixrly 2mo agoThey could be, however that would weaken their position as the sole source of knowledge which seems to me is half the purpose of their book destroying initiative.
- dqv 2mo agoThat's why the "but it's illegal" propaganda is so unconvincing for me. It's really "but it's illegal (and we want to keep it that way)".
- shagie 2mo agoCopyright law is an implementation of international treaties. Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention (182 parties) TRIPS Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement (164 parties - part of WTO) The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO. The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image. Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content. https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/fair-use-reformatting-media https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/fair-use-reformatti... Under § 106 of the Copyright Law of the United States, the owner of the copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies of that work, unless an exception applies. When considering reformatting media, please note that individuals do not have an automatic right to reformat a work from one format to another. In order to legally convert media, your use must fall into one of the following categories: you own the copyright in the work, you have permission from the owner of the copyright, or you have done a fair use analysis and have determined that fair use applies
- maxdo 2mo agoOk . How trustworthy is the claim . It maid by a resource that on its own has problems with copyright. Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge. It seems the initiative was secretive for a different reason . Buying a single book not allows you to distribute the content of the book , hence 1.5 billions fines. Usually I personally not on copyright people side , but in this case you clearly see the system functioning. Know knows how the book business will look like in 10 years , but now book publishers doing their job by brining ai companies to court
- thisisauserid 2mo agoSecond Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (in favor of Google) 2015 that similar actions constituted "fair use".
- greenavocado 2mo agoDuring World War II and its immediate aftermath, between 35 million and 40 million books were destroyed in Germany due to Allied actions
- danparsonson 2mo agoThey did rather bring that on themselves though
- timcobb 2mo agoBut think of the books!
- maxlin 2mo agoIt is quite disappointing to see them not using the type of machines that don't actually destroy the books, like, afaik, Internet Archive is using. Using a few gas generators for a transitional period isn't great either, but effect of those is very temporary. I fear permanence in this individual deal with the devil made for speed and cost.
- shevy-java 2mo agoBut scanning the books also helps those AI companies because ultimately they want more data. Yes, they also destroy rare books to sabotage competitors, and thus also damage global society - a reason why these evil companies should be disbanded - but the article seems to not put any thoughts into things here, other than the superficial "they destroy books".
- ahoka 2mo agoI guess they just cut the spines to speed scan the pages with a machine and then the resulting pile of papers is no longer worth anything, so they just dispose of it.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoAgain, rare and valuable are not the same thing. A $2 bill is not as valuable as you think it is, unless you think it is $2.
- danparsonson 2mo agoValue is entirely in the eye of the beholder - money itself only has value because enough of us agree that it does.
- pessimizer 2mo agoNo, it has value because it is the only means that are absolutely accepted to pay taxes and most legal judgements (i.e. obligations to the state that issued that currency.) If you don't have dollars and you need to pay US taxes, you have got to get some or you will go to jail. It's not bitcoin.
- danparsonson 2mo agoYou just said the same thing that I did - "enough of us" includes your government.
- bhouston 2mo agoWhy not force them to release their records? Some legislation would help. If they are scanning the world's books, the results should be open.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- starkd 2mo agoHow is Anna's Archive getting around the copyright violations of hosting all these books for access to all? I suspect it won't be long before they get sued and are forced to shut down. I spent some time reading the web site, and it doesn't look to be a well thought out project. Even the way it is organized leaved much to be desired. There's much more to library science and the organization of a vast collection of books than meets the eye.
- archonis 2mo agoAnna's Archive merely indexes copyrighted content. It doesn't host.
- cormorant 2mo agoThey evade judicial enforcement and try to stay anonymous. They've certainly already been sued (and lost by not even turning up). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#March_2026_publishers_lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive#March_2026_pu... (Contrast to Sci-Hub trying to defend themselves in court, in India, and that leading to no new articles since several years ago.)
- TaLiTr 2mo agoUnlike archive.org which is a real business, Anna's Archive is basically piracy. You could try to sue them but you'd have to find them first. This IMO makes them more resilient against that sort of thing, and also means they can actually do their job.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- branon 2mo agoI have a year membership to AA now, been meaning to contribute for some time, archive.org is next on the list Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded
- afpx 2mo agoarchive.org is an incredible blessing that I never really respected enough until the last few years. I have bookmarks going back to the 90s, and for some reason, starting in 2015 or so, sites just started disappearing. I estimate at least 20% of my bookmarks are 404 now.
- cormorant 2mo agoarchive.org itself reminds me of the Library of Alexandria. It is irreplaceable, and this is a disaster waiting to happen.
- akk0 2mo agoI imagine they are only buying one copy of each book, thus only significantly affecting the supply of books that were already unfathomably rare. That may still be bad, but doesn't really support the "scan every book you can get your hands on before they are gone" narrative. That doesn't mean I'm against that narrative; I'm a big supporter of shadow libraries and scanning every unscanned book. But connecting to the LLM narrative here seems opportunistic and populistic.
- brookst 2mo agoThe dissonance when a cause you support is loudly represented by disingenuous types. At some point they’ll hit on data center water consumption as yet another reason to support the cause.
- dbspin 2mo agoDoubtful. A robust protocol would be to scan several of each edition (to ensure no scanning errors), and scan each edition. Then too, these books are being purchased in lots with accidental duplicates, and all the major labs are doing it. So we're likely talking about tens of each book. For rare books - anything over a couple of hundred years old or small print runs either, that could well be most or even all copies. This wouldn't be immediately noticed either, especially if the books aren't currently considered noteworthy or well known.
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago"I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book…" I doubt that corporations of this scale do that extra kind of… book-keeping. They more than likely buy books by the pound.
- OtherShrezzing 2mo ago>I imagine they are only buying one copy of each book The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month. I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".
- JsonDemWitOster 2mo agoSorry for the copy-paste from elsewhere. I'm probably doxxing my online accounts with this. 100% my words tho and 100% I stand by this. Really can't wait for this outrage cycle to finally die. There's a lot AI companies are doing wrong. The wording of Project Panama is really some villain-type shit. But if you stop and think about it, this is really not concerning. Like, at all. 0. In the Anglosphere, the British Library (UK and Ireland) and the US Library of Congress (USA) preserves all books published in their territories. So if Anthropic is pulling a 1984/Fahrenheit 451, "gating access to information", they are really doing a ridiculously bad job at it. I'm pretty certain similar depositories exist for other jurisdictions. 1. Rare does not automatically mean it has some obscure knowledge nor does it mean culturally/historically significant. The oldest book the news outlets could mention is a 1970s manual on soil mechanics (Guardian link in your sources). How "obscure" is the knowledge in there, you reckon? How culturally significant is that book? Odds are, a good chunk of that book is outdated knowledge at this point, useless for anything practical other than knowing what people in the 70s thought about soil mechanics. And for the latter, there are a bunch of other soil mechanics manuals from the 1970s lying around. 2. No, despite the admittedly cartoonishly villainous description of Project Panama, Anthropic is not out to get every single manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s out there. They just need to cover enough subject breadth in their training data set. Getting redundant copies is a waste of money. See also, point 0. 3. You argue a lot for the nostalgia and sentimentality of old books, which, okay, but that is hardly beside the point. Libraries and publishers destroy books at a greater scale than Project Panama when there's not enough demand for them. That's not an affront to history or culture just the consequence of economics (see also, point 0). Similarly, y'all outraged about old and second hand books being destroyed but odds are, they would've been trashed anyway even if Anthropic didn't get their hands on them. We've had all the time in the world for someone else to buy them to keep them from big bad Anthropic but no one did. I'm just happy for the booksellers who made some money out of this AI-infected timeline. 4. It's not like Anthropic is buying books from Dr. James Justin Sledge---books not covered by point 0 in other words---and chopping that up. The fact that one of their reported suppliers is "ISBNdb" should clue you in that they are interested in books from the ISBN era (and hence covered by point 0). Fact is, it's a terrible investment to "gate knowledge" from the really rare and old and culturally significant books. They are über expensive and for what? Even more useless is the AI trained on those books! Imagine asking ChatGPT how to cook a large squid and it answers in the style of Thomas Hobbes.
- Razengan 2mo agoIdeally, governments or international organizations should be doing this: "harvesting" all the media output by humanity and making it available for everyone, similar to the Library of Congress etc. Heck even YouTube should be legally obligated to preserve videos, given how they now hold the largest visual documentation of human history.
- lo_fye 2mo agoThe price they should have to pay for destroying a rare book (just to scan it) is making a pristine high resolution digital copy of it available to the public at no cost whatsoever.
- juiceland 2mo agoWhy are people acting like books can’t be reprinted?
- letmetweakit 2mo agoYou have to have a sample to be able to reprint it.
- infecto 2mo agoI genuinely have yet to connect on this idea that we are “burning Alexandria” or AI companies are ruining the future of humanity because most of these books are absolutely junk. I do think book copyright law needs a ton of work but I think most folks are simply taking their bias against AI and creating hyperbolic scenarios. I am sure there are some gems in the lot and I am equally certain they may be scanning dupes of the same material but even at scale I have a hard time seeing the significance. Most of these published work in the last 60 years is absolutely junk garbage. The good stuff usually has a lot longer run so more volume in circulation. You can go pick up lots of books that are 100+ years old for a couple bucks or cheaper because this stuff has no value.
- thread_id 2mo agoI don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome. The legal precedents that were established from Project Ocean laid the ground work for the process as it exists today. Books from libraries are still being preserved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-rules-that-google-book-scanning-is-fair-use/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-ru... https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- titzer 2mo agoLike all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space. It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
- nazgulsenpai 2mo agoThey are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?
- al_borland 2mo agoThey could use them as training data, without providing access the actual books.
- jimmaswell 2mo agoAt least we would all benefit from the books this way, so long as legal nonsense keeps the scans unavailable to the public.
- ionwake 2mo agoI mean guys i get it, you have a bad day just once and you want to rewrite history, we all do, but geez... I guess just I feel destroying books should be classed as unethical. if i was ruler I think id ban it.
- joshstrange 2mo agoYes, let's begin with the trials for all the librarians who have destroyed/trashed books over the year! Nevermind that they do that because those books aren't being borrowed and no one wants to buy them. Destroying books to destroy knowledge is bad, destroying books because no one wants them or there are ample copies, _especially_ when those books go on to live forever as a digital copy, is a completely different story. It boggles my mind that of all places, here on HN, people can't understand that. The knowledge is not destroyed, only the physical vessel.
- ionwake 2mo agobro if people on HN of all places are concerned of physical media being destroyed boggles ur mind then u need to read more about the damage caused to society by prior happenings. I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion. IE, lets destroy this wood to reduce the chance of wildfires. Ok, well why that wood? we sure there arent other interests at play? Ie a carpark wanting to be built by a local authority? As you become older and witness large acts occur due to unclear scheming, you start to become sensitive towards destructive acts, feeling there should be a lens cast over it. Maybe Im just paranoid. Sure I can understand there must be tons of books that are not needed, but books, are object that include native function that IN the right context becomes priceless and hence should be treated with a degree of concern.
- joshstrange 2mo agoNothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.
- thuuuomas 2mo agoIs there any evidence the books are truly "destroyed" & not merely "disassembled"? It's common practice to cut the spine & binding off a book, scan the loose pages, & drop the rubber-banded loose pages in a box somewhere. The book still exists, just without its binding.
- lukasbm 2mo agoA more honest framing would be: "The judge ordered the destruction during scanning because of stupid copyright laws"
- bethekidyouwant 2mo agoI don’t get this latest anti AI talking point. They are digitizing the books preserving them forever.. are you upset that you don’t have access to it? Because you didn’t before either… stop whining and give AA some money.
- twright 2mo agoI'm a little confused about the value of scanning rare books since this story came out. I have a small collection of "rare" books and they're not really bounties of information, at least not modern information. I know novel training corpus is important but the information in rare non-fiction books is commonplace or out-dated. And the information in old rare fiction-books are originals for which reprints exist or just uninteresting stories that aren't really worth anyone's time except collectors'.
- clarionbell 2mo agoIn my experience, when someone mentions burning library of Alexandria, they are either exaggerating, or have a poor grasp of history. Usually it's both. This post, the discussion, do not change my mind.
- godber 2mo agoI think a solution to this could be for the government to require the companies to provide the original scans and OCR results to the government for safe keeping until copyright expires. Clearly that makes assumptions about the function of government and the complacency of copyright holders.
- spogbiper 2mo agohttps://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html some form of mandatory deposit law has existed since 1790 in the US. other countries have similar laws. there is a very good chance the government already has a copy of anything that has been copyrighted
- next_xibalba 2mo agoWhy are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about. The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.
- sudeepsd__ 2mo ago[dead]
- michael0church 2mo ago[dead]
- bix6 2mo ago> A guest post by Anna’s Archive volunteer “u” (translated from Chinese). I do not know much about Anna’s. Is it Chinese or is this just one of many worldwide helpers?
- throwaw12 2mo agoAmerica is interesting. * download and publish a book as an individual -> 100% lifetime jail + 10x your whole lifetime earnings/revenue - Aaron Swartz * download and publish a book as a company -> fine 1% of revenue * scan and publish a book as an individual -> legal issues, 100x fines of your yearly 50k donations * scan and "publish/train" a book as a company -> okay, lets ban chinese models, they are distilling your model
- SquireBuilds 2mo agoDo you think they will make all of that publicly available after it's been scanned?
- aeon_ai 2mo agoThis is only because this is a legal right granted as part of the purchase of copyrighted material, and because we have tried to stop AI companies from doing this with purely digital copies. The insanity of attempting to prevent AI learning (which is a direct consequence of the nature of observable information) because of the myth of intellectual property is the main driver of this type of behavior.
- theartfuldodger 2mo agoI collect old books. It's not common to buy books at all yet to buy old books. Library sales as big as concerts exist, little book libraries everywhere but the used book stores are constantly closing. I wish people cared 25 years ago. Unwanted books in boxes are everywhere. Its a false hysteria. You can still get any book you want, digitizing is the best bet for more readership.
- rcarr 2mo agoDoes adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head: - Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information. - Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose. You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory
- thth123123 2mo ago[dead]
- taintify 2mo agoSavonarola Altman I’ll leave
- chistev 2mo agoWhat is the deal with AI Companies buying old books to scan and then destroy them? https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1vszifd/what_is_the_deal_with_ai_companies_buying_old/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1vszifd/what_...
- odyssey7 2mo agoBig AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public. Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those. Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies. Maybe the hope was to just bury the book destruction under the rug, but the cat is out of the bag. Publicizing a state-of-the-art rare books preservation archive is now a good move. Tech tends to love associating itself with a classical tradition or something. Name it after the library of Alexandria. It would be a huge cultural loss if that were to burn down again. Thank God for our big AI companies that keep the archive intact. Actually, I assume it would be separate archives, since I assume there’s a something of an arms race in getting training data that competitors don’t have, but really, who would complain that there are multiple archives? That sounds like a good thing. And what big AI company would want to be the odd one out for not running an archive?
- RaffaelCH 2mo agoFrom what I understand, to work with copyrighted books they need to essentially format shift (i.e., scan and destroy the physical book). So a book vault would not solve this issue. A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's not worth it. At this point my only hope is that in the long run these scans make it to the public somehow (leaks, copyright changes/expiration, whatever), where they can then be accessed and preserved by everybody. Then we could have our true digital library of Alexandria.
- lukeschlather 2mo agoThey could put everything in some kind of nonprofit book vault/archive that includes all the source pages as long as they didn't use or distribute it. They could even provide a mechanism for rights holders to recover the text for free, if they need access.
- 2mo ago
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2mo agoMany countries require a copy of each book published there to be submitted to their national archives/library. The US has had this requirement since 1790 as far as I can tell. All countries I checked (Germany, France, Canada) seem to have similar requirements. WIPO claims that this is the case in the majority of countries (https://www.wipo.int/documents/d/copyright/docs-en-registration-legal_deposit_summary_responses.pdf https://www.wipo.int/documents/d/copyright/docs-en-registrat...). Thus, most books should not be at risk of getting permanently lost due to these practices. This is Anna's Archive (ab)using a current controversy (which I think is based around emotional appeals and distorted facts to create outrage over a non-issue) to tongue-in-cheek advertise their open pirate library.
- pfdietz 2mo agoDoes the demonization of destruction of books mean I shouldn't delete downloaded e-books off my phone's Kindle app? All those precious bits, gone forever...
- cyberrock 2mo agoLooking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?
- tescreal 2mo agoI have a tidy collection of books that are odd or fascinating to me. They're old. But you mistake people like me for being made of money. Old books shouldn't simply vanish. That is history, art, authorial creation. Once the last copy gets crisped, it is lost.
- cyberrock 2mo agoSome of my books were literal pennies, and they would vanish too if neither of us nor the companies bought them. Again, this is just confusing where these books are with the Louvre. Just because they were available for purchase doesn't mean they were a shared community resource, because the community didn't care about their fate until now. I just don't appreciate the lack of self-awareness.
- mmaunder 2mo agoAt the risk of angering the zeitgeist, destroying one or two or ten paper copies doesn’t make AI companies “become the only ones in the world with digital copies.”.
- jbstack 2mo agoNot if it's the Da Vinci Code. But there are reports of bookshops getting large orders that include rare books.
- premtonx 2mo agoI don't see any problem and don't see destroying books. I think books will exist but they will be written with the help of AI. The context will still be a human mind behind the words in the book.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoThis is a good example of immature writing. Buried on the bottom of the page are two links, both revealing internal tickets that are hinting as to how I can actually help. There should be big, bold, easy to follow steps for volunteers.
- ironqcold 2mo agoThe scale of problem seems a bit overblown. Anna's Archive paint a picture like AI companies are some movie villains burning books so no one can see them. but in reality they just disassemble them into pages because it's cheaper and faster to scan. Most of these books is highly specialized, they been collecting dust on shelves for decades and nobody need them. But the problem is real. Even if these books aren't needed by anyone right now, them digitization in a single copy that end up behind seven locks at a corporation is not great, because AI doesn't replace the original. You can't to ask a neural net to give you a exact copy of a page from that book. So yeah, the post dramatizes a bit, but the point are valid. We need open digital archives.
- zahlman 2mo ago> Anna's Archive paint a picture like AI companies are some movie villains burning books so no one can see them. but in reality they just disassemble them into pages because it's cheaper and faster to scan. Most of these books is highly specialized, they been collecting dust on shelves for decades and nobody need them. "Paint a picture" is apt. "... like AI companies are some movie villains burning paintings so no one can see them. but in reality they just cut the canvas off the frames because it's cheaper and faster to photocopy. Most of these paintings have been collecting dust in galleries for decades and nobody needs them."
- iLemming 2mo ago> You can't to ask a neural net to give you a exact copy of a page from that book That's the problem. I tried the other day to find the verbatim quote from one of the Gabriel García Márquez's books - a single effing sentence and I nearly lost my mind - every LLM would be like "this is a copyrighted material and I can't share it verbatim". WTF? These books are widely known, published in many languages, and yet no amount of money spent on tokens can give me the exact fucking sentence, just like the author intended? Really? I need to find, buy, download and search through the actual book to quote something that Márquez wrote at some point? What is even worse is when the LLM just outright lies to you, giving you the quote, but slightly rephrased.
- pino83 2mo agoWhat was worse: Putting all of our communication since ~2010 into a commercial walled garden? Or some books that were lying around in some bookstores or whatever (i.e. that nobody was interested in owning so far)? And about what topic have I heard more complaints in the last 15 years (although the latter topic is just a few months old)? Why is that? If you say that I'm indeed wrong, and the latter one IS indeed much more important, then please tell me why? What is wrong with me then?
- tescreal 2mo agoA few points for people: 1. some books are out of print. 2. some books CANNOT return to print. 3. all books prior to the 21st century are products of human minds. 4. copyright extends over the vast majority of printed material due to acceleration of literacy and printing access. 5. not all people value all books equally. 6. most books have a degree of historical interest (even cookbooks, which can say a lot about the economic health of a region when it is printes. culture is also clearly encoded in them). 7. many books are already lost, and historians are the ones who most voice the harms. 8. when a book is absorbed into the machine, it may remain vaugely accessible, but only on the good grace of the ones who pilfered it. 9. if no existant copies remain, then the price for access becomes effectively infinite. 10. removal of books denies human agency over access to information. 11. costs will follow a steepening curve much as ram did. first they came for cookbooks, but i was no chef so i said nothing. second they came for handicraft, but i do not toil with fabrics or glue. next they came for homesteading, but i loathe the outdoors life. after, they came for biography, memoirs, and letters, but i am bored by the dead. finally, they came for my own little little interest, but nobody was left who appreciated books, so they too were ripped to shreds.
- mo1333 2mo ago[dead]
- joshuakelleyds 2mo agoI keep seeing headlines, videos, etc and the recent copyright court case, Anthropic v. Bartz (1.5 billion dollars) gives the best context around this. I encourage everyone to read the full thing, but here are some excerpts: > Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books). Anthropic created its own catalog of bibliographic metadata for the books it was acquiring. It acquired copies of millions of books, including of all works at issue for all Authors. Anthropic may have copied portions of Authors’ books on other occasions, too — such as while copying book reviews, academic papers, internet blogposts, or the like for its central library. And, Anthropic’s scanning service providers may have copied Authors’ print books along the way to delivering the final digital copies to Anthropic. But neither side here specifically raises legal issues implicated by any such copies. Nor will this order Also the summary: > To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy. https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...
- jmspring 2mo agoI can't recall the company, it's been several years, but they were scanning rare texts in detail and making them available online. It wasn't Project Ocean/Google Books - that said I don't trust Google to be a good steward here.
- stuaxo 2mo agoI hate that to save this article about an AI company acting abhorently I have to 'favourite' it.
- yipinwong 2mo agoThe post reads like a propaganda. Evoking feeling over metrics or results (<- that's what propaganda does by definition) e.g. > but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity. Who are you that you consider it a serious crime against humanity? What are you a saint? > Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers. Throughout human history, it's the knowledge/info that provide one with wealth and advantage over others. With the author's logic, every single private knowledge the author is not sharing is an extremely serious crime against humanity. The logic of the writing is not correct.
- alightsoul 2mo agoIsn't this what Dario does?
- yipinwong 2mo agoIf Dario appeals to feeling, yes. Provide more context if you want a better feedback not whataboutism.
- alightsoul 2mo agoDario keeps rambling about how China is bad, like the US doesn't do those things itself. That appeals to American exceptionalism which every American is taught in school, it's just not taught explicitly because it's ingrained in the very lifestyle that Americans have
- yipinwong 2mo agoDid I stutter? Have I mentioned anything China? WTF is that from? You are twisting my words with whataboutism. Stop digressing
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- GreenLightGo 2mo agoIt all sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory, but over the past five years, a lot of conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. That’s pretty creepy.
- waffletower 2mo agoThis reads as bad propaganda. Surprised that they left the "translated from Chinese" disclaimer. There is the false implication here that the AI companies are somehow tracking down all copies of a particular book and destroying it. AI has spawned a global freak-out.
- r0b0tan 2mo ago[dead]
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- zuzululu 2mo agoagain "destroy" is not accurate. to scan massive amounts of books you have to cut the binding part as feed scanning has been around for ages there are non destructive scanning options but they are nowhere as fast and prone to errors
- NishanStepak 2mo agoNondestructive scanning can cost 10x as much. This is about cost. It is not about preservation. Google never destroyed the books it scanned. Amazon and Anthropic are attempting to save money. They are not considering whether or not a book is rare. They are treating books as a commodity. Rare books are rare. It is easy enough to identify when there are a limited number of copies of a book. The issue is saving money on items which cannot be easily acquired. There are plenty of books where there are thousands of copies available. Destructive scanning of these books is not the issue. It is indiscriminate destruction of items that are unique and in limited supply. Rare books are more than their content, they are the typography, materials, design, smell, and physicality of the items which matter. They are often very different than mass market hard covers or paperbacks. Not every book initially was produced in massive quantities. This is incorrect. Many books before they became important were done in limited runs. The lists from what I am reading often include books which are limited in quantity. It seems to be an attempt to get everything possible, not just the massively produced items. The problem is making AI companies separate the truly rare and unique items from the commodity mass produced items. Nondestructively scan the rare ones, cut up the ones where there are thousands of copies.
- qarl2 2mo agoGiven all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter. I'm genuinely surprised they don't.
- akudha 2mo agoAmazon has been getting bad press for years now - union busting shenanigans, poor working conditions, low quality products, customer reviews being gamed etc. Why would they care? Unless bad press directly and measurably affects their bottom line, they wouldn't care. Just this week there was news about a massive datacenter they are planning whose power generators would become single biggest polluter in the country, if it gets built. If they ever cared enough about bad PR, they have much bigger items to think about, like the proposed data center. Rare books probably wouldn't even make it their top 5 bad-press list
- everdrive 2mo agoDestroy human knowledge, skyrocket RAM prices, push up residential electricity prices, potentially infantilize a generation of young people. It's all worth it, of course. Every time you _can_ invent a technology, you _must_ invent it. No externality is worth considering.
- bjornnn 2mo agodestructive book scanning is pretty standard, it's the only way to efficiently get a good flat scan of the pages without a tremendous amount of human labor to correct distortion on every individual page. i'm curious about what specific rare books are being destroyed and how rare they really are. and at any rate, anyone can go out and buy books and scan them or destroy them or set them on fire or whatever, they bought the book it's their own property. so now physical books are treated as the public commons while intellectual property is privately owned? are we in topsy-turvy world? i feel like there are much more egregious crimes that people ought to be talking about with ai companies, like impoverished black people having their city water supplies poisoned or the massive financial fraud that will destroy the economy or the massive co2 emissions that will destroy the world or just the fact that it's not even artificial intelligence at all and it's not even a technological innovation, it's just a google hack that dumbed down an existing neural network model enough for it to run on lots of nvidia gpus and produce an impressive-enough tech demo to show to gullible investors who don't know what to do with their massive piles of money.
- fastball 2mo agoSo we don't want companies to buy books and scan them and do whatever they want afterwards, but we also don't want to allow piracy of digital copies (the $1.5B Anthropic settlement)? Bit of a rock and a hard place for them.
- ronsor 2mo agoThey want AI companies to shut down. Unfortunately, "we simply want you to not exist" is not realistically actionable or even compatible with a free society.
- iLemming 2mo agoWhat's infuriating about the book digitization is that you'd think: "Oh, great, this would allow finding a fact or a piece from just about any book ever published..." OMG, finding a verbatim quote from any given book these days is nearly impossible. Every LLM would state "tis a copyrighted material and I can't share it as is". And search engines now all being AI-driven won't find it either. WTF are you even talking about? I'm not trying to steal the whole plot of the book for my dissertation, I just need the exact quote from the book, just like the author intended, don't give me your "rephrased" adaptation of it. What happens in a few years when every single quote is some misinterpreted shit and nobody even knows what the original quote ever was?
- arttaboi 2mo agoThis is frustrating. Just to beat the competition and make a few extra bucks, they’re willing to destroy a century’s worth of human knowledge (good or bad).
- abunner 2mo agoAI companies are supporting the market for books that no one else wanted. The economically illiterate assumption of the author is that "rare" books are good. If they were that good, they would be priced higher. https://abunner.substack.com/i/210907372/anthropic-is-supporting-authors-and-shredding-their-books https://abunner.substack.com/i/210907372/anthropic-is-suppor...
- dbgrman 2mo agoHmm... interesting. previously this was annas-archive.pk, now its on gl domain. What happened?
- cdrnsf 2mo agoWe should be destroying AI companies, not books.
- Rover222 2mo agoCredit to SpaceXai (whatever it's called now) for going through the added effort of not destroying these books
- init1 2mo agoOne of the worst articles of all time. AI companies buy old books that would be rotting on a shelf with nobody reading them. They are required by law to destroy the book as part of the scanning process. This book was not being read anyway and now it's digitized. I.e. preserved forever. I get you want to be mad at them. Be mad at them for real reasons like increasing ram prices or using the public grid to socialize their costs.
- cute_boi 2mo agoidk why these ai companies can't give these scans to anna archive or something else.
- juiceland 2mo agoFascinating that there’s all these booksellers bragging about making bank selling rare books to tech companies but no list of rare books destroyed by tech companies.
- timnetworks 2mo agoDevelopers: Let's encode the entirety of human knowledge into an easily downloadable archive that can be queried using natural language. People that stand to gain the most from this: NO!
- extralongdivisi 2mo agoLike the ethos but how is this different than Project Ocean or the Internet Archive? It doesnt hurt to have multiple projects, im genuinely curious.
- theendisney 2mo agoDumb question, after scanning wouldnt they be allowed to sell a single digital copy of the rare book? One could argue it wasnt copied but transformed?
- yellowapple 2mo agoIf these AI companies were smart they'd be contributing their own scans to Anna's Archive, such that all of humanity benefits.
- pxoe 2mo agoThis ephemeral concept of "rare books" with no actual book titles to back it up that lets everyone project whatever they think onto it is so insane and yet it spread like wildfire, combined with bizarre attitudes people have towards books when they're just objects and are a copy in itself already. Took them long enough to come up with any semblance of "initiative" like this. Hopefully it succeeds and shows how embarrassingly low is the number of actual rare books with no available copy of any sort anywhere, compared to the proportion of performative outrage about it
- Bluestein 2mo agoI have been doing some thinking about this, and, am trying to combat (within) the knee-jerk repulsion that book destruction causes.- From what I understand, these, far from rare - though "rare" might get swept along given a sufficiently long tail - are average to obscure books that would otherwise be "gathering dust" on shelves somewhere.- From that point of view, I wonder: - Even if under a "walled garden", would it not be more efficient to have the knowledge represented by the book more widely available (of sorts) even if masticated by an LLM, rather than on a shelf somewhere? - Libraries and other pros routinely destroy books: They take up space on a shelf and they are expensive to keep around, so this might be far from uncommon.- I guess the objection here is to the "privatization" of a "commons" (the mass of printed books), modulo all the unknowns that the destination technology itself (AI) brings with it.-
- MollyRealized 2mo agoI scanned my grandmother's books - mainly autobiographical, she was a medical missionary in China and India, and children's - for this very reason. She had five children, who all had families, grandfamilies, and in some cases great-grandfamilies, meaning that copies of her books became rare. As silly as it sounded, as a child who grew up with Trek and TNG, I wanted some far-flung descendant to be able to generate her in a hologram, and to read her words. As such, I made the decision to destroy my own copies of her books so that they could be scanned for this purpose and stored on the Internet Archive. It was the only practical method at that time. But it would be wonderful if somehow technology advanced quickly in this area so that it was easier to scan books non-destructively. (The one issue I find dissatisfying about the process is that I could not substitute my own OCR of her work (some done, more planned) for the Archive's often substandard automated OCR. No disrespect to the Archive by this, and hopefully at some point they will re-scan with better software..) In case anyone would like to check them out: https://archive.org/details/@mollyrealized/uploads https://archive.org/details/@mollyrealized/uploads (A warning for those who do: my grandmother describes people as small - her Chinese cook and her Indian patients (she was a nurse), yes, but also her own daughter, her husband, and an upstate New York appliance salesman who calls her a pretty little woman. Applied to an elderly Chinese woman it carries a weight it doesn't carry applied to an American one. She also uses "coolie," ordinary in the 1930s and not now. Overall her writing, and the work it records, shows an ongoing desire to be warm to, to respect, and to understand people who weren't American. She and my grandfather went out to build and upgrade hospitals. They helped first and preached to those who wanted to hear it. As her grandchild, I believe I can accurately say that love and respect were what was in her heart.) My grandparents were Americans in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. My grandfather was shot at by an inebriated Japanese soldier. If the gun hadn't jammed twice in a row, you wouldn't be speaking to me.