3 ms·
To not destroy rare books.
by runarberg 2mo ago
To 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.
- frm88 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. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are under NDA.
- tptacek 2mo agoIt's in the 404 story.
- frm88 2mo agoIt's not. The 404 article states (paraphrase): we're not going to disclose any titles, so where does your information come from. Please provide a link.
- tptacek 2mo agohttps://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-companies-are-buying-up-tons-of-rare-old-books-to-train-their-ai-models https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...
- frm88 2mo agoBut we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future. 1. This is not the 404 media story you quoted as source 2. Maiberg's answer is most likely a book that has no emotional value. Translation: they do not know
- tptacek 2mo agoYou're right. It's merely the writer of the 404 story, discussing their story.
- dukeyukey 2mo agoCan you explain why AI companies destroying these is worse than a library or bookseller destroying these?
- breezybottom 2mo ago[flagged]
- dukeyukey 2mo agoIf someone was ok with Nazis killing Jews but not Soviets, I am going to think they don't believe it's the killing that is the problem.
- runarberg 2mo agoPublic libraries staff professional archivist, they take careful inventory and know exactly which book they are destroying. AI companies buy boxes and boxes of books with unknown content staff anybody who can operate a scanner and have no idea which books they are destroying. If a public library comes across a book they didn’t know they had, it is very likely that somebody will notice and know how to continue, to find out if this book is worth saving etc. AI companies will treat this book exactly like any other and destroy it to feed the plagiarist machine.
- tptacek 2mo agoAt this point I believe you're just sort of making up a fantasy of what you think a public library should do, not what they actually do.
- kasey_junk 2mo agoThis is not what most public libraries do with donation books. They mostly just recycle them. The very act of cataloging donation books takes a huge amount of resources that the collection managers don’t have. Many public libraries don’t have a collection management department at all! They outsource that function entirely to vendors and those vendors mostly source new books and spend resources preparing them for the hard use of a library (changing bindings, uploading and cleaning metadata, tagging, etc). Decommissioning is done by volunteers who just look at the condition of books and chuck the bad looking ones in a bin for recycling. My wife worked in this industry on the vendor side, your model of public libraries is closer to a small subset of certain big city libraries narrowed to their rare and research departments. The median book bought by a library is a Danielle Steele romance novel packaged for library consumption and sent to a small town library system that will be lucky to have a single professional librarian for the whole system.
- fenomas 2mo agoNot under US copyright law. The Bartz case ruled that if you scan a book and destroy the original it's considered format-shifting and you're likely fine. But not so for keeping the original and using the scan in its place - Internet Archive tried that (in an incredibly limited way), and publishers sued and won. So companies scanning books already know they'll be sued, successfully, if they don't destroy the originals. So they destroy the originals.