doubt many 'of the most valuable' books haven't been digitized or aren't available on amazon or ebay for a pittance. when i need to find something on anna's archive, it's usually because it's some bullshit, tween pulp romance novel from the late 70's.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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There's a lot of incredibly old books that can't even be opened to be read without damaging them; but those are already locked up in museums and shit for study and preservation.
Because when you destroy the publicly available source you become the only available source. Paid, of course.
The final nail in the coffin for humanity, locking knowledge behind digital sources that are inaccessible in event of catastrophe.
Crazy how we had all this information available and all we did was lock it up and make it for sale. The internet was an awesome place we shared ideas easily and without massive corporate "sponsors" now the owners of the internet are the corporations and they are just riding t till the wheels fall off.
“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” one small bookseller told tech news website 404 Media last week.
The bookseller explained that in April, he suddenly went from selling around 20 books per week to hundreds — including obscure and out-of-print works.
“It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell,” he said. “I’ve been well suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”
Then stop selling rare and out of print books to an AI company, you fucking doorknob.
Greed knows no bounds.
How would a book seller know? Orders increase and you find out afterwards why. Bit hard to know ahead of time
I mean I quoted the part where they made it clear that they know exactly who they're selling to...
You did. I was thinking of a seller that sells books thinking of a normal sale only to find out afterwards
Gotcha.
right, but once you find out, cut it off
💯%
Combine this mass burning of humanity's canon with the onslaught of AI generated nonsense and think about what is doing to do our history and knowledge going forward.
Humanity is being dragged into a black hole by tech-fetishist demons.
It's a second dark age approaching. It's slow, maybe not in our lifetime but with the enormous pressure of climate and demographic crisis add the regression of human cognition and destruction of researchable truth and you will get a collapse of the global economy and a shift in priorities (survival first) that will bring a dark age.
If they are successful in destroying all print sources of knowledge, technically we are already in the dark age.
"We must destroy this precious archive of humanity so our competitors can't also scan it"
So it can’t be traced that they’ve used said books for training data.
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But then they upload them to Anna's archive, right?
This could actually be a great initiative if they made them public or at least gave the scans to some Library.
To be honest, I'd be MUCH less against this practice if this shredding at the very least included saving the original scans at at least 300 dpi for everyone to access, freely.
Ideally, they wouldn't cut them by the spine, but even giving the despined ones to an archive/library would be just above the unpermissible line.
Despining, scanning and public access archiving is borderline permissible.
Also, if every AI company does this, then it's more books gone. If they cooperated they'd only need to do it once. Good scans of all books in the public domain would be so useful for us all as society.
While that would be nice, unfortunately it would almost certainly run into the very same legal issues that are also causing them to pulp the books after scanning them.
What issues specifically? Not disagreeing, trying to understand what you mean.
IIRC destruction of the physical copy to prevent resale while still possessing a copy is required for book scanning to be free use, or otherwise not encounter problems with copyright law. Proceeding to share/distribute those scans, or especially trying to charge money for them, would encounter those exact same copyright barriers.
Oh, maybe. Even then, for things in the public domain this shouldn't matter. I know that's probably not the majority of what they're scanning though.
I would assume they aren't bothering to scan it if it's in the public domain. Much easier to just grab a copy off archive.org or any other website hosting such things, and that's assuming the entirety of the public domain isn't already in the training set.
You have got to be fucking kidding me
You people have no idea how much I want AI banned all across everything. I don't care about anything at this point. These people are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL. Pure breed CRIMINALS
Fucking 90% of the books I read are "rare"
"Oh, but there's SOME benefits to having AI", says some person on the internet that had it shoved down their throat by their boss. No. Fuck you. Fuuuuuuck you all the way.
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Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.
This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump's recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.
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Library of Alexandria II
Why cant they rebind them in some sort of ring binder? I guess the answer is money, but that should be possible no?
They want to be the sole arbiter of all knowledge. Kind of hard to do that when the books they stole from still exist.
I really hope the AI bubble pops soon and takes at least some of these stupid companies with it. They've been operating at a GIANT loss for years at this point, how much longer will this go on?
The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.
There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone is smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.
It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.
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What's the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?
Cause to easily scan them they remove the binding and rebinding is more work %han destroyibg so the point is capitalism
Have you ever tried scanning a book? It's a huge PITA.
They just cut the binding off so they can be run through a document feeder.
Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.
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Good way to prepare for rewriting history to their liking. Shredding/destroying the books should be illegal in this regard.
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"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?" Stupid AI!
Destroying the an endangered book feels like it should be criminal no?
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That's fucking evil.
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