How tho?
Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways.
Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book.
And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.
The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.
That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.
> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?
What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?
What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)
Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.
> Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
> The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,
https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval
And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.
"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.
Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."
https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...
I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.
Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.
The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.
If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.
It is pretty standard procedure.
But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.
Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.
If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.
But unreadable by humans, right?
Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.
Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...
I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.
You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.
Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!).
That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.
These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?
Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.
After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.
This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.
Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?
>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.
When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.
I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".
What happens when the books don't sell?
Many books aren't lent and not bought and most libraries have limited space to store such books, thus they go where old paper goes.
Of course some rarely lent books are important and for the one person asking for it in ten years really valuable, but many still have to go.
I know it comes at a shock but truly most books are absolutely worthless.
Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria.
Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled.
Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often give this great moral weight to ever book in a way that is totally disconnected from reality.
All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned.
Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.
And I don’t have any reason to think some reddit librarian knows what’s going on, if anything, either way.
Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.
It’s very possible I’ve just missed deeper reporting, obviously.
But otherwise I agree. I’m neither losing sleep over it or just trusting that these (historically kinda scummy) businesses are actually behaving.
If there’s a serious problem I’d like to see something more concrete. Same for hand-waving the question.
How can anyone say this with a straight face. The knowledge is not destroyed, it is transformed. You can make use of it today in the form of LLMs and the scans still exist. Nothing was lost. It's literally no different from them buying books and stocking them in a private library not open to the public. It's not called the Scanning of Alexandria because if it was, it wouldn't have made a blip in the history, Alexandria's libraries were burned, those books, that knowledge was destroyed. Then only thing being destroyed here is physical copy (again for the people in the back: a copy).
> Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available.
Those same copyright restrictions are exactly what would prevent them from sharing the archives. Your beef is with copyright, not the AI companies who are (in this one, rare, instance) following copyright laws/rules.
Hyperbole much?
Does the fact that they're being converted to an immutable digital permanent record for all time mean anything to you? Because as far as I know, the works lost to the Library of Alexandria were wiped out of existence, not simply transformed into a more durable form!
If a company is scanning material protected by copyright, it has to send a digital copy of the scanned material to Library of Congress within 5 working days.
Copyright should really be amended so that once out of print and a grace period it’s free use. I am probably more of an anarchist in this regard. Similar to my belief that anyone should be able to ingest any data you put online, once a book is no longer being print it should be able to be used for commercial or personal use for free. Similar to a generic drugs.
There is far too much garbage that gets published, let the collective hive mind figure out what is valuable.
That's what governments are for.
Sure some governments and opinions would say so but you’re making a statement of zero impact. Fix the underlying copyright laws don’t create more rules.
How does this help anything, except create more work to throw in the trash?
It’s called “mandatory deposit”
Looked into this a decade ago for publishing eBooks via my personal corp when eReaders and ePub were starting to hit big in the mainstream.
There was a time of course when you could pull my books down from archive.org as PDFs. Perhaps that time will come again.
I'll look into libgen.
> The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.
So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.
This isn't theoretical, AI companies have finished lawsuits about this and this was the ruling.
A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.
I'm old enough to have been around when DCMA legislation was under discussion. Many people were dead-set against it and raised concerns over matters exactly like this. In Rainbows End (2006), Vernor Vinge wrote about a similar scenario where a robot went through the university library shredding books, and scanned the shredded pieces to recombined them into a digital archive.
Anthropic may be doing shady things and may have even done this on their own recognizance, we just don't know. As it stand, this is 100% a consequence of US copyright law, much of which was written by large corporations to protect their own assets.
You’re missing the point. It doesn’t require that they destroy the book, but it precludes them from giving it away. It’s their property, so they can choose to store it, but that has real, ongoing cost and may eventually leave unusable books anyway due to fire, pests, water damage, etc. if they’re not maintained properly.
To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible.
At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.
That's not their goal or else they wouldn't be burning books. Their goal is making money no matter the cost to the society.
Look, others talked about how this fetishising of paper books is quite silly (though I don't like it when the destructive scanning is just so one could feed it into a chatbot) but I have to say, all I can do after reading the above sentence is laughing bitterly. Anthropic is an American for-profit company, any talk about "working towards the benefit of humanity" is just marketing lies, and it's always incredible to see people treat those seriously.
_Of course_ Anthropic does that.
Aren't the copyright laws forcing them to do this the very ones that would make such archives illegal? The books that could be in such an archive are the books that don't need to be destroyed.
They literally lie, cheat and steal at any opportunity they have and in any way that they think of. Do not trust a single thing that they say; it is a fool's folly to do so.
A lot of this can already be said about a lot of companies, especially almost any large company, but it goes doubly if not triply so for this new breed of company now.
Are you referring to the burning of the Serapeum in AD 391 or the warehouse fires in 48 BC?
Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.
(But my knowledge of Alexandria extends only to episodes of "COSMOS" and "Connections").
Come on, we did without AI for all our history, we could live without it with no issue (as to me we could live without smartphones, internet, etc if we want).
I’m reminded of the screeds about the dangers of novels.
They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company.
Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine.
This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.
Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.
They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.
The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.
What was nonsense about water use?
The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.
Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.
Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.
2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.
But I understand blaming your energy waifu for its own failure is unacceptable for nuclear bros.
There are none.
Let's view it realistically here: AI companies are parasites. Them destroying books to dumb down mankind, absolutely fits into the destruction of the library of Alexandria.
Having said that, I think the day of physical hardcopy of books, is not necessarily over, but will be heavily complemented via digital storage. For instance I only keep books that I may re-read later or read many more times, e. g. thick science books. Many other books I can keep as .pdf file without a problem.