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If you're paying $100 per book for someone to visit a major library, get the book out, scan it, check the OCR? Then you'd probably be selective, to get the most out of a limited budget.
But if you're grabbing epubs and pdfs, and a book only needs $0.002 of space on a hard drive somewhere? Grabbing the useless 41% is probably cheaper and easier than exercising editorial control.
Many autocratic regimes editorialize and censure all forms of publications. But even in the US, which is nominally still a democracy you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons. And this is not just a right wing thing. There have been a few publishers that took it upon themselves to editorialize literature from the 19th and 20th century to get rid of some things that are now considered sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. The whole cancel culture is not just about canceling people, but about limiting access to their work as well.
I was at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago near the Opera. There's a nice little monument there for the book burning that happened in the 1930s. Anything that was vaguely intellectual or Jewish in origin was burned right there during the Kristallnacht. Nice place for a Christmas market and a grim reminder that those calling for things to be deleted/cancelled aren't necessarily very nice people. And of course Hitler himself got cancelled. Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany.
Anyway, imagine somebody in 5000 years finding their way to some archive of hacker news or some reddit thread might look differently at the value of some of the comments than the average moderator.
AFAIK this has never been true in Germany (for the book Mein Kampf at least). AFAIK the German state of Bavaria inherited Hitler's copyright on the book, and did not republish it. This means that no one was allowed to print it for copyright reasons, but you could still own or trade existing copies of the book. After 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death, the book entered the public domain. Looking into Wikipedia, uncommented reprints have been forbidden: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mein_Kampf&oldid=..., which I didn't know before.
This is not honest. They're not banning any books, they are stopping school teachers from forcing certain books on children. The difference is immense.
Though, I am not against highly directive schools (I think we need them), I am against mis-characterization.
And of course, the list of books is getting pretty long and what's on that list is basically determined by a very small but vocal group of christian conservatives with uptight opinions on things like science, evolution, sexuality, and other things they insist are wrong/evil/dangerous.
So they are not technically banning anything. But they are punishing people that go against this nonetheless. Which makes it kind of a ban. It doesn't go as far as Nazi book burnings. But I have just about as much sympathy for the people that did as I have for those insisting e.g. Harry Potter must not be in a school library succeeding with that because the threats against teachers and schools are very real and these people wield a lot of power, apparently. Bullying teachers and librarians into complying with this seems to happen a lot in Florida. That's not banned at all and actively encouraged.
What's next Uncle Tom's Cabin? Oh wait that actually happened as well in some schools. Because these people also include some racists and xenophobes. You might call some of these people fascists even. And they just don't like being reminded of things like slavery.
I would suggest that judgement is a critical part of our civilization, and it's judgement that says those bits of obscene graffiti in Pompeii that makes it so.
Or else they could say "well, we can't claim ancient cave art is priceless, because we're biased and our biases will change over time. Maybe in a thousand years we'll discover that ancient cave art is worthless, so we'll do nothing".
In fact you have judged my opinions and shared your judgement with me. Good job!
Your characterization of regimes as autocratic is judgmental, biased and will change over time. But right now that's your judgement and I applaud it, even if I disagree.
Gosh, book burning. Not backing up a romance novel or cookbook is definitely analogous to book burning, but I'll play along.
It was a symbolic act to show a rejection of ideas, not an attempt to eradicate the books, much in the same way Gandhi encouraged the burning of foreign made clothing and products. He wasn't going to rid the world of British cloth nor were the Germans going to rid the world of non-German ideas.
So yeah, when all the badly written cook books, romance novels, and children's books are in a huge bonfire, you can blame me, personally.
This is poppycock. Backing up all books -- the very action discussed by the person you're answering -- is by definition neither subjective nor subject to biases.
> This would then imply I could never take any action, because it's just subjective and biased.
And even if the first quoted claim were true, this, too, clearly isn't. Nowhere does the comment you're answering imply that the bias or subjective rationale of an action should, ipso facto, discourage a person from taking it.
Your comment is replete with similar reasoning, so warped that it's difficult to characterize as anything other than in bad faith. Indeed, this is the snottiest, rudest, least constructive comment I've seen on HN in quite some time -- excepting a couple of my snotty remarks on language or the quality of someone's writing.
I have no idea what response you expect, but the only one you deserve, I think, is one that just points out your dismissiveness, sarcasm, and breathtaking contempt. What an awful way to move through the world, let alone through HN.
But we should still archive it. Some day it might be useful to someone ;)
> this is the snottiest, rudest, least constructive comment I've seen on HN in quite some time
I wish ;-). I see a lot worse here regularly. But it's certainly not nice behavior. Luckily, I have a thick skin.
Well, it takes one to know one. So there.
1) tldr: you're wrong. I am not suggesting that "backing up books" is subjective or subject to biases. You'll need to reread my response: I'm talking about the judgement of doing so. And deciding that it is worthwhile (or not, as I joked with my made up 41%) is a judgement that is subjective and biased (if you subscribe to that sort of world view).
2) tldr: you're wrong. I openly indicate in my reply that I am exaggerating and extending his position (a reductio ad absurdam for you Romans reading this). However, he is suggesting that my position is wrong, or should give me reason to hesitate, as it might be "biased" et al. So I think my take is quite on the money. If you think your actions are biased and subject to historical revision, are you going to march along confidently? Or will your fingers tremble at the next book burning while you wonder "will history condemn me for this?"
3)tldr: you're wrong again. You resort to ad hominem attacks after demonstrating a complete inability to understand my position. I'd say you demonstrate both your intelligence (or lack thereof) and worth as a being (or lack thereof). I suggest you consider the unbiased subjective absence of your existence as a priority.
4) tdlr: I expected nonsensical windbaggery, and you delivered! Thank you. You advanced exactly zero of the positions involved and reduced this thread to garbage. YOU are the cancer killing the internet. Have a nice day.
"No, I think you're an LLM-powered bot! So there!"
Please don't make stuff up about the Holocaust. It's the sort of mistake you shouldn't make even once.
My argument is that the symbolic rejection, not the practical destruction of books, was important. Also, I pointed out through a subtle (too subtle for you so I'll spell it out: this is a wholly irrelevant argument - arguing that books don't deserve to be backed up has nothing to do with book burning) - so I played along - as I noted. Get it?
The practical destruction of all books considered non-German, or Gandhi's destruction of all British fabrics - might have been a desire, but there's no need to publicly burn books to destroy them. They can be efficiently destroyed privately. The Nazi's could have destroyed all the books they liked in some private little place.
Ergo, my argument stands! PUBLIC book burning is about PUBLIC rejection of something (non-German elements, or Foreign made goods, etc) and may in fact be less efficient than simply quietly and privately putting them in a landfill which no one will see. Get it?
I'm not making stuff up about World War Two, I'm arguing about a ridiculous analogy to not backing up romance novels being akin to book burning. Apparently, not wanting to back up romance novels and cookbooks makes one a holocaust denier. Go Hacker News.
Mr. Godwin? Are you around?
When I said "that's Holocaust denial", I wasn't saying "you're a Nazi", but pointing out an accidental mistake. If I thought it were deliberate, I wouldn't have said anything.
Your argument about the symbolic meaning of public book burnings is irrelevant (and I'm not sure why you brought it up), but there very much is a parallel between calling for the destruction-by-bitrot of books, and calling for the destruction-by-fire of books. (Again, I am not calling you a Nazi.)
So, in the spirit of rebuttals to random non-sense, I pointed out that there was no link at all to my comment and book burnings, but... I repeat myself.
Suggesting that backing up garbage books is not worthwhile, is apparently analogous to wanting all garbage you selectively oppose to be burned, in public.
So, by extension, the Nazi's can be condemned for not only burning books, but refusing to make backup copies of them.
I hope that clears this up.
How plausible the argument to the value is depends on the eloquence of the person under the Law.
This is the logic of hoarders everywhere.
There's a schlocky Victorian pulp novel that's of no use to anyone - except that it happens to contain a fantastically detailed description of an abandoned saltings in my hometown that nobody ever thought to record in any way. For me, those two paragraphs are gold.
If the novel hadn't been digitised as part of Google's Books Archive Project, I wouldn't have been able to find those two paragraphs. Digitisation not only creates backups, it enables completely new ways of interacting with those texts (eg Google's Ngram Viewer).
I retract my position, let's back up everything!
What seems banal and useless to you, might be extremely important for future historians, and to be honest, books are pretty compressible and storage is cheap.
Many books are just electronic garbage at this point, and backing them all up is like going to a landfill and saying "We should make another one, exactly like this one, in case this landfill proves to be valuable to someone, someday."
It might be useful for LLM training to produce garbage. Although many say they already do a good job at that already.
I'd start with every single AI generated book that's said to be available on Amazon (300 or so iirc).
And people can and do judge things all the time: Nobel prizes, juried contests, review boards, movies, music, and yes - even books! - as being worthwhile or garbage. Rotten tomatoes, Nobel prize committees, and so on.
So yeah, I think your answer is not the only reasonable one. And maybe 41% is way too low.
As the saying goes GIGO. In case you're not familiar with the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in%2C_garbage_out
Let's back up ALL the garbage. Someday it will be mined as gold, by hypothetical and probably never to exist future historians.
There are lots of worthless things we can do, quite practically. Let's not do them and say we did.