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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

The only issue I see is, how could you tell which are those books?

You can't, without spending a fortune to investigate the scarcity of some of the titles. I do a little work in this space and I don't know of anything destructively scanned that has zero other copies, but definitely some with single digit known copies, where no previous scan exists. Now there is one less physical copy, but a digital copy that none of us can access (except by tricking an LLM).

It's not just the big players buying up these archives, either. There are a lot of smaller players, especially in the OCR space, who are buying up huge swathes of works in languages which have much smaller digital footprints, e.g. Arabic.

We manage to do this for endangered wildlife too without anyone counting every single specimen; why shouldn’t we be able to estimate how rare a book is?

It's pretty expensive for the wildlife.

Most rare books are rare because no one cared enough about them. Ie most rare books are rubbish.

And if you instituted this, the commenters of this very website would surely decry it as a prime example of government overstep and waste.

Commentators on this web site work for some of the most evil organizations on the planet and have beliefs that 95% of the population rejects. You can safely ignore the YC cohort of devs and be fine.

> Commentators on this web site work for some of the most evil organizations on the planet and have beliefs that 95% of the population rejects. You can safely ignore the YC cohort of devs and be fine.

1. Why are you here?

2. What is the purpose of this comment?

The same techniques roughly apply. You can look at all the book marketplaces and see how many of each title are available and it'll give you a rough estimate. If you look across all the marketplaces, all the library catalogs, plus eBay etc and zero copies surface, even going into Worthpoint to look at the last several years of eBay sales, then you know you have a problem. That's how I normally estimate it.

After that you are diving into forum posts etc to see if you can find anyone who has even mentioned owning a copy or having seen a copy.

I don't know what happens to some works. Supposedly thousands, tens of thousands, or sometimes apparently a million or more copies published and yet not a single copy surfaces for years.

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