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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

Who says they're rare and nonrecoverable? If they're bought in bulk from used booksellers, they're probably quite common titles.

We throw away nearly a billion books every year. They're not sacred, and scanning a few million isn't a tragedy. People just don't like AI and want to be outraged about it.

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>they're probably quite common titles.

Old books could have been common back in their day, but they might not be very common today.

The books you will find on a bulk sale are, by definition, the ones that are very common today.

Read it again. These aren't books that were bought in bulk bt bookstores.

They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning.

The analogy is imagine someone buying near-extinct animals from any source in bulk, not kittens from average pet shops.

>They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning.

Nope! Actually this article has a list of the books they were scanning:

https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phis...

>provided Fortune with the email and subsequent spreadsheet containing 3,001 titles, mostly published between 2020 and 2021 by academic publishers like Emerald Publishing, Elsevier, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press, and ranging from business and education to engineering, public policy and medicine.

So not rare, mostly recent textbooks. The headline of this article is a lie designed to outrage you.

I see. That's good to know, though you could have led with that! I was mostly calling you out because it seemed you were misrepresenting the article's argument, whereas you now seem to have no problem with their reasoning of bulk destruction, but simply question the premise of whether the books are indeed rare in the first place.

I have to say though, while I'm relieved we're not destroying in bulk books from the 1900s, nevertheless, just because a book is from the 2020s doesn't necessarily make it a plentiful resource (I've often been in a situation where fairly recent textbooks I wanted are out of print and are only sold in old bookshops, or for exorbitant prices on ebay, for instance). So ragebait quality article or not, I still acknowledge the issue.

As I said to another person above, I would still feel more comfortable after this discussion, if the company had made a statement that non-destructive scanning methods will be pursued in books with less than X books in circulation.

These articles are designed to create maximal outrage, and they can mislead you into thinking the problem is far worse than it really is. Conflating the nature of the books (between "rare" and "common") is exactly the sort of things these articles do.

Also, the companies are required to do this by the government/law, they are not doing this because they want to destroy old knowledge. They are making that knowledge more widely available in a digital form.

>They are making that knowledge more widely available in a digital form.

Where can I access the digital form of the destroyed books? You should know since you made this statement, right?

Reread what he wrote

Yea, and I don't think I missed something. To be clear, I don't want the "knowledge in the book", I want the content of the book itself so that I can form my own knowledge. So don't not want an LLMs regurgitation of the book...

And what about fiction? I don't want an LLM's "interpretation", I want the real thing.

Is that made available somewhere?

You are not being prevented from accessing another copy of the book to get that knowledge.

> You are not being prevented from accessing another copy of the book to get that knowledge.

Except in the (potentually rare) situation that a book is rare, which brings us back into full circle in the discussion.

So, ragebait article or not, we have identified an issue if reasonable importance.

E.g. if there was an official statement that non-destructive scanning were to be used in titles with less than X copies in circulation,I would feel more comfortable.

The clear conclusion from all the articles I've read is that no truly rare books are being destroyed in this process. That is an intentional technique used by the article authors to manipulate readers into being outraged.

That means that they were already getting destroyed somewhat and not being recoverable, even without AIs. If there is just one or very few copies of a book or it ends in a particular buyer, or in warehouse prone to fires, not surviving to floods, rats or whatever.

> That means that they were already getting destroyed somewhat and not being recoverable, even without AIs. If there is just one or very few copies of a book or it ends in a particular buyer, or in warehouse prone to fires, not surviving to floods, rats or whatever.

There's a difference between accidental or negligent destruction, and planned and deliberate destruction.

You're describing the former, but these AI companies are doing the latter.

For model train sets, its often the cheapest most common ones that become the most valuable decades later. The expensive sets were cared for and so many survived, but the cheap ones were played with and tossed into the bin and then few survive in good condition. So because something was once common does not mean it can't become rare later on.

And... at the very most... each AI company destroys ONE copy of a book.

Good thing there are hardly any AI companies these days.

I know! This must have lead to the destruction of AT LEAST 10 copies of the Twilight books.

OH THE HUMANITY!!!

Well, if they're bought in bulk, there's gonna be some duplicates. They probably don't know what they're buying until they start scanning.

But still, the number of duplicates will be inversely proportational to the rarity of the book. Lots of copies of James Patterson and Twilight, probably few or zero rare 16th-century manuscripts.

I would assume the very first step would be cataloging the author, title, and revision of the book so hundreds of thousands of hours of time are not wasted scanning duplicates.

They probably still throw away the duplicates even if they don't scan them, because the wholesale value of a used paperback of the Da Vinci Code is like half a cent.

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