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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing to a point, right? They sell heaps of stock, some old / outdated stock (like "Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition" as per the article), in bulk, at full price, no questions asked. Retailer's dreams come true.

(I don't believe them being digitized for consumption by AI will impact book sales much, as ebooks, google books, project gutenberg, etc didn't either)

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As long as the AI devouring a book isn't making it harder for a person to get access to a copy of the book. There might not be many copies of some out-of-print books.

Would be nice to at least force them to open their scanned books data, after all they stole everything else, they can contribute some back

"Open" it how, exactly? Make it available for free? As in violate copyright?

Perhaps Anna's Archive will be the last bastion of some books, especially if they manage to acquire the internal collections of some of the AI companies, à la Spotify. (ie. the parts of the collections that didn't come from Anna in the first place.)

And what, potentially make things easier for a competitor? Not in capitalism sir

It's great for the retailer, although I think that example was picked out because it's an extreme example of a book that'll never sell. But the volume of these orders shows another way the AI companies are pissing away their investors' money.

Download content to train? Immoral and illegal.

Buy it? You’re wasting investor money.

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