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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.

The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.

One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.

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> If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material.

Yeah, I emotionally felt a little upset because books are being destroyed and I don't like that. But rationally, this seems very much like a win-win.

The second hand bookstores are getting revenue that they otherwise wouldn't be which means they have an easier time staying in business. AI companies get their materials legally. And it possibly pushes a second publishing run which ultimately benefits authors.

I think the only way this is possibly "bad" is if a rare/hard to get book is destroyed from these ventures. That would be horrible. But I doubt that's very likely as there's almost no such thing as a rare book that AI trainers would be particularly interested in.

The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"

No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.

As the author of several comprehensively obsolete books on programming, I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized, as if there were still some value in the words and code my co-authors and I created those years ago. Otherwise they'd be pulped or used as kindling anyway.

Books like that are not what I am talking about.

Books like that are pretty much all AI trainers are interested in.

The classics are all in public domain already so there's no reason for them to want to destroy a rare edition of Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle. And the stuff that isn't in public domain went through an era of mass publishing where copies are a plenty.

But further, just the nature of LLM trainers is they probably aren't particularly interested in lesser known books from the 30s or 40s. Why would they want, for example, an Chemistry book from the 30s? Something published in 2026 is much more up to date and likely to be useful. The only books they'd be interested in that period would be popular and have cultural impact. Meaning, there's probably plenty of copies laying around.

> I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized

It's probably already been done. But if it hasn't, do it and upload it to a shadow library.

You can also check if Internet Archive has scanned it or has a copy in the scan queue.

Your prissy outrage isn't a convincing argument that they are doing anything wrong.

Books are lumps of cellulose carrying information. Destruction of excess copies is no more outrageous than discarding excess packets off the internet.

> prissy

I don't think you know what that word means. But that aside, everybody is making a lot of assumptions about what books are being destroyed. Excess copies, outdated user manuals, etc etc. I'm sure there's some of that, but there's also probably lots of other books that are most certainly not that.

Anyone who isn't even a little concerned that millions of books are being blanket destroyed without any hint of concern about what those books are - they are just being blindly scanned and pulped by the truckload - is revealing themselves to be a bit soulless imo. There's really no other way to put it. Things have meaning outside the material. And I certainly don't trust these AI companies to have the best interests of humanity in mind when it comes to any of this. The fact that some or maybe even most of these books may be unworthy of preservation isn't the point. We don't know what's being blindly pulped. And neither do they. And neither do they care. There's just something gross about the whole thing.

Do you mind linking to some of your previous thoughts about the trillions of old books that get thrown in the trash without scanning every day?

>trillions

No need for hyperbole.

The point you are missing is that those books get consciously thrown in the trash. Somebody evaluated them and decided they weren't worth saving. Will some fraction of these be the result of poor taste and those books were indeed worth saving? Sure. But most it's reasonable to assume won't be. In any case, they will still have been deliberated on by an actual human being.

By contrast, these AI companies are doing none of that. They are blanket buying books, scanning them and then pulping them. No human evaluation happens at any point.

So, if Google consciously throws books in the trash, that's ok, but if they scan them first, that's not ok?

Or maybe this is just a thin veneer over anti-techbro antipathy.

If destroying a book is such an evil, then isn't not printing a book also a huge net negative? Are you going to call on publishers to make endless print runs to churn out books that then get warehoused? I mean, if these lumps of cellulose are such inherently valuable objects, wouldn't we create endless value by piling up the unread copies?

Most of these books were destined for the landfill or recycling plant eventually.

They are being bought by the pound and/or container.

It’s really a totally made up thing to be upset about, since it’s at least giving these books a chance at being archived somewhere and one last productive use.

Apparently many are surprised that libraries, thrift shops, used book stores, etc. destroy books by the ton every year. There is a small boutique industry that buys them in bulk, sorts through them to find books that still might have value, and discards the rest.

Yeah, a few rare and/or valuable titles will get mixed in. Just the law of large numbers. But no one actually wants to read that Programming Perl 1.0 book from the 90s anymore. They just like the idea of someone else paying for it to exist on a shelf somewhere. And someone else doing the curation to sort that 1 rare gem out of 15,000 titles just dropped off by the truckload from the local library system.

Yeah people (including me) tend to hoard books they buy and never toss them. All that does is force your estate to buy a larger dumpster when you die.

>There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature.

even my small town in my not particularly environmentally-conscious country has had those boxes for paper recycling since the 90s. I personally dumped a metric ton of pristine condition books into them after my grandparents died, because I had neither space nor desire to store a cubic meter of that utterly obsolete medium.

there's nothing sacred about paper, just like there was nothing sacred about clay tablets and sheepskins it had replaced. a nail-sized SD card can hold more books than the largest libraries in the world. venerating paper and libraries, at this point, is an irrational fetish.

and contrary to what all these activist/ragebait articles attempt to convince the uncritical intellectual majority, it is astronomically unlikely that any of these destroyed books were the only ones in existence. they are copies. you could buy a truckload of copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, wipe your ass with each one and then burn them, and while that act could be spun into "Local Man Burns a Thousand Books, Just Like the Nazis Did", it wouldn't actually make any fucking difference, would it?

What do you think happens to all of the extra copies libraries buy of popular books?

Are you out there rescuing them?

Books get thrown in the trash every day. It may be offensive but then you should be collecting them I guess.

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